Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362
sfraggle writes "Kotaku has an interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17-year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes. Quoting: 'Virtual shotgun armed, I was finally going to play Doom for real. A second later, I understood the allure the video game weapon has had. In Doom the shotgun feels mighty, at least partially I believe because they make first-timers like me wait for it. The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have the shotgun, its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy. The shotgun is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact. The shotgun is the punch in the face the once-scrawny boy on the beach gives the bully when he returns a muscled linebacker.'"
Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:5, Funny)
Plus, it's on Kotaku, the home of anime-obsessed nerds who love video games more than sex.
I think I'll pass.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:5, Funny)
Plus, it's on slashdot, the home of technology nerds who love computers more than sex.
I think I'll pass.
Nope, no different that way either. ah well.
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I don't love video games more than sex, but I certainly get to play around more that way.
May be why I hang out on Joystiq instead.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:4, Funny)
And apparently -elitist- nerds. The most ridiculous type. It's like comic book guy from the simpsons making fun of millhouse.
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It's like comic book guy from the simpsons making fun of millhouse.
Worst. Analogy. Ever.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Otherwise, you'll be stuck on this planet while the rest of us colonize space.
"And we were sent off first," he concluded, and hummed a little bathing tune.
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My fault I have a higher education than you and am the director of research for a multi-national corporation.
How long did it take you to compose that post in a legible manner? Everything I get at work from big-wigs who smugly assume (even when I'm the one paying for their services, e.g. when I go to the doctor) I'm an illiterate little shit who doesn't deserve the right to spend my hard-earned income on food is usually malformed garbage chock full of incomplete sentences, logical contradictions, and misused punctuation. The net effect over the past 4 years has made me conclude that there's really nothing involv
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...No skill involved at all besides hypnotizing the masses that you're somehow better than them and somehow /deserve/ to get money for free.
I don't know man, that sounds like a pretty useful skill.
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Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me
You're unfamiliar with the new game journalism, eh?
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Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
It looked a lot like English, but that was the limit of its resemblance.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:5, Funny)
You would know. Their 'waifu' are those stupid lolicon pillows.
Doom? Is that supposed the old stupid game with the rickroll boom box?! and the blue tails runnin thru map01 firing shotguns since tails are foxes are the best, on the multiplayer geting a DOUBLE KILLS and role play with MAH BOIS etc.
Doom's image has been tarnished plenty by these kinds of newbies these days. They no longer understand its contextual relevance and its significance.
Captcha: mallard. Mallards are ducks. Ducks go quack. Quack is pretty close to "Quake".
This is your brain on drugs. Get the picture?
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Sadly true. :D
These retarded n00bs don't understand that you're not a gamer until you mastered Asteroids, Defender, Qix, Xevious, Crush Roller and Joust. A multiplayer FPS like UT or Sauerbraten and 1 driving simulation as icing on the cake. The rest is scarcely relevant.
Memories (Score:5, Insightful)
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So by interesting, you mean... (Score:2, Insightful)
So by interesting, you mean it's another stupid online review wherein the reviewer decides that demonstrating his incomparable verbosity and masterful use of metaphors is more important than actually imparting any sort of useful information? How fun!
Here, let me summarize... (Score:2)
Re:Here, let me summarize... (Score:5, Funny)
Are summarizing sex or doom?
Sex...it's like doom.
Bonus 'joke':
It's been 17 years since I enjoyed either.
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Do we really need an informative Doom review?
It's not as bad as it looks (Score:4, Informative)
Some of the writing is godawful:
Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the writing is godawful:
Poetic prose or awkward adjective use, either way that description is characteristic of a non-gamer in my opinion. Perhaps I am a bit jaded, but are the words/phrases "2D sprite", "low-resolution", "models", and "textures" that much in the realm of jargon to be excluded from the current generation of mainstream gamers? Or am I pining for the days of yore?
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I didn't expect him to know the terminology. I was just boggled by the writing.
Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't expect him to know the terminology. I was just boggled by the writing.
Well I presume your average /.er's vernacular and phrase turning ability lies closer to the masterdebater end of the spectrum, rather than the cunning linguists range of word-play.
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You, sir, are going down!
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A Starcraft 2 player commented on an animation/effect glitch in a custom game as a "sprite" issue.
He was wrong but, hey, at least he knew what sprites were.
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I still prefer the looks of Doom to the looks of polygon-based games. I certainly preferred Doom to Quake, and maybe that has coloured my impressions of other games. "True" 3D graphics (made up of triangles) just look far too sharp for my liking. Edges on objects don't have chamfers, and the transition between objects and background is quite harsh. I figure those problems will be eventually resolved, but it needs better anti-aliasing and (possibly) "infinite" resolution.
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Uh....I think its time to take off the rose colored glasses. Doom looks pretty god awful compared to modern games. As soon as you get too close to a wall or enemy it just falls apart. Also objects don't rotate in 3d. Doom looks like a bunch of cardboard cutouts anymore. Quaint? Surely. But to say that something like Doom 3 or Half-Life is not superior then I think you must have a really funny idea about what constitutes good graphics. That said, I think there is certainly a place for straight-up 2d games, b
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There is a weird thing where the mind tends to put experiences in tiers. If everything is a cardboard cutout, it will all flow together and work OK. You did "cardboard cutout" well. The moment you start mingling real 3D objects in there, the brain starts seeing 3D objects and poorly rendered 3D objects (those aforementioned cutouts).
The same can be said of poorly done bump or normal maps, poorly digitized textures, etc. If something is either really good, or intentionally missing, the mind tends to give
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Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends on what you're looking for. If I want absolute realism, my Mom does a better job with a disposable camera than Van Gogh. However, I certainly wouldn't claim for an instant that the family album even registers on the artistic scale next to Starry Night. I can take a better picture than Mom using a 35 mm camera with actual attention to focus, stop, and appropriate film speed. It looks better and it's technically superior, but still not a blip next to Vincent on the artistic scale.
I can capture what a starry night LOOKS like quite well, but Van Gogh somehow captured what it FELT like to look at the starry night.
I'm not trying to raise Doom up to that level, just pointing out that sometimes the technically inferior is artistically superior. It may be that those very imperfections are necessary to the artistic value. For some, the less perfect graphics of Doom may create a superior atmosphere.
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You mean GZdoom, not Zdoom - G is the one with 3d acceleration and OpenGL stuff.
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Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:4, Interesting)
I still prefer the looks of Doom to the looks of polygon-based games. I certainly preferred Doom to Quake, and maybe that has coloured my impressions of other games. "True" 3D graphics (made up of triangles) just look far too sharp for my liking. Edges on objects don't have chamfers, and the transition between objects and background is quite harsh. I figure those problems will be eventually resolved, but it needs better anti-aliasing and (possibly) "infinite" resolution.
This is slowly getting resolved using some new techniques that effectively hide the "flatness" of the polygons. There are 3D accelerators now that can do proper tessellation and height maps at reasonable frame rates. Effectively, the triangles become similar in size to the pixels, so the detail becomes as good as what the monitor can display.
The previous incarnation of this was variations on bump maps, which didn't really work all that well. The most advanced version is called parallax mapping, which is used by some games, but isn't as good as real detail geometry.
Take a look at: Parallax mapping [wikipedia.org] and this demo video [youtube.com] of DX11 tessellation in action. In my opinion, they overdid it a bit in that video, but it gives you a good idea of the technology.
After 'detail' becomes a non-issue for games, the next challenge will be more accurate lighting models, which are still hideously expensive to compute accurately. Similarly, animating a real looking (not just realistic) 3D human face is an extremely hard problem to solve, but I've seen some amazing strides made there as well.
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I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would. I had expected a dinosaur, something that felt outmoded and unevolved. Instead, I found a cave-painting, gorgeous in its primitive beauty and built with an intelligence that rendered mean conflict with a thrill it is hard to ignore — or forget.
So it was... so still is.
No Sound!?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? According to the fine article instead of playing the very decent Chocolate Doom he played a flash version, without sound. The sound - alongside playing in a room where your monitor is the only light source - is one of the most important parts of the experience. I still remember cowering in a dark corner of E1M2 for what seemed like an age, terrified by the imps i could hear around me, but not see.
needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports and n (Score:3, Insightful)
needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports and not the dos box one.
Re:needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports an (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup seriously dude, avoided Doom for all these years and then decides on FLASH Doom! WTF... I think this guy didn't play Doom for all these years because he is a bit mentally deficient. And then... XBox demo... ohhh man.
Then we wrights the review after the first level it seems... please stop... or at the very least stick with reviewing XBox games.
mmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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i have to say i had a similar gaming epiphany (if you can call it that) when the original quake came ou
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You were on AOL in 1993? YOU KILLED THE INTERNET, YOU ASSHOLE!
Caps lock filter bypass text.
Re:mmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Admitted, it's not an FPS but a first-person role playing game, but still - a game that really was years ahead of its time. And not only technologically.
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Unless you were a gamer at that time you have no idea what it was like to make that jump from Wolfenstein 3d to Doom.
Well, the major difference was atmosphere - they dropped the goofball stufff from Wolf and went to 2.5D.
But still - there was nothing like seeing a 3D game for the first time. I still remember the first time I saw Wolf on a demo computer at Wallyworld. I'd never heard of it before, didn't even know 3D games existed, and I started drooling. It made Prince of Persia look like a piece of
Re:mmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember some weeks later seeing tiny screenshots in early previews of id Software's next big thing "Doom" in a PC magazine in Walden Bookstores in the mall. I specifically remember seeing the shotgun and Imp enemy. Hell I remember the specific map, just not by name, pictured in that screenshot. I remember holding the shift key upon rebooting to play this incredible new game.
Gaming, PC and console, has come a long way since then but few titles have captured that same kind of energy. As pretty as their games have been, I miss the id Software of my youth.
I played it only last year... (Score:2)
I played it for the first time only last year, and was pleasantly surprised. The controls are perfect. I felt like the shareware Episode I was most enjoyable, perhaps because I was reluctant to use the plasma and rocket weapons when they became available. The later episodes also seemed to involve me getting hemmed in more often.
Personally, I prefer Doom: The Roguelike overall, but Doom is still a fine, if ugly, shooter.
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If you think doom was ugly you should play wolf3d. We've come a long way. Of course doom was written by a handful of guys, nowadays you need a dedicated team just to work on your engine.
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If you think Wolfenstein 3D is ugly, you should play Chex [youtube.com] Quest [youtube.com]. Yes, those are "evil cereal eating creatures from another dimension."
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Summary Follows: (Score:2)
He played it 3 times. He used the shotgun a couple times, died, and decided it wasn't fun enough to bother playing for free on the web (flash) or by any other means.
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Winds me up as much as noobs who think film started with Tarantino.
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I chose Doom in my browser, programed in Flash with no music, but supporting the original WASD key commands for character movement.
I'm not entirely sure how you can truly enjoy Doom without the music. Hell, I know for a fact that I at least have the infamous E1M1 background track on my MP3 player.
Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
I always found Wolf3D to be repetitive and tedious, but Doom was genuinely creepy and fun to play. Just enough variety and surprises to keep you on your toes.
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I think the most challenging task in gaming at the time for me was convincing my parents that their multi-thousand dollar 486 needed a $300 sound card so their son could play Wing Commander 2 with the voice acting in its full glory (with the extra add-on pack, naturally). That will beat the snot out of taking any uber-demon on with a shotgun.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting your hands on a copy of either of Doom or Mortal Kombat at the age of 8 was like getting your hands on a copy of Playboy at 13.
My father happened to pick up the shareware copy of Doom for us. I was considered a king at the age of 8. A year later my friends older brother managed to get his hands on Doom 2. You cant recreate this, now a days you just go online and download an EXE. Back then if you had no source of income you had to find someone who just happened to have a source for the game.
Oh and lets not forget. Back then when a game didn't have the minimum requirements, it wouldn't even load. So even if you got your hands on a copy, you still needed to figure out how to get the damn thing to run. We waited 8 weeks for my neighbor to make us a boot disk to run Doom. Something today I could do in 10 minutes, I patiently waited 8 weeks for a boot disk that was capable of loading C:, a CD drive, and Sound with just enough memory to run Doom.
From the age of 8 to 12, I had to find sources for Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem, Quake, and Shadow Warrior. By 1997 most game magazines came with CD's packed with Demos so the fun in waiting and imagining what the game was like were over.
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Just wait till you see Doom 2. 7x 720k floppy disks? No game after Doom come close in making a truly awesome rocket launcher, imo.
obviously a pussy (Score:2, Troll)
He went HOW FAR without getting a shotgun? On the one true difficulty level (ultra violence) you get a shotgun just off to the left alcove from where you begin the game.
Also way better played with the mouse for aiming... but we all know that already...
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The start and end of PC gaming as we know it (Score:2, Insightful)
Doom was brilliant.I remember not having many PC games but knowing a lot of them sucked, and was familiar with Wolfenstein on the SNES. I finally got the disks for the trial version and was blown away. Sure I had to letterbox it, but the experience was so immersive and thrilling, it was obvious this was the future of PC gaming. I spent most of 1997 playing Doom II during my CAD class and enjoyed every second of it.
What sucks is that it has created and endless series of non-innovating FPS games, much like St
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So you never played Tribes, eh?
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I hear ya, man. Rainbow Six? Doom clone. Red Orchestra? Doom clone. Portal? Doom clone!
It's so easy to dismiss a whole genre as non-innovating, particularly when you (by your own admission) haven't played any of the games that belong to it.
Wolf3D (Score:2)
hot review (Score:3, Funny)
Was he watching hot gay porn while writing this?
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I still remember the first time I played Doom (Score:2)
I was working the overnight shift, not much to do, and they had just gotten a new PC for the computer room. It had a big, 17 inch monitor, a zippy 486 under the hood and even a decent sound card. I downloaded the game, put it on a floppy and told my guys to watch the control room while I went upstairs for a bit.
I popped the disk in and started up the game. I remember how immersive it felt, the sound, the three D graphics. I really felt like I was part of the game. Three in the morning, all alone in the comp
Doom dreams (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been a fair few years now since I've had a Doom dream. Probably because I've not run through the game for about the same time. Used to load it up, clear through the entire game in 30 mins as warmup to playing/doing anything else on the computer, and/or as a last thing before powering off for the night.
Backpage of PC..Pro?Gamer? (one with David McCandless writing for it), there was a comment about Doom Dreams and I suddenly realised what I'd been having the last few weeks.
They'd be normal dreams perhaps, perfectly normal settings, no hideous demons throwing fireballs, but the movement...
Soon as I started to strafe in a game, or run up and keep nudging a door to open it, I'd be aware that I was dreaming, and it was a Doom Dream. Never had that since for any other game.
Also, some dreams would have be carrying something and it'd be that gentle swaying motion. And I'd be lucid again that I was dreaming.
Perhaps I should load it up and play for a few nights before hitting the sack, see if I can duplicate the effect.
Emacs Dreams (Score:2)
During college, when I was doing everything in Emacs (Even the writing class, that was LaTeX in Emacs), I had some Emacs Dreams.
It is really disturbing to be dreaming about syntax highlighting, and a bunch of glowing characters against a black background.
(I have never had a VI dream, so I guess that shows where my allegiance lies)
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Another great old game to play is/are the X-Wing games. With a little tweaking, you can run them in Windows. It's perhaps the first full-featured 3D space combat simulator(yes, I know about Elite and older stuff, but for Windows, this was pretty much the best of the lot in the DOS days). Tie Fighter was the best, IMO, since you could customize your load-out and it supported high resolution graphics.
And it was hard. It really felt like an accomplishment when you finally finished the entire game. Not 10
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Whaaa Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have ...its big shots and its slow, fetishized ... stuff of macho fantasy. [It] is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact.
I remember uploading Doom to my local BBS. I don't remember it being quite the right-of-passage depicted here.
So? (Score:2)
Computer labs (Score:2)
Ahhh, Doom. At my college there were three types of computer labs:
486 PCs: For Doom.
IBM Mainframe terminals: For IRC.
Unix X terminal workstations: For software development.
At least that's what 90% of the people in each type of lab would be doing at any given time.
Shows how minds have changed since DOOM as well (Score:2)
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The Onion? (Score:2)
I had to double check the link to make sure I wasn't reading The Onion:
Ugh.
17 years? OMG!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't believe it has been 17 years.
I remember reading newsnet before DOOM came out. There was incredible buzz about the game. So much so that nearly every single post started with "DOOM:". People began to get tired of the prefix. Some suggested that the next game they get excited about have some super long name that couldn't be simply prefixed to a message title. Another person suggested the name "Smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris." Yet another person countered that they would simply acronym it and all of the messages titles would be "SPISPOPD".
When DOOM was finally released, SPISPOPD was one of the cheat codes.
It was awesome.
Re:17 years? OMG!!! (Score:4, Informative)
WASD? Flash version only, I guess. (Score:2)
For regular old Doom, it was the cursor keys. For Quake as well, in it's original offering, IIRC.
Plus "," and "." were strafe. Joy.
Anyone who wants to repeat this experiment, and not a "purist," should grab gzDoom [drdteam.org], which is zDoom with OpenGL rendering and light effects. Works great in Windows with the original .WAD files. Even runs "Strife," which is a pretty cool Doom engine game from a history perspective.
I would just set the controls to whatever FPS style you like. The original controls for Doom and Quak
I'm A New Doom Player Too!! (Score:5, Funny)
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as you type this from your mom's basement wondering what it would be like to have a girlfriend......
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Re:Doom-shaped hole in my life? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, by all means walk into a story about the game tell us how you're still not playing it. That's a great way to avoid a -1 troll.
Re:Doom-shaped hole in my life? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people go through life without ever reading Homer or listening to Bach. I'm sure they don't feel that they're missing out on much either. Doom is that kind of foundational work that crystallizes what's great about what came before, and influenced everything that came after. If you like movies, you owe it to yourself to watch Hitchcock and Kurosawa. If you like games, you owe it to yourself to play Doom. If you don't like games, skip it, no biggie.
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Kurosawa? Bach? Seriously? If I were looking for analogies to Doom in other media, I'd go with the myth of Cronos devouring his children rather than The Odyssey, and "Anchors Aweigh" rather than "Mass in B Minor". Flashy, unsophisticated crowd pleasers. In film a better analogy would be Friday the 13th.
Though maybe you're right, and Doom really is the foundation upon which modern gaming is built, and a standard touchstone for the medium. If cinema had followed the same path, then the majority of new r
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Doom was much more than just a precursor to modern FPS (a genre I've personally long abandoned).
It pushed the boundaries in gaming of graphics, audio, level design, and interactivity. It also helped excite a generation of game developers into joining the industry. Respect its authoritah.
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http://www.kongregate.com/games/mike_id/doom-1 [kongregate.com]
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News for nerds:[ ]
Stuff that matters: [ ]
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Had to learn TCPIP early on
Wasn't Doom IPX/SPX? I don't recall TCP/IP support.
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3dfx is dead.
They've gone bankrupt since 2000 [wikipedia.org]
But I share your sentiments, once I got my Voodoo Banshee card and got some extra RAM in my Pentium I was king on earth.