How you discovered the Doom series? / Your first time playing Doom?

[Flesh420]

My dad and I walked into a computer store when I was six, it was '93. I don't remember fine details but I vividly remember a group of people huddled around a computer screen and my dad and I stood behind the crowd and looked upon the greatest creation of the 21st Century.
Doomguy's face was like a god on that screen. I don't know why, exactly, but it was a very special moment, something I'd never seen before.
That same week my dad brought home the shareware floppy of Doom and installed it on Dos and left me to it. The fear I felt hearing the first pinky growl was insane. That started my life-long pc gaming obsession, Doom obsession. I'd wake up Saturday mornings and hear the moans and gunshots from across the house and get out of bed and watch my dad play it for hours. I'd stare at the register screen and my imagination filled with so many possibilities, the wonder of the plasma gun ... it was amazing.
We never got the registered version until Ultimate Doom released, and I played the absolute fuck outta it.
I remember walking into a Walmart, or something, and seeing a big Cyber-demon cutout for Doom2, and my dad bought that, too. The new monsters filled my imagination all the way to the fucking brim.
To some people Iron Man or Batman are heros, to me it was always the bloodied Doomguy holding Daisy's head, grit teeth, and a good ol' fashioned shotgun. One man VS a sea of hell.
I feel very fortunate to have witnessed the revolution of PC gaming.

[Tracer]

Some of my favorite early Doomemories were watching my dad deathmatch my uncle. I would just sit and stare in absolute admiration.

[Cerebrate64]

I actually first heard of the game from seeing a strategy guide for it a about 7 or so years ago. There's a thift store that I would walk down to every once in a while when I was 14 or 15, (at the time I lived a few blocks away) and I would look through the books. I saw an old strategy guide and remembered looking through it, it seemed pretty cool so I kind of took a mental note in the back of my head that I would have to play it when I would be able to get ahold of it. Being a kid with no money I wouldn't be able to buy it, I would have to ask for it as a birthday/christmas present. A few years later I got an original xbox for my birthday(this was well into the 360's cycle I believe) and I got Doom 3 as one of the games with it, since my list of wanted games was maybe 4-5 games long. It was the BFG edition of the game, so I played the original game after I got through 3/resurrection of evil. I remember spending 15 minutes trying to figure out how to jump, and it was weird that I couldn't aim up/down in an FPS. Played through episode 1 and didn't even know there was more than that.

[Sharpie]

I first heard of Doom... well, I can't exactly remember when. I couldn't have been more than 10, and the extent of my knowledge was "It defined First Person Shooter" and "There's something called a 'cyberdemon'."

I first played Doom using DOSbox with the shareware version. I was 15 and loved it.

Later that year I had to convince my parents that the big "M" that Steam was displaying wasn't that big of a deal, and later that day I had Ultimate Doom and Doom II. I beat Ultimate Doom (minus Thy Flesh Consumed because I sucked at games back then) entirely in Steam's default DOSBox.

A particular memory that still stays with me was constantly alt-tabbing to DOOMWiki so I could get every secret, and manually saving at the start of each level after a few death-induced pistol starts. Among those manual saves was one done at the start of E3M9. I was holding the rocket launcher and must have hit the fire key before I paused. I lost count of how many times I reloaded before I stopped dying from the self-induced splash damage.

then I started Doom II in dosbox and just said "fuck it I'm using zdoom"

[Sharpie]

Averagewalrus24 said:

Could you really stand playing it through the steam EXE for that long?

Somehow, yes. The only source port I had played before then was the highly modified version of Doom Legacy that SRB2 uses. When I started Doom II, my patience wore thin.

[Doktor Mandrake]

First time I played Doom was first game in late 90s, can't remember exactly but think it was around 1997-98.

I wasn't born until 1990 so I would of been too young to remember when game first launched in 1993, and then first time I owned it was the shareware version on floppy, don't know if that really counted as 'owning' it since it wasn't full version though heh

[Dirty Harry]

The first time i saw Doom was in 1994 when i went to a friend's house. He was playing it on the PC(here in my country, only rich people had a PC at the time).
I was extremely intrigued by that game(he was playing Descent too). The first time i could really play it was when i bought Final Doom for the Playstation.Only in 2005 could buy a PC and play all the other versions.

[grommile]

First time I played DOOM was before DOOM II came out.

First time I owned DOOM was when I bought the id Anthology boxed set. I still have the T-shirt (though the collar is shot), but the pewter Cybie got thrown out at some point.

[Vermil]

Piper Maru said:

First played and owned Doom when it was originally released in 1993, been hooked ever since.

This.

[ShoDemo]

First played The Ultimate Doom around 5 years ago and it has been my favourite game ever since.


I only own GBA Doom and I hope that someday I will be able to buy an original Windows 95 version, a bundle like the Depths of Doom Trilogy or The Ultimate Doom Trilogy: Collector's Edition which is newer and doesn't cost that much

[MTF Sergeant]

I got my first Doom copy from my dad for passing Kindergarten. I owned the game when I was 10, when I completed the entire game. All maps(including secrets) complete!

[T-Rex]

I first got into Doom back in 1995 or 1996, I believe, but was given both The Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 from my uncle and aunt in 1997 when I was nearly 10. Then a year later, my parents bought me Final Doom.

[mjf6866]

My first Doom experience was Christmas 1994 on the 32x. Didnt have a home PC at the time so that was my only way to play it. My brother and I spent ALL of Christmas break playing. We were obsessed. Little did we know at the time how crappy that version was compared to the PC...later in '95 we got our first home family computer with Windows 95...486 DX4 100Mhz. I remember being in K-Mart and finding some oddly packaged CD with the shareware version on it. Didnt know what I was doing so I ran it directly off the CD and constantly got the blue disc icon lol...but i was blown away how much better it was than the 32x. The colors were so vibrant, the music was so much cooler and you could actually see the backs and sides of the monsters! lol

we promptly went to Egghead Software the next weekend and my parents bought us The Ultimate Doom and the rest is history. 22 years later and the obsession is still strong.

[Bashe]

My first experience with Doom was watching my dad play it in the computer room, back in around 1994 or possibly 1995. I was just a wee thing at the time but it's one of the few things I really distinctly remember from that era, especially hearing the E1M7/etc. music in OPL, and being scared shitless by Daisy's head in the ending - that left a huge impact on me.

My first time actually playing would probably come a few years later, when we moved to Idaho. My brother would kind of let me sneak in playing Doom since my parents didn't want me to play it. I didn't really do anything meaningful while playing, but it definitely my very earliest experience. One that would stand out the most to me was my dad letting me play the game for a while after cleaning my room as a reward. I thought that was amazing and I played with cheats until about map10 then stopped. That was a much more enjoyable experience.

I didn't actually own Doom strictly myself until I got a copy of Doom 2 in 2000 that my brother had pointed out at a KB Toys. That was the first copy of the game I got that had belonged directly to me. Eventually I'd get copies of the GBA ports, the PSX ones, and after much too long, all the rest of the id games through Steam.

[ZALGO]

First heard of the game when I was 6 and I was at a walmart. I saw Doom 3 lying in the games isle.

The cover photo of that hell knight got me to ask dad to get the game. He secretly bought the game a few months ago but didn't like the slow pacing of the game(I didn't play it until I was 15 and I didn't like the pacing either.)

My first time playing it was when I remembered about the doom 3 cover and did some research on the franchise, ended up playing the shareware at school when I was 12. Game was pretty scary and my first encounter with mr. pinky frightened me. I only played for so long until the barons beat me up pretty badly at E1M8. I eventually bought the BFG edition for Doom and here I am, still playing and streaming all the doom games and wads to this day. My favorites being Doom 2016 and Doom 2.

[Frisky]

I asked my friend how he played classic DOOM on his computer and he told me GZDoom. So, I downloaded GZDoom, downloaded a WAD of DOOM 2, and I played...up until the 3rd level because I was a wuss at the time...

This was also in either late 2015 or early 2016.

[Spocks_Beard]

I don't know when I first played Doom, I know owned the Gold Medallion CD and the Supercharged Expansion shovelware. Maybe 95, 96...I didn't fully own a proper Doom game till Doom 3. Bought Doom Collectors Edition in 2005 or 06.

[Sick Bow]

I was born in '93, so I'm probably late to the party. My first time playing Doom was back in 2000 or so, my buddy's dad had a shitty Gateway PC, cigarette butts falling out of the case, so on and so forth. I got to play for a little bit while he went to the store, and holy shit was I hooked.

Never really had a decent PC until I build my own back in 2011, so before that I only played Garry's Mod and Doom 3 at like 15 FPS, but I did own Doom the day it came out on the XBL Marketplace. Used to have a blast just playing the vanilla maps with buddies online on my shitty x360. Obviously it was one of the first games I bought on Steam.

[LordShadowZ]

My first time playing Doom was in 1998 or 1999, when I was like 6 years old. My older brother had Doom 2 on the computer, probably pirated, and I played it a lot. I always played it with cheat codes and usually with the Ultimate Simpsons Doom wad, and I would always get scared and almost always stopped playing by Map 15. I didn't have experience with the Doom 1 until I played the iOS version around 2010.

As I've gotten older I've purchased copies of the Doom games on every platform I can over the years. Steam, Xbox 360, and PS3, as well as the iOS Ultimate Doom.

[galileo31dos01]

So in my first topic ever in this forum, I want to ask you doom players: 

 

1. When was the first time you ever played Doom?
2. Which version?
3. What do you remember from your first playthroughs? 
4. How did you feel at that time? compared to how you feel nowadays playing it
5. Umm, anything you want to add related to my questions...

 

In my case I was like 4 or 5 years old, my mother had a PC with Windows 98, she bought the game which came in a CD, I'm pretty sure it was the first episode of Doom. All I remember about the game are the bonus items with their corresponding sounds, a red key-card from a long distance, an Exit sign with a switch I couldn't flip and I didn't know why, the green and blue armors for sure, all of the faces of the marine, including the rare one, the way he falls when he dies, but nothing about the playability, maybe that the scenario was very dark, but nothing about the monsters which is weird. So I can't really remember how I felt about at that time, but I definitely remember when I played it again a few years ago. All of the medium to high level monsters really scared me, especially the baron and the mancubi. Nowadays they can only catch me by surprise but I can handle them. 

 

Probably other users did these questions before, but I just wanted to share my experience and read others, if you want. 

 

EDIT: Oh shit I just found another thread like this, anyway... 

Edited March 24, 2017 by galileo31dos01

[Nevander]

Your mom bought Doom? Coolest mom ever!

 

For me it goes back to around 1995 and 1996. My dad was already into it and had it on our super old DOS computers. This was before Windows 98 was even made. I was just a little kid then, but playing Doom and Doom II was the most fun I've ever had. Loved those games and kept playing it for years and years after through multiple OS upgrades and still play it to this day and now making maps/mods for it! Obviously the version was the original floppy disc DOS version. What I remember the most was how real the environments looked at the time, and how I could feel like I was really there.

 

At the time the graphics were amazing, and now seeing the DOS version in 2017 you are blown away by how they look compared to some of the newest stuff with UE4 and the like. It really has come a looooong way since then. I'm wearing my nostalgia goggles with pride because I still say that classic Doom even with it's primitive graphics beat out any modern game. I actually prefer the graphics to be simpler, puts much more focus on the game to be good on its own right.

[Voros]

The main reason I play Doom is purely because it never gets boring, no matter how many times you've played the map. Modern games get old for me the moment I finish them. Becomes boring as hell to play through again, because that feeling is gone.

 

Oh, I was checking out Doom a few years back for the first time, cause I liked looking through all the old games of the past. I wasn't into it that much then, just wanted to finish it, and I enjoyed every moment. I was more into Quake at the time, and suddenly here I am saying "Doom is life, Doom is love". A video on Brutal Doom showed me all things about Doom I never knew about, and my Dooming experience got even better when I got my hands on GZDoom. Millennial "first Doom" experience here :P

 

Fun fact: Believe it or not, when I first heard of the name "Wolfenstein 3D" I thought it would be some gothic fantasy game related to werewolves XD

[t1p14k]

First time I played Doom was in 1995 on PSX with a friend. We were 15 years old and played the whole day in his bedroom, in the dark. I was my first FPS and I found it exceptionnal. The sounds of the ennemies spotting you, the graphs, the music fucking with your nerves, the hellish background, the demons in-fights ... I told myself, this is the shit ! We were already pretty worked up and then came E2M8 : the (infamous) Tower of Babel.

 

We found ourselves in the first room : 4 switches, 4 corpses and one mega armor. Dude, something's up ... we opened the doors and we saw a soulsphere, one rocket launcher and a fuckton of rockets. OK, something's definitely up ! We shot the first lost soul and ... WTF is that roar ?! We froze. The noise, ka klonk - ka klonk - ka klonk, louder and louder. We waited behind the door, the fear making us unable to move. 

 

And then, the cyberdemon entered the room and splashed us on the wall. We literally jumped from his bed ! Man, good times ...

[42PercentHealth]

When I was little, I wasn't allowed to play any games involving guns, but Hexen & Heretic were OK. Later on, we converted to Christianity, and magic was thereafter seen as evil and witchcraft, so those games ceased to be OK. Eventually, shooter games were permitted in our house, but nothing involving fantasy, demons, magic, etc. Just Call of Duty, Wolf3D, stuff like that.

 

First time I played Doom was in college, 3 or 4 years ago. I started playing Hexen & Heretic again (without my parents' permission or knowledge) with a buddy of mine. After we finished them, my buddy suggested we move on to Doom. So we did. I remember being less than impressed with Doom 1 (given all the hype that I had heard about the game growing up), but more impressed with Doom 2. About the time I graduated, I discovered Scythe, with which I was very impressed, and then a whole Doomworld loaded with a lifetime supply of WADs to play.

 

So when I call Doom the greatest FPS of all time, it's not actually due to "rose-tinted nostalgia."

 

EDIT: When I was playing in college, I didn't even know what a source port was. My friend and I set up co-op games on DosBox... fun times! XD

[Xegethra]

I was only 5 when it came out originally, but we didn't have a computer in our house, too poor for that stuff. But, a school friend had a machine that ran it and I played a little bit of it then, didn't get hooked on it though no time for that but it was fun and I did enjoy it. Then the PSX port came out and we already had our brothers PS1 on loan and he got Doom for that and handed it over to us. We played it a fair bit and that was what got me into it further.

 

So I had always played it on PS1, largely not remembering what the original was like. We soon got a PC in 2000/1 and Doom?....Nope, didn't play Doom on computer until about 2008, really late. I had played Doom 3 when it came out though, thought that was cool. So up until that point I had only played the PS1 port, and when I played the original again I instantly moved onto it...I mean I love the PS1 port, but the mod-ability and easy to play set up of what Doom is today, I kept with that..and now there is a PS1 total conversion mod, best of both worlds.

Been playing more and messing around making and playing WADs ever since.

[Aquanet]

It was around 95 or 96 at a friend's house. He was not good at sharing, so I did a lot of staring at the screen as he played. It was Doom 2, and the Plasma Gun and IoS had a big impression on me, along with The Spirit World. One thing I've noticed over the years is that my impression of how large a space is in the game has tended to shrink, and this has continued as I play pwads. My first pwad was I think Going Down a couple years ago, but I didn't yet have the skills or experience to fully appreciate it. (For example, I thought the levels were average sized.)

[VeeTHis]

 

1: The first time was about... 2 years ago; I wanted to play it before that, but I could not find out at all how to make a source port work, but at that time, I didn't know that it was as easy as downloading Doom 1 or 2 on Steam and selecting the IWAD in the source port start menu...

 

2: I started off with Doom 1 (Steam Edition) on Skulltag. Even though it's dead and has been that for a while, I use Skulltag for almost all of my source port needs. If I want to run a mod that is anything other than a map(s), or music, GZDoom is the way I go.

 

3: I remember dying A LOT. On E1M2, I got lost, quit for a week, came back, and got past that level. I only had about 25 health left somehow by the end of E1M2. I also remember spending about twenty minutes trying to figure out how to aim up on E1M1.

 

4: At that time... I felt very noob-like. I was pretty angry at my little skills, and how the most common thing I did in Doom was dying. I was very bad at strategy back then, and I really just rushed into rooms, and this caused me dying a lot. Nowadays, I like to do strategy, like in a large room with a ton of enemies, I kill a few, let them in-fight if they do, and kill the rest.

 

Bonus Question: At that time, I felt like Doom Mapping was VERY complicated. I downloaded Doom Builder 2, and had no knowledge on what to do. I fiddled around with some things, and made my first map: it involved a ton of enemy spamming, and it got rejected from /idgames. Second map, it sucked. My third map (Temple Palace) is 100x better than the... other two mapping attempts I made. The one I'm currently making (Heavy Steel) is better than all of them, obviously.

[yakfak]

my dad bought one of the big PC mags with articles and reviews concerning games... I'd poked around at the demo episode of Doom before, but one month the magazine had a cover disc with the results of a mapping contest for vanilla Doom so he bought the full game as well :3 I don't remember teh timeline, but the version we had included Nightmare skill but not the fourth episode. it took me hours to navigate the levels which were bigger than any game I'd played before (retrospectively, getting lost in E1M7 is a little embarrassing but I certainly managed that) and the atmosphere seemed so scary that I crept around the levels at snail's pace, but I was so inspired by the way people were making new levels for the game that I decided I wanted to beat it!

[Deleted_Account]

The first time I played Doom was in 1993. I remember being equally awed and terrified at the same time.

[SFoZ911]

Think it was 96'. My mom paid a couple of bucks to two teenage neighbors to install some video games on our home computer. They installed Mortal Kombat 3, Worms 1, Doom 2, Heretic and a couple of classics I can't recall. I liked Doom 2, she liked Heretic. I was never scared of Doom at all and I didn't think of it as a horror game. Also yes, I played Doom 2 before I played Doom 1.