Are you a first or second generation Doomer and what makes you proud to be one?

[Jayextee]

I'd argue both that the concept of 'generations' needs to be clearly defined, and that there are indeed more than two notable periods in the Doom community to belong to. From where I'm standing (and this is incomplete, I bucked out of the scene for ten years):

 

1. From the first game release up until the source code release
2. Source port hype period
3. [redacted, I wasn't there - some kind of dark ages? :P]
4. The Brutal Doom reawakening
5. DOOM 2016

From this, I'd say I was a Generation 2 kinda guy, even though I skipped that third part and came back for Generation 4. It's all academic though, because without a proper Doom community timeline such efforts are hopeless. And, with my bare knowledge of the pre-source days, could that 'generation' be fractured further still as pre and post editing tools? Did Doom 2's release cause any kind of schism in the scene? Did the arrival of Quake et al (but still, pre-source) cause a mini 'dark age'?

All. Moot.

 

However, I can't be the only one that would be interested in seeing as complete a timeline as possible. This scene's rich as hell with its own history. FREE HISSY!

[Graf Zahl]

I've been there from the start in December 1993, only taking a break between 1996 and 1998 when 320x200 PixelVision didn't cut it anymore (Doom95 never existed in my book), I got back once the first higher resolution ports appeared.

[TootsyBowl]

1 hour ago, Jayextee said:

I'd argue both that the concept of 'generations' needs to be clearly defined, and that there are indeed more than two notable periods in the Doom community to belong to. From where I'm standing (and this is incomplete, I bucked out of the scene for ten years):

 

1. From the first game release up until the source code release
2. Source port hype period
3. [redacted, I wasn't there - some kind of dark ages? :P]
4. The Brutal Doom reawakening
5. DOOM 2016

From this, I'd say I was a Generation 2 kinda guy, even though I skipped that third part and came back for Generation 4. It's all academic though, because without a proper Doom community timeline such efforts are hopeless. And, with my bare knowledge of the pre-source days, could that 'generation' be fractured further still as pre and post editing tools? Did Doom 2's release cause any kind of schism in the scene? Did the arrival of Quake et al (but still, pre-source) cause a mini 'dark age'?

All. Moot.

 

However, I can't be the only one that would be interested in seeing as complete a timeline as possible. This scene's rich as hell with its own history. FREE HISSY!

Well by this I am a full blooded Generation 4er. Brutal Doom dragged me in and it went from there.

[Frisky]

Do you include third generations?

[TootsyBowl]

 

5 minutes ago, Frisky said:

Do you include third generations?

The 2000's, between when Doom was the shit and the rise of Brutal Doom.

[Jayextee]

Doom was always the shit, bro.

[MFG38]

My first exposure to Doom was back in 2007 at the age of 12-13 with Doom 3, but I started Dooming seriously in 2008 with Doom 2. Does that make me second generation?

[HavoX]

I was born in 1984, and I started playing Doom in 1995, so I guess that makes me a first gen Doomer, doesn't it? Heh.

[Flesh420]

Have played since '93 when I was 6.  Literally Doom was the only game I played up until I got a PSX.  Then in the early 2000's I finally got an internet connection and discovered Legacy. 

My son's not even two yet and loves it.  When he sees the doomguy's face he starts pointing and talking about him.  Which is very weird because I've hardly played the original Doom around him, only '16 Doom.  But somehow he knows all about the classic, and he'll pull up his little chair and sit beside me and watch me play. 

It's very awesome but also weird he already loves it, like it's in his DNA or something.

[HavoX]

Like father, like son. :)

[Maes]

Which one do players of Doom 3 and Doom 4/2016/whatever fall into?

[Avoozl]

Well my first exposure was Doom 64 not far from its release date.

[EmotionalFelineinaMadstate]

yes

[schwerpunk]

First Gen by age alone. Played a lot more Quakes, Unreals, and Build engine games than Doom in my formative years. Though I did play the hell out of SNES Doom (rented that cart from Blockbuster like five times).

 

I didn't really, truly get into Doom until my twenties, when I was sucked back in by the smooth visuals of the [url="http://dengine.net/"]Doomsday Engine[/url]. Through that, I began to dimly appreciate the excellent gameplay beneath the beautiful graphics. I continued to source-port hop over the years, playing on and off.

 

Finally, it was Brutal Doom dragged me back for good. That's when I started exploring gameplay mods, custom maps, etc. I couldn't get enough Doom. I had no idea this community was so vibrant. My first attempts at mapping were all for ZDoom, and the reason I'm a programmer today is because I got the bug from ACS.

 

But over the years, and mostly thanks to this community, I developed a taste for the "classic" Doom experience (Chocolate Doom is my fav port to this day), even though that wasn't my entryway (heh) to this game.

 

Great idea for a thread, by the way - some good reads in here.

[42PercentHealth]

I was 3 when the game came out. I remember playing Heretic at 4, Hexen at 5, and hearing about Doom & Quake in school. It wasn't until I was in college that I finally played Doom (and Quake), and also learned that my Dad had played Doom when he was in college. So I guess I'm second-generation? I'm just old enough to be first-generation, but I discovered the game late...

[Skeletonpatch]

I am most certainly a second generation Doomer (never heard that term before), I was born in 1998 and can't remember a time when Doom was not a major interest of mine. My dad introduced me to it when he let us (me and my older brother) use his old computer after he had just gotten a new one. It had Doom '95 installed on it (the computer itself ran windows '98, the year I was born haha) and I fondly remember watching my dad play through the first few levels of The Plutonia Experiment (we have Final Doom in the big box!). This was sometime in the early 2000s and I distinctly remember sucking at the game a lot.

 

I didn't GIT GUD at the game until my dad installed DOSBOX on his Windows XP computer (I think DOSBOX is a bit of a downgrade from Doom '95, am I right?). The particular version of DOSBOX my dad installed was pretty terrible, seeing as it had no fullscreen option that my eight-year-old self could find and I had to enter a command every time I wanted to launch the game. I have many memories of playing Doom hunched way too close to the screen because that was the only way to make out what was going on the tiny 3x4" box on the desktop.

 

Then one day, my older cousin brought a memory stick to our house containing ZDoom and it CHANGED THE WAY I WOULD PLAY DOOM FOREVER! No more command lines! No more tiny non-resizable windows! F@#&ING JUMPING! I finally defeated the Icon of Sin legitimately after years of trying, I discovered all the delicious options bundled in and the amazing portability of Doom, all you need is the ZDoom folder and the .wads and you can play Doom ANYWHERE (assuming you have a computer, of course).

 

I began creating my own maps with Doom Builder 2. I searched far and wide for Heretic, Hexen and Strife! Then I eventually learned of GZDoom and tried my hand at modding the game (yes, I know that you can do that with ZDoom, but I never tried it with ZDoom)! Brutal Doom, alternate visor huds, Pirate Doom, the Hell on Earth Starter Pack! And, I am ashamed to say that I never played the original Doom all the way through until the mid 2010s, because my dad did not have a working copy of the .wad... I had to buy it from Steam... We only had the shareware... Though we've always had Doom II and Final Doom! That aside, I consider myself a Doomer through and through (this post is way longer than I intended it to be).

[Pirx]

I think I wrote about this somewhere. I played my first doom game in January 1994. DM on E3M2, lol. Camped the RL until someone found his way into my cave, then we blew up. Witnessed years of the scene during the 90s and 00s on doomworld, doom nation, new doom and other sites as a silent lurker.  Many links on old sites are dead. So doomer almost since the beginning.  I'm an obsolete model.

[scifista42]

Second generation. Played only vanilla Doom 2 IWAD (v1.666) as a kid, then abandoning Doom for a few years, then rediscovering it along with other IWADs, source ports, PWADs, map editors, and the mapping / modding community. I like the fact that when I started playing PWADs and trying out mapping (around the year 2011), there were already tons of PWADs available from all years of Doom's history and featuring various aesthetical and gameplay styles, which not only kept me occupied, but I could (instinctively as well as consciously) compare them, identify my favorites and develop my preferences.

 

In parallel to this, on the mapping / modding side, I like the fact that the editor I started with, Doom Builder 2, turned out to be easy and fun to use for me (I learned it without any tutorial) and that ZDoom-specific features, but actually even vanilla-only features, provided endless possibilities for creativity (note: I've first played around with Hexen format maps, ACS and DECORATE using zdoom wiki as a source of information, and only later went into vanilla or Boom compatible mapping and modding, finding out that working within their limitations is entertaining and capable of achieving decent results too, and nowadays I still appreciate the benefits of both).

 

All in all, my interaction with Doom, the community, and everything related, gave me a lot of enjoyment over the years, and taught me a lot about both creative and technical aspects of level/game design (which had always interested me). Being second generation had influence on the path by which I got here, but what I'm truly glad for is simply that I'm here now.

[Urthar]

I had seen the shareware version of Doom back in 93 and it looked pretty neat. But my real introduction was a couple of years later, in the form of 4 player DoomII deathmatch on the office LAN. The first time I saw the Icon of Sin was in a coop game. None of us had any idea of what to do, so we ended up fighting infinite monsters for about an hour until the Boss started nagging us to do some bloody work. Good times.

 

It all ended the day Descent came out and suddenly we could get the whole office playing instead of just 4 people.

[DoomGater]

I am a first generation doomer and I am very proud of it.

Without any doubt - it's nice that there are younger people who like doom and that keeps doomworld alive, but please ask yourself a question:

 

What makes a person a first generation doomer?

I don't think it is enought to say "I play doom since I was five". Back in the days we went to CompuServe's "Go Action" to find

out how to beat the Icon of Sin and to spread the word to others. There was no doomworld and no doomwiki with all the answers.
We spent long time to figure out, how we could create floppies from an installed game to share it with friends. There was no self-explaining

WINRAR which creates multi-volume archives in a breeze, we had to learn many things. How do I have to configure my memory best to

run DEU, and what is the best AT-init-string for my modem to automatically call my buddy for deathmatch? It was really demanding and

intense and I've learned a lot about computers from playing, editing, sharing and configuring doom.

Any first gen doomer I am aware of is MUCH more, than just sombody who plays doom.  We are -at least- doom techs.

 

And so we have knowledge of obscure, hidden wisdom, that none of the 2nd gen doomers can achieve ;-)

 

 

[DoomGater]

On 24.7.2017 at 4:28 AM, YukiRaven said:

"Doom will never die, only the players"  -somebody

That's a Ray Davis quote from the DOOM LEGACY site http://doomlegacy.sourceforge.net/

But all those years I wonder...

WHO IS RAY DAVIS?

 

Does anybody know...???

[Csonicgo]

I never played Registered Doom until the mid nineties, but Doom 2 was played from day one. My friend Scott had Doom 2 and the shareware version, and we played it together on his 386. That computer was awful. The best performance we could get was with low detail with a smallish window, but we made it work. My father, seeing us play it, decided that we needed a kickass computer so he wouldn't have to carry me to Scott's house every time I wanted to play, so that Christmas of '94 he brings in a computer his friend had made - with an Intel Pentium inside (either that or it was a DX2). That thing blew the doors off anything I had experienced since.

 

I kinda put off Doom for a while when Quake came out, then Doom64 happened, and I was hooked again. I started getting my old disks out and reinstalling the thing, then found out from a Doom64 fan site that the linux doom source code was released. That's when I found Doom Legacy. Yes, my first port ever was Doom Legacy. From there I discovered that all those mods I couldn't figure out how to run back in the day - just worked. I quickly switched to SMMU, then ZDoom, with Eternity coming later on. Doom Legacy still holds a place in my heart, though.

 

Unfortunately, I lie in-between First and Second Generation. I started in the Doom community in 1999, although it was on NewDoom forums instead - and we know how that turned out, don't we? The drama forced me to jump to Doomworld, where I've stayed ever since. As a result, I have been in the community for over a decade, yet I'm too young to see Doom community in the "old" days.

Up until recently, my contributions to the Doom community were never "enough" in my eyes. I never made a map, I never got into the DM scene as much as I wanted. All the maps I made never made it past the layout phase. But I redeemed myself by bringing in maps that never made it into the archives. Now I have my own entry in /idgames/, and I'm happy.

 

I'm quite proud, I guess. :-)

[Doomkid]

First gazed upon the glory of Doom when I was like 4, probably about 1996. Was downloading / tinkering with wads by age 7 and was DMing regularly after discovering online Doom in late 2001. That's also when I found WadAuthor and started mapping.

 

I think I fall right in between the two, been around for a long time but was still just a child when people in their teens and 20s were essentially putting the foundations for the Doom community to grow upon in place. Now I'm in my mid 20s seeing other youngsters join in. I love the way the torch just keeps getting passed on from generation to generation. [/ramble]

 

[SOSU]

On 7/24/2017 at 7:25 AM, TootsyBowl said:

 

  Hide contents

I'm still in high school. How late is that?

 

Earlier than me :P (i didn't even start high school yet)

[insertwackynamehere]

I've been playing Doom since almost the beginning but I was also like 4 years old or something. So I grew up both with games getting better and better before pretty much losing the "gamer" status around college in the mid-late 2000s. So I guess sort of first gen but as child which gave me a different perspective. I think what's interesting about video games you play as a kid is that they sort of shape a lot of your thoughts when you are young, more than you realize. Not like the violence or whatever, but more the games seem more magical as a kid so I'll have moments where I double-take things because they remind me of a video game I played back before I had any real adult concept of real versus fake. Even leading into you "tween" years, there is still that foot-half-in-childhood mode where you constantly grind away at games trying to find secrets that as an adult you recognize no level designer actually would have ever done like trying to get to the out-of-bounds areas in games and expecting some crazy reward.

[quackbal]

I played first around early 1995 at the age of 6. Was at my dads work as my PC couldn't run it! So I guess I'm between first and second gen.

 

I got more into it in around 2002 (and joined this forum shortly after, being a lurker ever since :D ) as I enjoyed source ports like Legacy etc. Then I learnt about Doomsday!

[Coopersville]

First gen. It was a hell of a ride from beginning to now, and I wouldn't change a thing. 

[LordShadowZ]

I'm kind of a mix of first and second gen, somewhere in the middle. I started playing Doom in 1998 at the ripe old age of 5 and I played it quite a lot for a number of years, though I obviously never got involved in the community at the time. Then I got a lot more seriously into Doom toward the end of 2015 when I decided that I wanted to start doing something creative with my passion for video games.

[Obsidian]

Second gen: I first played Doom II in the early 2000s on a friend's computer (with no sound whatsoever, heh). Got my grubby mitts on Doom II and Doom Builder in mid-2012 on my mum's computer and I've been here ever since. It's been a hell of a trip and even though I almost dropped out of the business last year, I wanna make sure I stick around as long as I can.

[DoomGater]

On 24.7.2017 at 3:59 PM, Maes said:

Which one do players of Doom 3 and Doom 4/2016/whatever fall into?

Technically thinking, it should be 3rd and 4th generation, but in my humble opinion, they don't count at all.