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First Person Shooters (Games)

It's DOOM's 29th Anniversary. What's Your Favorite Story? (archive.org) 95

It was 29 years ago today that DOOM was first released — and we're still using it! Here in 2022, the latest mod reportedly converts its demons into the zombies and creepers from Minecraft. This week Hackaday wrote about a simple emulated RISC-V processor that runs DOOM. Last month someone even got DOOM running in Notepad. And recently WebTV enthusiasts not only jerry-rigged a contemporary TV to a WebTV unit, but then actually got it to play a 1990s-era WebTV version of DOOM on their TV screen.

The last 29 years have been a long, strange trip. A hidden Doom level appeared in Microsoft Excel. A Doom video was also used to promote Windows 95. And then there was that weird Doom movie starring The Rock and Karl Urban... By 2015 Doom was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. In 2016 John Romero created a new level. Later that year a new release of Doom even featured a mod with one of the the original Doom II levels from 1994.

In 2016 we'd asked Slashdot readers to share their own favorite stories about Doom — and the best thing about that post is those 351 comments. ("I went to the door, confused why the police were banging on my door.... They said they had reports of shots being fired." )

Is anyone still playing Doom today? Share your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

And what's your own favorite story about Doom?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

It's DOOM's 29th Anniversary. What's Your Favorite Story?

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  • Playing in VR (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 278MorkandMindy ( 922498 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @09:42PM (#63120468)

    My introduction to Doom was on VR headsets (yes, they existed but never caught on), playing with a puck against 3 other people. There was a custom cabinet that housed a computer for each headset, plus a screen for outsiders to watch, all networked together.

    The first level deathmatch, of course...

    Ah Zone3 Perth, how I miss you!

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      How was that VR? Was it crazy? I remember my college friend and I played a VR game that was a linear FPS. It wasn't Doom for sure. It was OK.

  • by spywhere ( 824072 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @09:51PM (#63120484)
    A classmate gave us a bootleg copy of the full version of DOOM (3 diskettes).
    My roommates and I installed it, played it for a while... and then called ID Software at the number in the credits.
    "Hi, someone gave us a bootleg copy of DOOM, and we want to pay you. Where do we send the check?"
    I sent a check.
    A few weeks later, a box showed up with an official copy of DOOM and a bunch of DOOM & Castle Wolfenstein swag!
    • by Ambvai ( 1106941 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @10:26PM (#63120542)

      The state of things sure was different just a few years prior-- I remember in 1998, one of my friends emailed Epic MegaGames about something similar to that for the original Unreal because he had the money but nobody would sell such violent, mindwarping stuff to young'uns...

      And he got back a message threatening legal action about the distribution of unauthorized copies.

  • by fikx ( 704101 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @09:56PM (#63120494) Journal
    Not a long story but I thought it was cool back when I read about it:
    Doom as a system utility: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao... [unm.edu]

    Other than that just remembering how mind-blowing it was when it came out , since at the time Wolfingstein was amazin, the features Doom promised seemed so hyped and exagerated. But it worked, played many a game on Sun stations in the computer labs
  • Doom was one of those games that existed at a time when I didn't have the budget (I was a young teenager at the time) for a computer that could run it well enough, and by the time I did have a better computer, I was playing Descent and Duke Nukem 3D instead.

    • I never really liked Duke. Hard to remember why precisely: the engine was more capable for sure, but something about the gameplay just never felt as fluid as doom.

      These days, there's really no contest! The level building community for doom has continued apace and kept churning out new material and it's just astoundingly good now.

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      I wasn't mad on Doom TBH, I prefered Quake, Drakan, Hexen, Heretic, Half-life, Deus Ex, Max Payne, Unreal, Blood etc. Doom may have been a first but I don't think it was the most fun, I did play Doom 3 all the way through, it was great looking at the time. I don't seem to be able to deep-dive into games so easily these days.

    • Yeah, Descent, lived it. That kind of full 3D levels never returned, did it? Seems mike a perfect match for a VR-shooter (if you got a strong stomach)
    • A bit similar here, but as my first computer was a Mac, I went with the Marathon trilogy and Mars Rising.

  • by antdude ( 79039 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @09:57PM (#63120500) Homepage Journal

    I hope id Software and Bethesda will do something big next year like they did with its Quake 1 (e.g., giveaways). :)

    I still remember I didn't really have a PC to play it, but my next door neighbor and king did with their 386s. I downloaded the shareware game and copied to 3.5" floppy disks. I gave them to my friend, but he had to study for his high school senior finals so he could only briefly played it. He said it was rad. I did install on my king's IBM PS/2 model P70 portable PC. It was choppy and had no audio (can't remember if it had PC speaker audio), but playable.

    Later that year, I got a new custom built tower PC from my parents' friend. It had an Intel 486 DX2/66 MHz, 8 MB of Memory, 15" OptiQuest monitor, Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 (also got a Creative Wave Blaster II/2(?) to add on for it later on [unknown date] to improve MIDI music], 2x CD-ROM drive, Diamond SpeedStar Pro (VLB), 3-buttons Genius CLIXes mouse, and a Conner Peripherals IDE 340 MB HDD, etc. It ran Microsoft DOS v6.x and Windows v3.1. It was amazing! I became a DOOMer! Then, came online dial-up modem play. My neighbor and I played co-op even though it was very slow because of his 386, but worth it. However, I had to go on vacation for a week. :( Then, came local BBSes using SirDOOM. 4 players. Wow. Then, we made 2 mods: http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm... [zimage.com] -- Fun times as a teen. ;) I still haven't played DOOM 2016 and newer though. Also, I played DOOM 1 prereleases back then. Hehe.

    • I hope id Software and Bethesda will do something big next year like they did with its Quake 1 (e.g., giveaways). :)

      I

      Not going to happen, the average gamer has allowed game companies to steal and infect games with drm for 20+ years now, we lost level editors and dedicated servers.

  • I was in College when this came out.
    I downloaded the Beta's from a local BBS.
    I ate Ramen for a few months just to upgrade my RAM to play it more smoothly.
    I remember downloading something called a Hypertext Transfer Protocol demo/beta from the same BBS.
    Things were changing at that time.

    • by l810c ( 551591 )

      Just for Clarity and made the common mistake to conflate a couple of things.
      There Was an Internet since 1969. I was connected and played MUD's and used Newsgroups via BBS. The rollouts of ISPs and introduction of the World Wide Web really changed things.

    • Yep, was in college as well. When I was home on vacation, I remember playing it in a darkened room in my parents house. Was incredibly focused, not paying attention to anything else. My older brother, also visiting at the time, noticing this, threw a damp towel that hit me in the back of the neck.

      After I proceeded to scrape myself off the ceiling, I had a few words with him. He still chuckles about how high I jumped from a sitting position. Good times.

  • I bought a Sega Genesis 32X to play Doom. The only way to complete the game was to start at the first level and just play through (couldn't save progress). I would play for 2 1/2 hours working my way through the levels, then the game would freeze, with no way to recover. It was so frustrating (I had a Velodyne subwoofer, though, so the Imp's Song sounded good) that I bought my first computer ($3500 for a Pentium 133) so I could play doom on a PC.
  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @10:30PM (#63120554)

    Was at school on a modem sitting on the idsoftware FTP site waiting for the shareware version to drop. That same day after school got a 4 player game LAN game going in the computer lab. About a week later I managed to get the IP over IPX hack working and played over the Internet with someone from South Africa. Latency was terrible but I didn't care it was the beginning of an era.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      Was at school on a modem sitting on the idsoftware FTP site waiting for the shareware version to drop. That same day after school got a 4 player game LAN game going in the computer lab. About a week later I managed to get the IP over IPX hack working and played over the Internet with someone from South Africa. Latency was terrible but I didn't care it was the beginning of an era.

      I played Descent with a guy from Australia (I'm on the west coast of the USA) and lag was 750ms or so. Even though I had a 27" CRT monitor, a SpaceOrb, and two Voodoo 3dfx SLI graphics boards for normal single person play at home, it was still kinda fun because I knew the guy from IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I also knew that Australia back then was abysmal regarding Internet access/bandwidth. I figure I did him a solid by showing him the future.

  • I played doom when it was distributed as shareware with PC magazines. I reached the final level, killed the two barons, went to the platform where you get teleported to a pitch black room in which you're killed. I didn't know English back then and wasn't aware that you're supposed to die and play the other episodes once you bought the full game. Later I discovered cheat codes and did the god mode cheat (iddqd) killed everything in that dark room and there was nothing else to do. Fun times. i don't have to s
  • Grosse Pointe Blank: UltiMart Adventure

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • There was an episode of La Femme Nikita where Burkoff was supposed to be at an arcade, playing some hardcore game - but I had to laugh when I saw that his hardcore "game" was just Doom's pre-game opening roll.

  • by Mononymous ( 6156676 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @10:54PM (#63120614)

    Doom is many things to many people.
    Of course there are those who play it as an action game. There was always plenty to satisfy them, especially those who play deathmatch.
    I have played Doom since 1996 (though sometimes only monthly or so) and have literally never tried multiplayer.
    I still have my CD-ROMs of Ultimate Doom and Doom 2.
    For me Doom is a puzzle game. Many of the original levels were designed in that spirit, and certainly many other brilliant WAD creators were inspired by them.
    Conserving ammo, finding the key you need, figuring out what that switch does, can be compelling intellectual challenges.
    Then there's finding all the secrets!

    I remember the first time I finished E1M1 and was told my time and the par time. I remember thinking, "Oh, so trying to finish levels as quickly as possible is going to be a thing?" If the par times hadn't been so ridiculously impossible, I might have been tempted.

    • Doom is many things to many people. Of course there are those who play it as an action game. There was always plenty to satisfy them, especially those who play deathmatch. I have played Doom since 1996 (though sometimes only monthly or so) and have literally never tried multiplayer. I still have my CD-ROMs of Ultimate Doom and Doom 2. For me Doom is a puzzle game. Many of the original levels were designed in that spirit, and certainly many other brilliant WAD creators were inspired by them. Conserving ammo, finding the key you need, figuring out what that switch does, can be compelling intellectual challenges. Then there's finding all the secrets!

      I remember the first time I finished E1M1 and was told my time and the par time. I remember thinking, "Oh, so trying to finish levels as quickly as possible is going to be a thing?" If the par times hadn't been so ridiculously impossible, I might have been tempted.

      I was a paratransit driver for 2 1/2 years. One of my passengers liked FPS games, but only against the computer: not against humans.

    • Do you play modern WADs?

      Speaking of par times, for some nerdyness, there's a video on youtube which does a deep dive into the history of speedrunning just E1M1. I think the author is a chap called Karl Jobst. He has a few other level specific speed run retrospectives. so astonishingly niche and yet if you've played the levels it's really interesting.

  • by timholman ( 71886 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @10:54PM (#63120616)

    I was in graduate school when Doom came out. I was renting a room in a friend's house, and he and I were soon addicted.

    Eventually this led to us running a long RS232 cable between our bedrooms so that we could play together in team mode on our respective PCs. We would open interior doors so that we could shout at each other across the house while we played. Later on we installed different Doom mods to make the game more challenging.

    It was a hell of a lot of fun. I've never been much of a gamer in my life, but Doom was absolutely an exception (along with Nethack). My friend and I still reminisce about it to this day.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I remember being impressed by the graphics and hoping that my Amiga would get something similar (it did). Then I started to feel ill, and to this day I can't watch someone playing Doom because it gives me motion sickness.

      In fact a lot of 3D games from the 90s and 2000s give me motion sickness. Uncapped and variable frame rates seem like the obvious thing to blame, but Doom running at 9,000 FPS on modern hardware still does it.

      • By Amiga, you mean the 500 or the 1200 ?

        A friend of mine had a 1200 with an AlienBreed 3D game. I still wanted an Amiga 500 for the bigger game library. :) There are people working on a FPS clone for Amiga 500 and Atari ST. I haven't followed very recently. Cute dedication to these machines.

      • I've been playing with GZDoom for quite a while. I made a mod that multiplies almost all enemies by 10, and have combined this with the Brutal Doom mod as well as the Corruption Cards mod.

        The point is that when you put all this together, you may end up with a hundreds of barrels and hundreds of zombies in a room. Shoot a barrel, and... watch your framerate drop to 15 seconds per frame. Yeah, that's SPF, not FPS.

        Now that's a rough approximation of what it's like to run Doom on an Amiga! I get about 2 FPS

    • Doom and Nethack... Respect, man!
  • by Line Noise 42 ( 10252212 ) on Saturday December 10, 2022 @11:00PM (#63120634)
    It's the week before Christmas, 1993. Myself and a few work colleagues have heard that this new Doom game has a multiplayer mode so we decide to have ourselves a quick deathmatch session before we knock off for the holidays.

    After fiddling around with DOS Ethernet card drivers, TCP/IP packet drivers, netbios DLLs, etc we finally got it working! It was amazing! However, a few minutes after we started playing the phone started ringing. We were the IT department for the company and I was the help desk guy. I reluctantly answer the phone and get told "The network's down!'

    "No problem!" I say, "I'll look into it." No sooner had I hung up the phone but it rings again. "My terminal isn't responding!" Oh oh!

    We used actual, honest to God X-Terminals extensively throughout the company. It turns out that they were particularly sensitive to being overloaded by broadcast packets on the network to the point where they would crash. They'd been rock solid for years.

    What had changed on the network? Well, we could think of one thing. We stopped our Doom game and magically everything started working again. We didn't realise that the first version of Doom used broadcast packets when playing network multiplayer. It switched it to multicast soon after. No harm done. We told everyone to restart their terminals then we isolated our PCs from the rest of the network and started playing again!

  • I worked for Sunsoft (part of Sun Microsystems) in the early to mid '90's. Doom was available on every workstation. Starting at about 3:30 every Friday afternoon one could hear the succession of office doors closing down every hallway :)

  • I introduced him to Halo when he was 4, he's been playing shooters ever since, and 3 months ago he said to me, "Daddy, have you ever played this game Doom?" I felt I had to introduce him to Quake, at that point. He's a good lad.
  • Everyone was talking about it. Then I saw it! I had to have it! My 386DX/40 only had 1MB of RAM, drat! Time to shell out $160 for four 1MB 30pin SIMMs, Installed the RAM ... typed DOOM ... waited ... Awesome sauce! It's one of those moments in time you never forget ... your first game of DOOM!
    • Also never forget sitting there waiting as the dots slowly grow from left to right as it does the init doom refresh daemon. I had on idea what that meant, but it sounded cool and was the longest step in the startup.

  • Doom was revelatory at the time (as we all know). An astounding capability was the fairly easy-to-access ability to substitute graphical elements. It took no time at all before we had a lab version running with our lab principal investigator's head substituted for the Cacodemon. Worked well :)

  • When Doom cam out I was working for Children's Television Workshop. We all bought it and installed and played eight player on the thinnet network after hours. We used to setup local conference calls to each office on speakerphone so we could trashtalk.

    Nothing but good times.

  • If I remember right you could take the retail WAD file and replace the WAD file on the linux version and have the full game.It was pretty sweet as you didn't have to fight with the memory in MS-DOS. I remember creating a RAM drive and running the game from there and it ran like butter even on my 386DX 33mhz. I also had the Sega 32x version later. Seeing people port this game to everything with a chip in it has been just amazing. Modern Vintage Gamer has a great video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?.. [youtube.com]

  • Reading Byte magazine (or something similar), and finding these cheat codes there...

    IDDQD
    IDKFA
    IDSPISPOPD -- walk through walls

    I think the first two grant weapons, life, armour, etc. The last one was breathtaking: walk through walls to avoid the demons.

    It's a bit sad I have these memorised from 25 years ago, while I've forgotten other significant codes -- past phone numbers, past car registrations, past emails, etc. Maybe it comes down to the connection between entering these codes and the emotions of the g

  • I was 9, and my uncle showed me this game on his PC. I was mesmerized. I didn't have good hand-eye coordination. I wasn't good at the game. Never made it past the first few levels.

    He taught me "idkfa" â" and I've been hooked ever since about easter eggs, cheat codes, and started me on my path to finding bugs in games and how to debug them.

    I never got to finish that game even with the cheat codes. But that memory will always live with me on getting a peek behind the curtain, getting a glimpse into the c

  • by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @12:57AM (#63120780)

    https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]

  • It is humbling to see these personal reminiscences. So many fine people who sacrificed hundreds of hours of their lives in this interesting cause. So many who were willing to set aside their families, their careers and all their waking hours to this heroic game. After all, there is no real triumph in your gaming unless you make sacrifices, right?

    I'll admit, I was tempted. Was that really 29 years ago? I had nearly got hooked by lesser games. The Devil whispered in my ear about the thousands of hours of deba

    • The Devil whispered in my ear about the thousands of hours of debauchery that lay before me with Doom. Better than sex, it seemed.

      TMI (Too Much Information)

    • What a great life lesson! I mean, the one you're unintentionally providing, not the one you've hamfistedly struck about the head and face in a vain attempt to force it onto the reader.
    • I have probably 500 games and an arcade cabinet with an additional 1200. I barely play them any of them.

      But fucking DooM. The only game I might have played every single year since it came out. If you’d said minecraft, WoW, CoD, or really almost anything I’d tell you it was great but this is like bragging that you never wasted any time watching Star Wars, reading Dune or Lord of the Rings.

  • My son was about 10 and I was watching over his shoulder as he was playing it, amazed at the game play. Even as a spectator, it was so intense that when he turned a corner and nearly ran into a cacodemon, or whatever, it made both of us jump and lightly shriek. It was good for a laugh. As he got more familiar, and better, it lost some of that initial luster, but it was memorable the first time or two.
  • Playing network doom in the SGI lab at Stanford in the early-mid 90s with Sergey Brin and Larry page when they were students.

  • Doom II level one on the 3 man lan was explosive and we just jammed it over and over. You could hear us shouting racist epithets far and wide

    • Doom II level one on the 3 man lan was explosive and we just jammed it over and over. You could hear us shouting racist epithets far and wide

      I've never understood the whole shouting racial slurs while gaming thing (I used to do the whole LAN party thing with scrounged 10 base 2). Perhaps you could enlighten me, particularly why it seems to be a good memory not an embarrassing one?

  • by bugnuts ( 94678 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @01:38AM (#63120834) Journal

    ... and linked each demon to a process. Shooting one killed the process.

    He jokingly called it a sysadmin support tool, and told me it might be the highest notoriety to lines of code written at the time.

    It was written up on slashdot [slashdot.org] at the time, too.

  • used to sneak into my room at night, where the PC was, to play Doom. She needed to figure out the maze, she said. Was pretty good at it too.
  • I was maybe 15 growing up in Mexico City and had just started to program in Basic. My dad would buy the one PC magazine that was available at the newsstand every so often. The 1.4MB floppy was always full of goodies and fun experiences - one of them was the fully playable Doom demo. I spent hours and hours and hours on that demo. I couldnâ(TM)t buy the full product - not because I couldnâ(TM)t afford it - I lived in a country that did not really have much of a software ecosystem at the time.
  • Unfortunately it didn't ship with a standardized tcp/ip server-client implementation, so 29 years later you'll need to tinker a bit to get multiplayer working. In order to play against my 5 yo daughter, I've set up two android phones with 'Delta Touch' which contains a Zandronum multiplayer capable client, each paired with a bluetooth game controller. Server is hosted on linux, and requires the exact same version of Zandronum running in server mode. Asthere is no compatibility between Zandronum versions, t
  • by 26199 ( 577806 ) on Sunday December 11, 2022 @03:07AM (#63120906) Homepage

    My first experience with Doom was Doom 2 on a 486, I guess I was about 10 years old, and, what can I say, the sheer joy never left me :)

    I have the game box cover as a poster on my office wall. (With half-life, system shock 2, deus ex and baldur's gate 2, if you must know).

    I had a sound card but played the whole thing through with midi music but no sound effects before discovering that it was the DOS mouse driver clashing with the sound card ... hello autoexe.bat/config.sys. That fixed, the sound was amazing.

    One amazing part was how customizable it was ... building maps of course, but with DeHackEd you could make a lot of fun things; zero speed projectiles as mines, for example.

    Then there was trying to get multiplayer working online with dialup and "kali". Never did get a game. We had some small success playing locally with a serial cable.

    And, oh, the hidden levels...

    Good times.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      I remember someone made a parallel cable setup (DOOMPAR.ZIP) for DOOM back then. It actually worked when my friend and I tried it in his dorm room!

  • Not really a specific memory except that Doom was what got me into LAN party gaming, I didn't do it often (mostly at work after hours) but we had great times. It led into other fun multiplayer LAN games like Carmageddon, and of course the classic Quake...

    Back to Doom specifically, I still also have fond memories of the way the pink pig things kind of stuck on your chainsaw, and also spending a LOT more time that was reasonable figuring out the best ways to get various monsters to attack each other. To thi

    • Lastly, I do not think to this day there is a more impressive video game weapon than the BFG, from the sound to the effect.

      I like the Team Fortress 2 sounds (Heavy: "Fire! Fire! Fire!") and the Halloween Fire effect.

  • "It's coming home", is it?

    Viva le frog!

    Please, non British people of the world. Stop being better at soccer, motor racing, golf, rugby, cricket, cheese rolling, curry making and dentistry.

  • Over a lousy coax cable trying to get IPX to work with some crappy ethernet cards and faulty coax termination. But than playing all weekend till deep in the night doom four person multiplayer. At four o'clock in the night in a dark room suddenly hearing the chainsaw messed you up quite good and got you out of that alcohol buzz really quick. Fun stuff. We played sometimes for so long that the game crawled to a halt for all the dead players that where lying in the map and did not get removed.
  • Nothing like having an entire classroom full of kids playing Doom behind the teacher's back. The teacher never bothered to check the task manager, that was beyond him, settling instead for looking at the windows 95 task bar to ensure no one had Doom running.

    Well he thought he was looking at the task bar as he walked past. Quite standard practice was to start everything we needed for class, take a screenshot, hide the task bar, hide desktop icons, and set the screenshot as our desktop backgrounds. Doom runni

  • I swear those fat rocket hurling bastards were saying, “I’m your ma” in a low, menacing growl right as they sent rockets my way.... Damn near crapped my pants when I would hear that before I saw them. All the while listening to Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside
  • Back in the early days of computing at least for me. A friend gave me 3 floppies and a knowing look. I had a 486 with 4M of ram, lol. My first 'real' video game. And it scared the heck out of me. The imps were some scary creatures hurling fireballs at me; when I first saw them they terrified me, lol. And oh what fun the shotgun was. I played that game to the end. Moved on to Quake to continue the fun, what a time to be alive. Good stuff. Great times for sure, you had to be there to experience it.
  • Ahhh, Doom. Back in university my roommate and I played it a lot. After a while, we swapped the sounds for samples taken from random comics. To this day I still remember the yodelling doors and yawning (= dying) imps...

  • I only got Doom in mid-1994 - the same time I got an internet connection at work.
    I was a draughtsman back then, having made the switch to CAD. My company wasn't doing well, so there's was nothing to do.
    I got the shareware ... and that was me lost for the next few years, to a world of Doom and most importantly, DCK - the Doom Construction Kit by Ben Morris.
    That's where my love of 3D game editing started, lasting right up to the release of Half-Life II.

    I also fondly remember playing Doom on Shrooms, back when

  • DOOM came out after CW 3D (there was a 2D side-scroller that came out when I was in high school) while I was in the USAF. I was walking among the cubicles, when I saw two of my compatriots playing DOOM on their USAF-issued computers. I said to them, "You guys better knock that crap off before the LAN shop catches you!"

    To which they responded, "Who do you think we are PLAYING?"

    Back when the Air Force was fun.
  • In 1993, the internet was the new frontier and Doom seemed like the interface to cyberspace. 3D that was fluid and visually easy to navigate was a new thing, and I think all of us thought the internet was going to merge with Doom (and later, "true 3D" games like Descent) to be a virtual world like Second Life or its modern clone, Meta.

    We used to hang out for hours, smoking weed and blasting death metal while going through the mazes in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. I only knew what a "cacodaemon" was thanks to th

  • What made DooM different from most other FPS games, and has kept it going among fans until today, is the fact that you can design your own levels. Even new level editors have been written in recent years, let alone levels. I am still writing them.
  • The single-player campaign was a real eye-opener and a milestone and I loved it. Scary and immersive. What I miss the most though is the local death-match and co-op play with my cousins in our cabin in the north (Sweden). We had our 486 PC:s and tried our best to connect the coax cables and get the damn IPX drivers to work. When it finally worked the clock was usually very late but it was worth it. The favorite game play was death match in Doom II and its first map ("Entryway"). Co-op in Doom II on nightmar
  • I was 14, fascinated with programming and 3D (but was terrible at coding, didn't know where to turn to for help - no Internet) Doom really caught my attention - worked part time at a computer store building clone PCs. Purchased a Gravis UltraSound card for my computer because Doom supported it - was great playing the game with the 'best' audio available at the time. Loved connecting PCs together for LAN/serial game. Great times - still have a 486 with a GUS and Doom is the only game on it! One Halloween
  • It was December 31st, 1999 and it was half the hands in the data center in case Y2K broke things. So someone had slipped a graphics card into an H80 (IBM's first 64bit AIX server) and installed doom since IBM had been including CDs for it in the RS/6K Media kits.
  • I lugged my old school PC (with CRT monitor and all) to a friend's house to play Doom 2 Deatchmatch. It was glorious!
    I didn't have a serial cable, though. So I cut some electricity wire, and just pressed it over the pins of the serial ports (pin 2, 3 and 5 in a DB9 port. Pins 2,3, 7 in a DB25 port) and hooked up our PCs that way. Worked great.
    The bas thing is that I am still spoiled by that experience. I don't get online deathmatches. Where the fun in fragging if you can't see and hear the pain of your en
  • After enjoying the Doom shareware, I got the new Doom II around Christmas (in my late 20s). I can't remember whether it was a gift, but it was the last time Christmas had a special vibe like when we were children. I think because it was so different and it seemed that the whole computer industry was exploding then...there was a low key excitement to it all.

    My cousins visited for Christmas and also had never seen anything like it. One cousin slowly rotated the game pad (somehow I didn't know it could b
  • The biggest travesty in Doom's legacy is the fact that DOOM 2016 & Eternal are not open source and likely never will be. They will not have share in the legacy of the original and will be lost to the annals of history, where as the 1993 classic will continue to thrive.
  • I'd long-since soured on most FPSs (With the exceptions of plot and character driven ones like Deus Ex, VTM:Bloodlines, Alien Isolation, Fallout 3+, etc... YMMV though if you really consider those FPSs or not, I guess.) after the genre developed a bad case of consoleitis and degenerated into basically a bunch of pre-teen Call-of-Duty and Counterstrike prats whose idea of "gameplay" is shooting "faggot" and 'bitch" (and worse) at the top of their lungs in xbox live.

    So, at some point after I'd turned 40, I wa

  • A bunch of us used to come into the office on the weekends and use the corp network to host Doom parties and do PVP tournaments. We played teams, custom maps, etc. Might have been some beer involved. The higher-ups knew and they didn't care.

    Sooooo long ago, damn.

  • When DOOM came out, every BBS in my area had copies of the full version. And the filebases got every update as well. I was a high enough user on them that downloading 3 floppies on a 14.4 wasn't a big deal. The bigger deal was making space on your hard drive for it because it needed 5 MB for the download, 5MB to unzip the download, then when you ran the installer, the installer combined the files into one big file (another 5MB), then got unpacked, so you needed to have about 35MB free all said and done unle

  • Many of the milestones that is attributed to Doom, really only happened in Quake, such as real 3D levels.
  • My household didn't get a computer until early 1994. Dad bought us a 2-year-old 486 SX w/ 8 MB of RAM, a Connor 80 MB HD, and a Sound Blaster Pro. I poured most of my waking hours into learning everything I could about it. DOS, Windows, batch files, ANSI.SYS escape codes, etc. I lost much of my fascination and skill when Windows 9x came along, but I had a lot of nerd fun in those early days.

    Music has always been a major part of my life. One of my earliest memories is sitting in front of my parents' hi-

  • It's crazy thinking back on DOOM. I found a bug, so I went looking for someone to tell, and I eventually ended up exchanging several emails with some guy named John Carmack.

    John Carmack wasn't as big of a deal back then, but even so, an equivalent rising star today would surely be far too busy to talk to some random college kid at such length. The internet was a different place back then. For all we have gained, we have lost a lot too. It has been years since I really felt like I made contact with another h

  • This is right up there in coincidences! I come across this article while I'm watching the DOOM movie on Thai TV channel MONO29. This channel shows English movies from a while back (probably because they're cheap) and also things like Chinese legend movies. I remember playing DOOM back in the day and couldn't change the channel, remembering how bad the movie is.
  • My 2-year-old son sometimes sat on my lap as I played Doom. I have a recording somewhere of him exclaiming "Doom!". I would let him push the spacebar to shoot at demons. Interestingly, as he grew he was never afraid of ghosts and monsters -- unlike his peers. My hypothesis is that he understood that they could be fought and defeated, so they lost some of their potency.
  • I was nearly eaten by a grue.

    Fortunately, as it turns out, I don't taste very good.

FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: A black panther is really a leopard that has a solid black coat rather then a spotted one.

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