What was your first Doom experience (and in order)?

[Lila Feuer]

I know, there's millions of threads like these, but ya'll seem to love it and I can't be arsed to look for older threads on the same subject.

It's interesting that a lot of people started out with PSX Doom, but I wonder if there are cases where you discovered Doom via its N64 version or you discovered the PC Doom games out of order (or if you began with Doom 3).

I started with the Doom shareware via Doom95 on some games for windows 95 CD, it had an interactive 3D space where you walked around like a hub and you went into rooms that contained a couple monitors that showed the game's title screen. You used the screen and it launched the executable externally for that game. While the CD did have some memorable titles like Fury 3 or obscure ones like Havoc, the most interesting one on there was obviously Doom. Shortly before this I had played Hexen as my first proper FPS game (Jurassic Park on the SNES with its indoor Wolf3D-esque sections didn't really count IMO).

I later got the retail version of Doom with Doom II, as I got The Ultimate Doom later on, so registered content like the Cacodemon and D1's bosses as well as the plasma rifle and BFG9000 weapons were seen in D2 by me for the first time, somewhat negating their presence in D1's later episodes when I got around to it but I did appreciate seeing the new levels which I ended up enjoying more than most of D2's. In time I would get Final Doom and then The Master Levels.

Fun fact, Doom II initially mislead me as looking it up on the internet back in the day as a kid netted a LOT of PWAD and partial/total conversion pictures which I for some reason thought was ALL part of the Doom II package and I was blown away, thinking this game was huge compared to anything I'd seen in the shareware episode. Later on did I realize these were addons for the game, leaving the base game seeming a little more bare-bones than I expected it to be.

The only console version of Doom I had in physical form was the PSX version, to which I knew nothing about there being any differences like the altered levels, new sound design and soundtrack, the colored lighting and reverb features etc. I never saw Doom portrayed in such an unusually darker, more ambient setting than the seemingly brighter, more upbeat PC version but it grew on me over time. Eventually I picked up Final Doom for PSX.

I put off Doom 3 for a long time because I never thought it looked like a good game, but curiosity struck me one day in early February 2010 and I went and 'got' a copy to see if it was any good. At the time I actually quite liked it as I was pleasantly surprised at how it managed to still be a decent game, like Doom if it had actually happened as opposed to the originals which were more arcade-y. Down the line however upon watching my S/O play the BFG edition of the game I was pretty hype to see if it held up in my memory only to be sorely disappointed at how boring and soulless it all looked now. Doom '16 shits all over Doom 3 IMHO.

I would get to Doom 64 via the Absolution TC for Doomsday, and while this is obviously an inferior recreation of the game I was very excited to finally see this seemingly unknown gem in the franchise. Much later on I'd get to experience the superior Kex engine port of it, but for the time I spent with Absolution and for a Doom spinoff it captivated me, it was like a wonderful marriage between Doom and Quake and it's easily one of my favorite Doom games to this day, next to Doom 1 and Doom '16.

Speaking of Doom '16 I am still going through it, having gotten it for $20 last time during a sale and I've been having an excellent time with it (playing on UV from the get-go) as I feel this is what Doom 3 SHOULD'VE been. Not some poorman's System Shock with the Doom branding slapped on it for a new engine they clearly couldn't think of anything else to do with it at the time.

Oh yeah, I also got No Rest for the Living when it wasn't on PC yet as an illegitimate rip, the skyboxes were broken and the music wasn't implemented but I didn't care, because I was blown away we got more Doom II in 2009/2010. Great set of maps, much better than most of Doom II's IWAD IMO.

[Voros]

My first indirect contact with Doom was SRB2. At that time, I didn't know shit about Doom. All I saw was a third person pixelated Sonic game.

Then I remember watching the Doom movie. Again, no idea about Doom. The movie was nice. During the credits, there was a mention that it was based on the game Doom, or something like that, and I thought I'd google it. So I googled, read it's info on Wikipedia most likely, and went on with life. I didn't bother checking it out though.

I liked emulators. And I really liked Project 64. With it I also downloaded the Doom 64 ROM (heh) and played it. I was enjoying the game until I found myself in an inescapable pit surrounded by walls that said "I SUCK AT MAKING MAPS". I was enjoying the game so much that I quit and never looked at it again. Fucking pit.

Again, emulators. This time, DosBox. Checked out Doom Shareware and played it on HMP. It was fun. Then I got Ultimate Doom, and got stuck on E4M2 because I didn't know there was a sprint button, or sprinting for that matter. Yes, I played E1 to E3 using no sprinting. Initially I was playing it on keyboard only but then enabled the mouse too.

Then tried out Doom 2 and finished it on ITYTD. I still hate the frustration I encountered on The Citadel map. What a load of crap.

Then one day I looked up some Doom videos on YouTube and there was a video called "all the ways to die in Brutal Doom". I was curious as to exactly what this is. Clicked on video, watched it. My mouth was open as I saw the Rifle firing bullets at leaping imps and the hud showing cracks everytime Doomguy got hit. I'm like "WTF how is this possible?" Then I see all the third person deaths and I am astonished. So I google Brutal Doom, look up instructions on running it and all that. I discovered source ports. Downloaded GZDoom 1.8.2 or something like that and did a test run with Doom 2. All those options O.O why didn't I know about this sooner? Then Brutal Doom. Oh man, my mind was blown away at the time.

And then Final Doom. I never gave it a proper playthrough, other than loading up random maps and playig for shits and giggles. It was just too similar to Doom 2.

Then Doom 3 got my interest. I wanted to try it out so I did. The game was fun on the first playthrough, but after finishing it, I didn't feel like playing again because I know how everything would go, just like Halo Combat Evolved. The overall experience was great though. I liked most of the things in the game.

And then Doom 64 EX. I thought I should give it a proper playthrough of Doom 64. I didn't, but I will someday.

And then came Doomworld. If that counts :P

Everything that I wrote here happened in the last few years. Maybe from 2014.

[leodoom85]

I started playing the SNES version of Doom and playing the first episode on the easiest skill. The twist on it is that you can't continue on the second episode on easy, you have to step up the skill then I played on Normal (and dying many times thanks to a pixelated cyberdemon...what a way to finish). After finishing on Normal the first and second episode, I stepped up again and played the three episodes on UV in one go. Best experience ever.

 

Then I played the PSX version of Doom and Final Doom and I started on HMP. After playing the whole game, I played it again but in UV. It was a nice esperience and I played that game a LOT...

 

Next stop was the N64 version but I played a bit. I wasn't fond of the controls and I couldn't enjoy a proper experience.

 

Then I got a laptop and the first port of Doom which was Doom95 which I played the original IWADs like Ultimate Doom, Doom II TNT and Plutonia, along with PWADs. Then I got the Doomsday port which, at last, I enjoyed Doom 64 with the Absolution version. That was awesome and I started to love the game. Next port was ZDoom with more advanced features like jumping and in that port I got into Heretic and Hexen. And the rest is history with my present and using GZDoom and Zandronum.

 

Also, I have the BFG Edition of Doom 3 in PS3 which I finally played No Rest for the Living. And, of course, I played Doom 3 and their expansions too...

[Deleted_Account]

The first time I experienced Doom was in 1993 right after its release. My older brother got me hooked. After that was Doom II, PSX Doom, Final Doom (and its PSX Counterpart), Doom 64, Doom 3 and finally Doom 2016. So pretty much in the order they were released. I still have all my original copies of the games. Lots of good memories throughout the years.

[joepallai]

My first encounter with Doom was when Sandy Peterson announced he was leaving Dragon magazine to work for id Software; he later then showed a more in depth article/review. 

 

The next encounter was when someone offered me a copy in '94 as part of a trade/gift for all these D & D books I gave to him and his brother.  Unfortunately at that time I only had my old 8088 and couldn't run anything worth playing.

 

The first time I actually played Doom was in '95 on the Playstation.  I then quickly bought it for the computer.  A month later I bought my first Doom editing book.  

[Not Jabba]

I first encountered Doom as soon as it came out, when I was 8. It might have even been a bit before the game's actual release. There were demos of it playing on a whole line of computers at the Sam's Club where we used to get groceries and stuff. I saw it from across the store and just wandered over and stared at it the whole time my mom was shopping. I was completely in awe that a game could look that awesome. And we had to get it, obviously. My dad bought it within a few months, and I watched him play it all the way through. I couldn't really play it yet, because I was too little and clumsy with the keyboard, but after I learned about the cheat codes, I played through it over and over again with them.

 

I saw Doom 2 demoing at the same store, and we got it soon after. I must have played both games a hundred times over the next however many years until the games finally gave up and died, or our computer wouldn't support them anymore, or something. The back arrow key just stopped working ingame. Even after that, I played through a couple more times with cheats. When I was in college, right after Doom 3 came out, I picked up all the classic games in the Collector's Edition, which is still technically what I'm running, though I have to use a port to play because Doom95 isn't functional anymore.

 

I was aware of Final Doom since it came out, and I had always wanted to play it, but I assumed it was more of a new game rather than a published mod, with maybe a couple of new enemies or at least a new final boss for each episode. I was *so* disappointed when I finally picked it up with the Collector's Edition. I appreciate it a little more now, but that annoyance has probably never gone away completely.

 

I got Hexen when it was new. My friend across the street had Heretic and I thought it looked really cool, but I never really got to play it until I was able to buy it on Steam many years later. 

[Hellbent]

I think seeing a demo of it running on a computer in a local computer store early in 1994. I think it was February or March when I played the shareware for the first time (but it may have been as late as April) and I remember the excitement of waiting for the registered floppy disks to come in the mail. 

[DMPhobos]

 

1 hour ago, cyan0s1s said:

While the CD did have some memorable titles like Fury 3 or obscure ones like Havoc, the most interesting one on there was obviously Doom. Shortly before this I had played Hexen as my first proper FPS game (Jurassic Park on the SNES with its indoor Wolf3D-esque sections didn't really count IMO).

While i didn't had the same CD by the way you describe it, i remember mine had also both Fury 3 and Havoc on it, also i played the shit out of the SNES Jurassic park waay before Doom lol

Alright... my whole Doom experience, waay before playing the game i had some nintendo magazines covering Doom on the SNES, it had a lot of the maps in the red black colors, it fascinated me a lot and created this odd image about doom, i kept looking at the magazine maps and screenshots untill one day they gave me nightmares. Around this time there was a cousing of mine that just kept talking to me about how awesome doom was (he had the snes version), and about how there was this level were some pink monsters came out two fridges (he was refering to the barons on phobos anomaly). It's was an interesting time before doom

 

Some time later my dad bought a pc and he lent me his old one, he had a demo CD with a bunch of game demos among them there was Doom 95. To sum it up, it scared me so much that my legs were shaking by the time i reached e1m2.

 

Years went by until in some weird time of my late childhood i got really interested in ghostbusters, so much that obsesively searched the internet for anything about it, then i found about the Ghosbusters Doom mod, and it really fascinated me. I borrowed Doom 2 from the same cousing just to play it, and behold, it was the first time i ever played Doom II and it was just for a mod. Some time later i got to know z0k and i got into doom editing, so slowly i started to lose interest in the ghostbusters mod, and became more interested into doom itself. Then i played the original Doom, and instantly it became my favorite game

Around this time Doom 3 was about to release, and one day i saw a review of it on a videogame show, and i was just stunned not just by how it looked, but how serious and it seemed and how distant it was from the original doom. When it got released i was super pissed about how i didn't had a computer to play it (and even less the game). Much like how i had this image of doom way before i played it, the same was for Doom 3. I didn't got to play it untill i found a videogame rental place where they had the Xbox version. And i played it for waaay too much on that place, so much that i even  managed to beat it on nightmare. I was really surprised about how mixed the reception from the doom comunity was, but after some years i came to agree on a lot of the flaws Doom 3 had.

After that i got to play a lot of comunity wads, my first experience with D64 was with the absolution TC, i played for some time, but i didn't finished it. I can't remember when i first played Final Doom, since i played it way after playing the original Doom and Doom 2, and to me it semed like just another doom map pack, so it didn't interested me and i didn't played it with the atention it really deserved.

And finally there's Doom 2016. By god, how the wait was long. Since Carmack confirmed that there was going to be another doom sometime by 2008 i got waay tooo hyped. They say that hype can kill a game, but to me, the new Doom was everything i wanted it to be, and more.

 

The most recent doom related thing that i had was the BFG edition for the 360. It had a kickass poster that's currently hanging on my wall

[damned]

I remember, that to run Doom, we had to start our 486 4MB ram (my dad won some money in TV show so he bought us PC) in safe mode. So we had to push F8 (or F5?) during the booting of the PC.
 

[TacoTurtle]

Well, myself, about 5 at the time. My memory isn't exactly clear so I've romanticized it a bit to make for enjoyable reading (at least I hope)

 

When I was younger, my family computer was bought as a present by my father's grandparents. This was no small present, it was at the time the most valuable thing the house by a long distance, and that included the family car. My dad was away a lot in the Navy, so it was mainly used by myself and my brother as an educational aid. For my dad, he used it as a gaming machine. He came back one time and had this floppy disk that had the word "doom" in all lower case, scribbled by someone. He was excited, and so was I. I remember all the colour filling up the screen and this powerful music coming to life from the speakers. Well he loaded up the level and died pretty quick, at which point he realised I probably shouldn't be in the room.

It didn't take long having been exposed to this colourful and interactive dreamworld that my curiousity was too strong. And it wasn't too long until I was playing it with him, hitting space when he needed me to. It was an unconventional relationship; I still remember him playing Stonekeep and the hyperactive response I had to him when he got chased down by the tall ugly green Throggi.  But when time was so limited with my father, I'm glad we were able to find sometime together somehow.

 

[cacomonkey]

Doom was disappointing to me first time I played it in 1995.  It was dark and gloomy and full of convoluted and confusing mazes and frustrating switch hunts.  I had just come off playing Catacomb 3-D and Wolfenstein 3-D and actually found them more fun and straightforward compared to Doom.  It wasn't until later that I began to appreciate Doom for the masterpiece it was.  I'd smoke a blunt then do some Doom, and say to myself, "You know, this is goooood shit!  Cheers to Doom!!!  And to this doobie! Life is good."

[MarsHappyNation]

My first exposure to Doom as a whole and the reason I found out about it was many years back, mentioned in some Columbine documentary or something. My first actual experience with the series was Freedoom, if that counts. Played through it one day when I had nothing better to do and messed around with mods. I'm a sucker for easily customizable games so from there, I decided to pick up the original a couple months down the road.

[42PercentHealth]

Let's see... I only heard about the game in school, but I wasn't allowed to play it because guns. My parents did let my brother and I play Heretic and Hexen when they came out. We were only 5 and 3 years old -- one of us would do the walking, and the other would do the shooting and jumping. We didn't ever get very far, because we didn't know how to solve any of the puzzles or save the game. :-P

 

I also remember playing the shareware version of Hexen 2 when it came out. My brother and I would take turns playing, but I don't think we ever got past the bit where you catapult yourself over the wall because it was SO FREAKING FUN!!! We just kept flinging ourselves over the wall until we depleted our health, and then we would start over. :-D

 

Eventually, my parents were converted to Christianity, and then they decided against games with magic and monsters. I mostly grew up playing strategy games, as well as some flying games like Descent, Terminal Velocity, Red Baron, all old-school stuff. Fast-forward to college...

 

I independently decided to re-visit Heretic and Hexen on my school laptop. Hexen was awesome, Heretic was meh. I finished Heretic once, and Hexen about 10 or 12 times until I knew all the puzzles and found all the "secrets." Also enjoyed the Deathkings expansion and Hexen 2 immensely. Somewhere in that time, I played Doom, and was not impressed. It was just hallways full of guys that you shoot. When you get done with all the hallways, you win. Couldn't figure out E4M6, so I quit playing there. Co-op'd Heretic and Hexen with my best friend at that time, and when we were done with those, he was like "Let's play Doom next!" So we did. I still wasn't impressed, but we did figure out that different sides of that teleporter took you to different places, so we finished episode 4. To this day, I don't usually play Doom 1 WADs because taking down a cacodemon or a baron with the pump shotgun is just way too tedious.

 

After I graduated, I discovered Doom 2, decided to play it, and was significantly more impressed by it. The more open spaces and the wider variety of encounters and monsters made the game so much more enjoyable. I discovered Scythe by looking for Doom content on YouTube, and it was like getting to experience Doom 2 for the first time all over again -- but better in some ways. Then I found Doomworld, downloaded some of the WADs that seemed to have some "classic" status... And the rest, as they say, is history.

[CzechMate29200]

I was reading news (yes, im that kind of person) one day and saw this article titled "Hry, které měly být zakázány" (Games that should've been banned). Of course, being the rebel that I am, I quickly clicked on the article and started reading it so I could play the shit out of them :)

Most of the games there were from the 90s, like Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D, but then there was this one called Doom. I knew what the word meant in English, so that caught my attention pretty quick. So I did some research on Doom. I found this article and all I read out of it was

"Kickass gameplay and a shitload of enemies to kill, get Doom right now". so that's exactly what I did, found out about source ports and such and then got Doom and played it. It was meh at first but then after like the 5th time playing it, I was hooked. This was almost a year ago...the rest is history :)

 

I found out about DoomWorld a long time ago, but never joined until a couple days ago...

[seablock]

in 6th and 7th grade i had this best friend who, somehow, got really into Doom during the school year. idk how he found out about it but anyways one time i went over to his house and he had bought Doom and Doom II on his Xbox 360 so we played co-op for a bit. i thought it was fun, but i wasn't hooked immediately. later on we also rented the Doom movie and tried watching it, but we both kept falling asleep halfway through. eventually, after playing it enough at his house, i decided i wanted to play Doom at home too so i bought the games on Xbox 360.

 

then when i was in my freshman year of high school, i heard about Brutal Doom (yeah yeah i know) and that made me go out and buy the games on PC. it was only then in high school that i got really, really into Doom and it became my favorite game of all time.

[ShoDemo]

Talked about it again, but why not?

Some years ago, I was watching a top 10 horror games on youtube and Doom 3 popped up. It said in the video that it was banned in many countries and I was really curious. So, I started playing it, I shit my pants and I left it at the very start. Then I said I would look the previous games to see if they were scary. I opened The Ultimate Doom and laughed saying:<<What is this? Is it like a cool arcade game from the past?>> And I decided to move on and play more levels after E1M1. It was so nice for me and I hadn't seen anything like it before, which is why I kept moving until I met with Slough of Despair (before that I only got stuck on playing Containment Area a few times). I was on HMP and I got my ass handed to me. Probably thanks to that map, I started developing resource saving skills over the next years. I came back to Doom one month later and finished it for good. I enjoyed it thoroughly and it became my favourite game, even though I didn't ever think of having a favourite game before that.

 

Next, I tried playing some pwads and Final Doom, although I didn't have the proper skill and couldn't face easily the new monsters from Doom 2, so I said what the heck and started playing Doom 2. It was also a nice experience and seeing all those new enemies I thought it was going to be really tough and it was, because I had moved on to playing on UV for the first time. I liked the city levels a lot and the SSG I got used to, as time passed by, because at first I would spend my shotgun shells without consideration (I hated the SSG in the past), but then I saw its power against enemies and how fun it can be to use. In Doom 2, I found the first ever map I hated, Barrels o' Fun, which was replaced by Unholy Cathedral from Doom 1 (it is the worst map in my opinion). Except the city maps, I liked somewhat the gimmicky maps, though I was not crazy about them. And as a game it has my two favourite monsters, as I said millions of times before, Hell Knight and Arch-vile.

Overall, I am thankful I played Doom 2, because now I have some of the needed experience for most pwads.

 

And I had to see the Doom movie when I found it existed. The FPS scene was cool, but I was expecting more than some zombiemen, imps, a Pinky and a Hell Knight (like an army of Hell Knights for an example). It was a normal movie, that didn't make me go crazy.

 

Then I played more pwads, like Back to Saturn X, Scythe, Scythe 2, Ancient Aliens, 7Sins, e.t.c. and got my eyes out of their sockets, when I saw how beautiful and hard a wad can be. 

 

And I continued with Hexen, which was awesome and satisfied my need for exploration, while having a cool atmosphere and Strife, with its nice story, which I haven't finished yet (I am after the sewer level, so there must be a lot of road to cover).

 

Finally, I am now going for the remaining games, which includes Final Doom, Doom 64, Doom 3 and Strife (and maybe the expansion for Hexen, Heretic and Hexen 2).

[Graf Zahl]

For me it started right at the beginning in December 1993 with Doom 1, then in Summer 1994 someone told me about user maps and due to lack of internet access I bought some shovelware CDs with a lot of crap maps so I had more stuff to play, then in late 1994 I got Doom 2.

For Heretic I only got the shareware version because I was unable to buy the full version.

I bought Hexen and Final Doom when they became available. After that I moved on to technically more modern games because the primitivity of the DOS EXE with its low resolution didn't cut it anymore. I only got back in when the first higher resolution ports appeared.

Some time later I finally purchased Heretic and Hexen Deathkings on eBay when I got into Doom coding.

I only rented Doom 3 in a video store, got bored after endliess dark corridors and never continued with it.

I never played Doom 2016 like all the other modern games due to my strict boycott of all DRM'd product.

 

[TDRR]

14 hours ago, Voros said:

My first indirect contact with Doom was SRB2. At that time, I didn't know shit about Doom. All I saw was a third person pixelated Sonic game.

*Long wall of text*

For me it was almost exactly like that, the only difference was that i discovered D64 in 2016, DooM in 2013 and SRB2 around 2010.

[LGN-76]

Quote

I had heard of DOOM prior to this, but the first time I ever played DOOM was when I rented DOOM 64 when it first came out. We got a Nintendo 64 the previous Christmas, and we literally rented every game that came out for it. Dad really liked the game compared to all the other stuff we rented. One day I came home from school, went up to my room, and Dad was in there on my bed in front of the TV. I see "You pick up a stimpack" on the screen, and then I see a DOOM 64 box open with its contents all over the bed. I now owned DOOM. I still have that same cartridge to this day, and I even dumped it to power DOOM 64 EX...

Then, for my 10th birthday in 1998, my Aunt gives me a little surprise: The Depths of DOOM Trilogy. I have to admit, I was initially thrown off by how DOOM I and II looked and sounded at first thanks to my experience with DOOM 64, but I eventually caught on to how great the games were, and still are today...

 

[Tetzlaff]

My personal order was:

 

1. Doom II

2. Doom: Obituary

3. Doom 3 - Mr Smiley Head's Safari

4. Doom

[rouge_means_red]

First tried it thanks to Brutal Doom and over time my appreciation for vanilla Doom just grew and grew. I was 4 when Doom came out so it was too scary for me

[cacomonkey]

I wanted to mention that when I first saw the buzz in all the computer gaming magazines in 1993 about this new revolutionary game called Doom and saw all the screenshots, I was salivating.  "This is the ultimate game!" I decided.  But my circumstances at the time had me with only a SNES console as my sole resource for playing any video games.  I decided I would buy the SNES port of Doom just as soon as it came out.  I came very very close to pulling that trigger but then my nephew gave me his old Tandy 286-computer with color VGA monitor and I discovered shareware Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D off the BBS boards and lost all interest in the prospect of playing Doom because I knew my device couldn't handle Carmack's new thrilling wonder game engine.  Then a year later in 1995 or so I bought my first "powerhouse" IBM-compatible - an AMD 5x86 computer that was the equivalent of a Pentium 75.  "Doom, here I come!"  I exclaimed.  But of course the game couldn't even remotely live up to the mythic expectations I had of it when I finally did play Doom.

 

But to this day I wonder what would have happened if I had first played Doom on that SNES with 10 Frames per second (or whatever it was) and a horrid d-pad controller (for first person shooters, at least).  Perhaps I would have lost all interest in Doom and wouldn't be here today.  Perhaps.

[Flesh420]

My dad and I entered a computer shop when I six and people were gathered around a single pc. We went up and looked, and I remember seeing the Doom Guy's face and it blew me away—a face! A gun!  But we only watched for like a minute and nothing of note happened.

 

Later that week my dad brought home the shareware and installed it under DOS, he let me play first before dinner.  My whole life changed. The pinky scared the piss out of me when I first encountered it.  I'd stare at the preview shots of later episodes for hours full of wonder.

 

Then later, we were walking around a Walmart and we stumbled across a huge Cyberdemon cutout holding copies of Doom 2.  Again, a week or two later he bought it, but couldn't get it to work for some reason (I don't remember, but I hung out on the couch excitedly waiting for what seemed like hours for him only to tell me he had to return it). A day or two later he purchased a different version, or something I don't remember, and it worked.  The new monsters filled me with much wonder.

He bought Ultimate Doom after Doom2, if I'm remembering correctly. 

I read the manuals for Doom and Doom 2 back to front front to back.  I still have most of the monster descriptions memorized. 

 

Then later, again, he came home with the shareware of Quake......

[Lila Feuer]

12 hours ago, cacomonkey said:

I wanted to mention that when I first saw the buzz in all the computer gaming magazines in 1993 about this new revolutionary game called Doom and saw all the screenshots, I was salivating.  "This is the ultimate game!" I decided.  But my circumstances at the time had me with only a SNES console as my sole resource for playing any video games.  I decided I would buy the SNES port of Doom just as soon as it came out.  I came very very close to pulling that trigger but then my nephew gave me his old Tandy 286-computer with color VGA monitor and I discovered shareware Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D off the BBS boards and lost all interest in the prospect of playing Doom because I knew my device couldn't handle Carmack's new thrilling wonder game engine.  Then a year later in 1995 or so I bought my first "powerhouse" IBM-compatible - an AMD 5x86 computer that was the equivalent of a Pentium 75.  "Doom, here I come!"  I exclaimed.  But of course the game couldn't even remotely live up to the mythic expectations I had of it when I finally did play Doom.

 

But to this day I wonder what would have happened if I had first played Doom on that SNES with 10 Frames per second (or whatever it was) and a horrid d-pad controller (for first person shooters, at least).  Perhaps I would have lost all interest in Doom and wouldn't be here today.  Perhaps.

I find these stories so fascinating, with how different technology was back then, and how at the time Doom must've seemed like Crysis compared to Wolf3D.

[Aldaraia]

Doom shareware

Doom 2

Heretic

Doom64/PSX Doom

GBA Doom

Collector's edition

Custom wads

 

As for source port usage:

 

Original .exe

Doom95

jDoom

Doom Legacy

ZDoom

ZDaemon for multiplayer

GZDoom (when my PC could actually do OpenGL graphics)

Pr/GlBoom+ (current source port)

 

[Lila Feuer]

Source ports, I was wondering if I should add those.

Well Doom95 was obviously my first experience with the classic Doom games (did not experience them in their native DOS environment) and it sucked with its lack of DeHackEd support as well as generally being crash happy (least in my experience, probably trying to run things that absolutely needed DEH files to run at all). My first true proper source port was regular ol' Boom and the appeal of it's limit removing capabilities and being able to play Boom-compatible PWADs listed under the /ports/ section of idgames database was very exciting.

I'd try out ZDoom and Doom Legacy (I forget if it was one before the other or what) with ZDoom coming out on top as the definitive source port because I was sold on modding via the simple yet powerful DECORATE coding language. Hilariously enough, my first hardware accelerated experience for Doom was actually ZDoomGL before I got GZDoom and then I'd play around with Doomsday/jDoom because of its unique if novel features.

I'd eventually go back to Boom-derived ports with the versatile prBoom+ and gave Chocolate Doom a whirl to experience that classic Doom environment without having to DOSBox it, which I would do later on anyway for the hell of it for my Steam copies.

Multiplayer port experiences was ZDaemon initially, but in very limited doses. Spent a lot of time on Skulltag once I discovered it which effectively re-ignited my obsession with Doom all over again. I would use this port strictly for a while as it felt like an all-in-one G/ZDoom package. Until I found out how it was like five divisions behind G/ZDoom development and I moved over to GZDoom.