People's first experience with DOOM

[proman232]

I am a gamer of many backgrounds. Platformers, stealth games, RPGs, but the FPS is the cornerstone of my gaming experiences. I was recently playing Memento Mori 2, one of the first WADs I played with ZDoom, and I started thinking about my first experience with DOOM. It was in 2002. I was seven years old. In my small town in Saskatchewan, Canada, Windows 95 was still reigning supreme. A buddy of mine had a CD full of shareware games. When we first loaded it up, it wouldn't work! So we tried again, and again, and eventually got it running. We were looking through the menu of games, and I pointed out one called Doom. My buddy thought it might be cool, so we started the game. To this day, I remember that it took 9 tries to beat the first level. Mind you, the game was only the shareware release, so we never got to see the rest of the game, but it didn't matter. We were perfectly content to play the 9-level demo we had been given. Now, when I look back on those days, I think that experience helped shape and define my skills in first person shooters into what they are today.

All that aside, this got me thinking: What are your first experiences with DOOM? I'm curious to see what brought you to the community.

[Bashe]

The earliest experience I have of Doom was watching my dad play it back in 1994 or so. It looked scary and intense, but also really fun. I didn't play it myself however until a few years later, and under supervision of my parents, being around 7 at the time. I didn't really play a lot of Doom in the 90s, but I sure watched it a lot. That's one thing I"ll always remember is watching my dad and brother play the game. I however did play Chex Quest and Doom 64 frequently, and enjoyed those.

I wouldn't seriously get back into Doom on PC again until around 1999, when my brother installed it again on his computer and let me play it every so often. From there, I learned a close friend of mine had Doom 2, and since I didn't have it, I'd play it at his house until I eventually bought it again in the summer of 2000. Then I started to discover wads to play and whatnot, but it wouldn't be long before my brother got his computer shipped to his station in NY, so we didn't have a computer for a while. Once we got one, I secretly installed Doom on there to play. It wasn't optimal, but worked alright for the most part.

Come early 2003, I got my own laptop, and from there I didn't have to worry about hiding things and could just do whatever I want with it. This is when my interest really took off and I started to get more wads and even create a few silly ones, and by the end of the year, I joined the community, where I have remained since.

[mallo]

Doom was in my life since I was born. When I was 4-5 my dad didn't let me watch he playing, because he said I'll have nightmares. But it was just very late. I remember he played with IDDQD. My brother was playing too. I even made a map (age 6-7), which is on /idgames/ archive!

[0bsidian]

I first played it on a friend's old-as-time computer when I was about 7 or 8: Played it on ITYTD and couldn't get past MAP08. I might have played better if there were speakers.

Also, for some reason I thought the Mancubus fired rockets.

[TheMightyHeracross]

I saw Doom 2 on one of my Xbox friend's games list. I loved it, even though I only downloaded the demo. That was when I was 9.
Now I play it all, TNT, Doom 1, Plutonia, and Doom 2, and I'm 13.
Yeah, I'm a new guy in the Doomunity.

[Daft_Guy]

My first time I have play Doom was I have 5 or 4 years old it was Doom 3 I played in my xbox
the game it was creepy for me in that times haha now for me its an action game I'm happy because Doom 3 it was my first game I have playing next was Doom 2 and Doom 1.

[E.C.S]

Yeah, the first time I played Doom was when I was 5-6, in that time my aunt taught me how to use basic stuff of DOS. I didn't played much of Doom because it was a bit scary for me at that time, I was more a fan of Duke Nukem 3D, one of my first PC games. I remember the first time I encountered a Assault Commander in Bank Roll made me feel scared, I pressed the Esc button and changed of level to make him go away. Good times.

[mallo]

I didn't played much of Doom because it was a bit scary for me at that time, I was more a fan of Duke Nukem 3D, one of my first PC games.

Duke nukem is creepier for me than Doom.

[armyman12345]

Those protozoids make me cringe.

[0bsidian]

Those protozoids make me cringe.

Ditto. Those things scared the crap outta me.

[Quadruplesword]

I had my first real experience with Doom around 2002 or so when I dug up an old CD from my basement, booted it up out of curiosity, and found the shareware version of Doom on there. At the time, I didn't know about source ports, so I was still using just the keyboard. I remember getting scared out of my mind the first time a pinkie started charging towards me, and I remember getting to mission 8 and just being so scared because of the music, and thinking that the barons at the end were so impossible to beat because they took so much damage (and my young brain didn't think to use the rocket launcher ). I also remember playing around in the room at the end of the mission where you're supposed to die, experimenting with cheat codes to try and find a way to kill everybody and not die. Lots of good memories playing the shareware episode. I occasionally got to play the full versions at my cousin's house but I never got far, and I usually got lost and had to pester my cousin to come help me . I remember trying to select the other episodes and just getting so angry and upset whenever it told me I had to buy the full game to play the other episodes.

It actually wasn't until around 2007 or 2008 that my sister's future husband bought the full Doom trilogy for me as a gift. After all these years, I finally had access to all the full games and two that I had never heard of (both chapters of Final Doom). It was a really exciting time for me, playing all the old levels I never got to experience as a kid, playing with source ports and all sorts of mods.

With the advent of mods and a plethora of custom levels, I can tell I'll be playing Doom for a long, long time .

[everamzah]

DooM ][ was my first PC game. I picked it up in the box at the local retail store once an order was placed for our family PC: A 75 MHz Pentium with 8 MBs of RAM. Unfortunately, the delivery was delayed and it took a month for the PC to arrive. That gave me plenty of time to salivate over the manual and box and CD.

[Awesomeface879]

I was about 4-5 at the time, in 06 or 07, we had the shareware version of DooM on my family's old mac. I wasn't allowed to play it, since they thought it would scare me, but at times I would load it up and watch the gameplay demos, and attempt to play the game. My family had a different control scheme on it, so I could never actually play it until at least a year or two later. When I did manage to play it, I played on ITYD, and got pretty good at it as well, dying a few times along the way.

After a while, when I was about 8, I decided to download The Ultimate DooM and DooM 2, along with final doom to experience all the great wads that have been made. Now, I'm 10 years old, playing doom almost all the time, trying various wads out there, and occasionally playing the normal doom wads, for the replay value.

[TheMightyHeracross]

I even made a map (age 6-7), which is on /idgames/ archive!

Where would this .WAD be?

[Arch]

I played Doom when it came out, after having played all Wolf 3d and Spear of Destiny maps, even making my own "megawad" - replacing all Spear of Destiny maps with a program called "mapedit", if I remember well.

Doom graphics are pixeled for today´s standards, but I remember at the time, we felt like playing in a "movie".