Ever wonder how was Doom Multiplayer back in 96?

[Endless]

All I can say... 1 vs 1, 90's glory.

 

We have come a long way in MP in gaming history. Doom created the term ''Deathmatch'', but of course, it was primitive version of the modern DM playground. But even by that, DM was consider a really big jump for gaming back in the days, all I can say I would have love to have a Lan Party 20 years ago.

My first MP experience ever was a litte game called... *drum sounds* Counter-Strike Source. Yes, I really good game for my first MP experience, enjoy the crap out of it against my friends, and even enjoy it against Bots.

What was your first MP Experience? 

 

[Red]

For local multiplayer probably Super Soccer for SNES or Mortal Kombat 3

For online multiplayer probably Gunbound, though always at a friend's place and never my own because we didn't have internet back then. It wasn't until Halo 3 that I started playing online with people like a big boy.

[[McD] James]

Quake 3 was my introduction to both the Quake series as well as multiplayer first person shooters. I loved it back in the day. Nowadays, not so much. It's a good game, but hasn't aged very well with me on a personal level. I much prefer Unreal Tournament for online arena shooters. 

[Endless]

Just now, Red said:

For local multiplayer probably Super Soccer for SNES or Mortal Kombat 3

For online multiplayer probably Gunbound, though always at a friend's place and never my own because we didn't have internet back then. It wasn't until Halo 3 that I started playing online with people like a big boy.

How was the Xbox community before? I like the console and Halo is an epic saga... but playing online in 2017 is quite... disturbing. 

[[McD] James]

4 minutes ago, Red said:

For local multiplayer probably Super Soccer for SNES or Mortal Kombat 3

For online multiplayer probably Gunbound, though always at a friend's place and never my own because we didn't have internet back then. It wasn't until Halo 3 that I started playing online with people like a big boy.

 

I played a lot of MK3 on the SNES with my friends. Kabal was pretty godly in that game. 

[Endless]

3 minutes ago, Ajora said:

Quake 3 was my introduction to both the Quake series as well as multiplayer first person shooters. I loved it back in the day. Nowadays, not so much. It's a good game, but hasn't aged very well with me on a personal level. I much prefer Unreal Tournament for online arena shooters. 

Unreal Tournament and Doom are my fav FPS games of all time, sadly UT doesnt have such an active fanbase like Doom does. But there some really good mods and maps out there, I just wish It could be remebered with all the honor it deservers.

UT has really special place in my heart. 

Its still a incredible fun game to play, once a legendary game, always a legendary game. 

[Doomkid]

I'm not at all jealous of the way Doomers had to play online in the 90's - Peer to peer connections are shitty enough for gaming now, I honestly can't imagine it on mid 90s dialup, but obviously (and thankfully) many Doomers did it and loved it since we have so many DM maps and demos from back then.

 

Client/Server Doom was one of the best things to ever happen for mutliplayer!

[Red]

2 minutes ago, Anidrex_1009 said:

How was the Xbox community before? I like the console and Halo is an epic saga... but playing online in 2017 is quite... disturbing. 

Can't really compare because I haven't played online on console (or much at all for that matter) since Reach came out and my interest in the franchise died altogether.

Casual bigotry all over the place aside, I absolutely loved the amount of user created content people put out for Halo 3, and Bungie back then was excellent at staying in touch with their fans and letting them form actual communities within communities, for both casual and hardcore. 

The fact most maps were done with a glorified prop mover says something about how ingenious people got to do something unique with this game. Sure its easy to make anything in Halo 5 and even Reach when their Forge Mode is basically just a mini G-Mod, but when people released stuff like Duck Hunt, Halo on Halo, Fat Kid, Jenga and a bunch of other unique game modes, it was just ground breaking to see. Because like I said Forge was basically just a prop mover with very limited tools, there was no way to make objects float or clip unless you pulled glitches that required other people to help you trying over and over until you got it, and yet people still put out shit like this and a lot of other maps that screamed creativity and teamwork, its so simple but back then this was like holy shit how did they do that.

[Endless]

1 minute ago, Red said:

Can't really compare because I haven't played online on console (or much at all for that matter) since Reach came out and my interest in the franchise died altogether.

Casual bigotry all over the place aside, I absolutely loved the amount of user created content people put out for Halo 3, and Bungie back then was excellent at staying in touch with their fans and letting them form actual communities within communities, for both casual and hardcore. 

The fact most maps were done with a glorified prop mover says something about how ingenious people got to do something unique with this game. Sure its easy to make anything in Halo 5 and even Reach when their Forge Mode is basically just a mini G-Mod, but when people released stuff like Duck Hunt, Halo on Halo, Fat Kid, Jenga and a bunch of other unique game modes, it was just ground breaking to see. Because like I said Forge was basically just a prop mover with very limited tools, there was no way to make objects float or clip unless you pulled glitches that required other people to help you trying over and over until you got it, and yet people still put out shit like this and a lot of other maps that screamed creativity and teamwork, its so simple but back then this was like holy shit how did they do that.

That sounds beautiful. I know there can be great and fun games, but If the community are small or to toxic, well, those games can be condemned to mediocrity or oblivion. I have high hopes this will never happen with Doom. 

[MrGlide]

18 minutes ago, Anidrex_1009 said:

How was the Xbox community before? I like the console and Halo is an epic saga... but playing online in 2017 is quite... disturbing. 

It used to be decent. Times have changed, it seems like online attitudes have as well. I'm in the same boat as red kinda (except I played the dog shit out of h3 online). First game online was Halo 2 I think. I had played unreal well before then but there was no internet out in the countryside back then, So bots where fun. I would have got decimated anyway.

[Red]

The problem is that the demographic of Halo was so wide and the community was (and probably still is) so large that you're bound to encounter all sorts of rancid horrible people, especially back then when people still didn't really know how to handle toxicity as we do now (and even now it could be handled a lot better).

 

The edge Doom has is that the community as a whole has been around for closer to 30 years so chances are the members are far more mature or at the very least experienced in handling these sorts of things.

[Red]

All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

 

[40oz]

Doom LAN parties are a blast. My cousin has this nerd's wet dream set up in his basement. We were able to set up a game of skulltag CTF some years ago with two of our buddies. Being able to shout at each other and make fun of each other made it by far the most thrilling multiplayer experience ive ever had.

 

Theres something severely disconnected about multiplayer today. I have a second controller I picked up with my PS4 and its covered in dust because I haven't found a single two player game I could play with my wife. Online multiplayer is huge but its a remarkably solitary activity that isn't worth my time getting invested in.

[elsaltaccount#9999]

Zandronum multiplayer, GOD FUCKING DAMNIT, I'M SICK OF ALL THE MEGAMAN SERVERS.

Also, I WANT TO FUCKING PLAY A NON-EMPTY SERVER THAT ISN'T PRIVATE!!!!!

Edited September 2, 2017 by elsaltaccount#9999 : Dog shit is kinda tasty.

[Edward850]

4 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Peer to peer connections are shitty enough for gaming now, I honestly can't imagine it on mid 90s dialup

Better than you would think, actually. Doom of course didn't use TCP/IP, but rather just dialed and handled connection itself, which meant that you were dialed straight to the other player, rather than through an ISP and through early internet gateways. Phone lines, at least for national calls, go through very little routing nodes so as long as the quality of your phone line wasn't compromised it'd be a very clean connection.

 

Worth noting that with the above in mind, in some rural places, a multiplayer game today with your neighbor would be better with direct dial-up as it'd have a lower and more stable connection than over the internet, simply because the local phone system would have an exchange to handle the call directly, and the ISP would be out of town. At least with vanilla Doom anyway.

 

The wild-card becomes Dwango. Still a direct modem service rather than an ISP, but its connection quality would be dependent on Dwango's ability to host the call (especially with 4 people in the same game, so essentially like a party line). Can't imagine it would have been too bad, however, as the service was quite successful until effectively deprecated by internet multiplayer. Strangely stayed relevant in Japan and evolved into running a video hosting service.

Edited September 2, 2017 by Edward850

[CARRiON]

My first online gaming experience was Command & Conquer, followed by Duke Nukem 3D and the Platoon mod.

 

[ASD]

An experienced MP player told me that back in DWANGO, whoever controlled Indigo always had the worst lag whereas Brown had the best connection. Can anyone recall whether true or not?

[geo]

I tried peer-to-peer in 96 or earlier. It was fun to co-op. Just the novelty alone of having 2 players in the game was awesome. Even on dial-up (96kbps) everything ran smooth.

[snapshot]

They used to pay for Dwango rounds from what I read.

[elsaltaccount#9999]

55 minutes ago, dmg_64 said:

They used to pay for Dwango rounds from what I read.

That kind of sucks.

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, ASD said:

An experienced MP player told me that back in DWANGO, whoever controlled Indigo always had the worst lag whereas Brown had the best connection. Can anyone recall whether true or not?

Lacking an answer, this strikes me as a coincidence. Unless there was something funky going on with the Dwango drivers player order, it would seem more likely player 1 (green) would be slowest, and the most latent from green being fastest, due to arbitration of frames from green. I'm unsure if network drivers could change those rules, but they are part of the playloop so I wouldn't have thought so.

[Doomkid]

3 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Better than you would think, actually. Doom of course didn't use TCP/IP, but rather just dialed and handled connection itself, which meant that you were dialed straight to the other player, rather than through an ISP and through early internet gateways. Phone lines, at least for national calls, go through very little routing nodes so as long as the quality of your phone line wasn't compromised it'd be a very clean connection.

This is interesting to me, but even connecting P2P to others in Australia - or Melbourne even - still has annoying spikes of lag and generally choppy and delayed movement. The same was true back when I lived in the US as well, playing P2P ports over Doom Connector always sucked compared to using a C/S port because you feel all the lag directly. Naturally the lag is still there with a client/server architecture but the predictive movement present in all the C/S Doom ports makes play feel much more smooth, even if it is just the psychological element of seeing the animations as you input them rather than actually visualizing the delay.

 

Increase the party to more than 2 players and you'll really have delays and such on your hands. It's nice for each person to only have to worry about the connection between them and the server, rather than worrying about the connection to every other person as well. Myself, a person from England, a person from Slovakia and a person from America can all have a fun DM together thanks to the client/server architecture. There is a 0% chance of that with a P2P connection!

 

To condense my blabbing, P2P would only be preferable with someone who lives reasonably locally, unless someone enjoys extremely choppy movement and delayed inputs. I've done a P2P match all the way to Cali and with the framerate halved with dup2 and extratics turned up to like 4 or something it was kinda-sorta-almost playable but even then just using one of the c/s ports is far far more enjoyable, for me anyway. I'm thankful for them because the MP scene would be almost certainly be about 1/10th of it's current size without them. It really was a huge, important milestone and I'm really glad that we have that option since I constantly crave DM and it's usually with people who live internationally since Doomers are dotted all over the world.

[Doohnibor]

My 1st MP experience was 2 player PSX DOOM back in 1995 via link cable! : )

I didn't have internet by that time, I hadn't read about Multiplayer and haven't been told about it... so I basically had NO idea what Multiplayer was and what to expect.    

All I had was the short mention about it in the PSXDOOM manual that two players could join or play against each other after connecting two PSX with this cable. So I bought this cable brought my Tube TV!! and PSX to a friend (which was quite a hassle) and then had one of the most lifechanging game experiences ever! (it was only topped by the moment when I stepped into my first selfmade DOOM map : )

I actually liked coop much more than DM - that was probably because the PSX didn't have real multiplayer maps.

 

A short while later a friend at that time told me that he had heard that it is possible to make your own DOOM maps with a PC.

One week later I had one ; )

Then I played quite some MP over the internet....  Duke and Shadow Warrior. These two games had AWESOME DM and were much more fun than DOOM DM which was totally boring compared to it.

But it often was extremely hard to play due to the terrible latency of the 28.8 modem internet connection : )

My first LAN experience was a nightmare...  again the huge hassle of transporting all the gear... and then I couldn't connect to the network....  some guy tried to help and about two hours later and after numerous reboots and fiddling around my PC was completely messed up...   I ended up watching the others and had to reinstall my machine. 

It's all so much easier now ; )      .... but sadly the newer stuff seems to be not nearly as much fun.

 

Edited September 3, 2017 by Doohnibor

[Endless]

5 hours ago, CARRiON said:

My first online gaming experience was Command & Conquer, followed by Duke Nukem 3D and the Platoon mod.

 

That is by far the best RTS I have ever played, sadly, I never had the opportunity to play it Online, Not even LAN! But AH! I LOVE IT

[Deleted_Account]

Me and my brother used to deathmatch on Lan back in the day all the time, I remember it well.

[Doohnibor]

12 hours ago, Piper Maru said:

Me and my brother used to deathmatch on Lan back in the day all the time, I remember it well.

Don't know why...   but your Avatar makes me laugh, everytime I see it.

Guess that was not the intention ; )

[scifista42]

^ I guess the ridiculousness was in fact intentional. He's often inserious in what he says or does on this forum.

[kaleb.]

Skulltag back in 2009/2010 was my first online multiplayer experience...well also i think club penguin back in like 2006 lol

[notjimmyboigreez]

i used to play over IPX when it was first shareware with my dad. used to love it, i can remember the first time we did it and we ran up to each other in the game and i came running to his computer to see what the doom guy looked like.

 

me and a few friends actually played the XBLA version a few nights ago and did a 4player deathmatch, we was all loving it and it just goes to show a game of this age is still proper good fun.

[axdoomer]

On 9/2/2017 at 1:26 AM, Doomkid said:

I'm not at all jealous of the way Doomers had to play online in the 90's - Peer to peer connections are shitty enough for gaming now, I honestly can't imagine it on mid 90s dialup, but obviously (and thankfully) many Doomers did it and loved it since we have so many DM maps and demos from back then.

There's a very low latency on dial-up, meaning that you could play with someone who's very far from you on the phone line and there would be no lag because the "ping" would be very small. People were meeting on BBS channels and then one called the other person using his computer's dial-up card and the other person's computer answered. That's how people played over Dwango, but I think people had to pay for a subscription and there was a ranking system of some sort.

 

Dwango had the best maps. You could search on some FTP repositories for new maps or buy some CDs, like D!MATCH. Such CD compilation were random maps cumulated to one CD, they were not very good most of the time.

 

You had to search for good maps. On my D!MATCH 150 CD, there was only 11 Doom 1 maps that were worth playing. I played them the other day:

Spoiler