What’s your DOOM origin story, and what Myths did you grow up believing?

[Martli]

#9503

I’m keen to know what people’s origin story is with DOOM, and also any funny anecdotes/myths you grew up thinking about the game

For me, I think I first encountered the shareware version of DOOM on a windows 95 demo disc that came with our second PC in 1996 (so for me, age 8/9). It was DOOM95 and I never really got that far in it. I can’t really remember what I thought of it beyond wondering why Chewbacca was a bad guy and firing fireballs at me. Although I’d played a few DOS games before that on our 286, I don’t remember thinking DOOM was too remarkable at the time. It was more that I was embarrassed at how old our previous hardware was and that I had been missing out on some awesome games. I took DOOM for granted for sure

Later on I became more adept and DOOM was the game of choice for me and my friends. Someone managed to get the cheats off the internet and they are now etched into my brain like my friends’ old phone numbers.

We eventually got DOOM II on CD (also using the DOOM95 Launcher) and I still have the manual from this. My younger brother and I poured over the manual and spent hours and hours in the final map on god mode just shooting baddies, and seeing what we could find using noclip (Oremor Nohj).

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten sick or bored of this game. I’ve had it on basically every PC and Mac I’ve owned since in various forms. It also found its way onto the PCs in high school music class which led to some interesting ‘lessons’. I did a little bit of casual multiplayer in the late 2000s but nowadays I mostly just play the OG DOS version on my retro PCs and use it to test different sound card settings.

As for myths, one of my high school friends claimed that either his older brother (or maybe his older brother’s friend) beat the game using only the knuckle dusters (or maybe it was the chainsaw). I can’t exactly remember, but that guy was a legend in our eyes! I feel like everyone knows someone who knows someone who’s done that though right?

So, tell us your DOOM origin story and any funny myths you grew up believing!

[TigerQuoll]

#9504

Nice, I like reading people’s cherished memories of old games!

My story is very different though. The first time I saw DOOM was shortly after my family got our first brand new computer, a 386. The best game we had on that machine was Wolf3D, which I thought was absolutely mind-blowing at the time.
When I saw DOOM on a friend’s computer you might expect me to be even more amazed, but I had only just sold my soul to Wolf3D, and I didn’t want to accept anything being more advanced or better than that game. Especially because it felt really special to me to have a cool new 386, and it would never be able to play DOOM.
So I actually resisted DOOM for quite a few years. I only came round to it about 8 or 10 years later, once it had become pretty much irrelevant and no longer such a threat. I eventually played the shareware episode, realised it was actually pretty fuin, then, on a class excursion to the Queen Vic Markets, I bought a discounted boxed copy of Final Doom.
I guess the rest was history.

[reidrac]

#9505

I went with two friends to the capital city of my province to visit a couple of computer shops to ask for a quote because I was in the market for a new PC.

One of the shops had in the centre of the room a PC, small tower with a 15″ screen and multimedia speakers (that was before multimedia!), and it was playing Doom.

Can’t remember what was that PC, and we didn’t ask for the price. At that time I don’t think any of us had seen any 3D game, not even Wolfenstein 3D that should have been popular by then, so we were quite shocked on how realistic the game was 😀

I mostly remember the sounds effects, it was quite loud and back then I had only the internal PC speaker at home!

[sorceress]

#9506

My first experience of Doom was at school, as someone had installed it on the computers in my home classroom.

I’ve told this story before, but that was for a different game, so I’ll tell it again… My home classroom was the resources room, which was a room that pupils would go to do computer-related things as part a cookery or geography lesson, such as looking on the CDROM or word processing a recipe. No lessons took place there, and we had the computers to ourselves at lunch time.

I think there were 4 of us in the class who were into computers – two lads were DOS gamers, then myself and another person who had come from the amiga/atari side.

My interest in games at that age was not particularly great, and I wasn’t familiar at all with what was happening in the gaming world.

So when I first saw Doom II, i was quite amazed by it:

– Doom’s rich 3D environments, with artwork that seemed to exist somewhere between cartoonlike and realistic. In contrast, the only first-person games I’d seen on 16-bit platforms were flat shaded, with minimal geometry.

– Doom’s smooth animation and fluid gameplay, that far exceeded the slideshows I’d experienced on 16-bit machines.

– Doom’s first person violence with guns and blood was unlike anything I’d seen before in gaming. It felt liked it pushed social boundaries as well as technical.It was exciting.

I think it was some time that same year I got my own DOS/Win95 PC (iirc: P150 / 2MB S3 Virge Graphics Card / 32MB RAM / 2.5GB HDD / 8xCDROM). This was only partially motivated from playing DOS games at school. I was more into office software, programming, and CDROMs, but my interest in gaming did grow a little, and I did enjoy trying the game demos I found bundled on PC magazines. I did have Doom II for my computer at home, eventually buying a collectors edition as well.

As for myths… I often used to wonder if there were more secret rooms in the levels than what we knew about, and I’d enjoy exploring the maps, looking for walls where a little room might fit behind it. I didn’t understand how the maps were put together at that age, and I didn’t appreciate that that walls and structures were not built like their real-world counterparts. That you couldn’t (theoretically) take panels off the walls and see what was behind it. So I liked to imagine there were rooms that not even the designers had found. :p

Doom II along with Warcraft 2 were my two favourite games for a long time, and even though I rarely play them now, I think they will both always have a special place in my heart. I think I’d still rank both of them in my top 5.

[Wesbat]

#9508

I also love reading everyone’s games memories.

I first saw Doom on a 486 laptop my dad brought home for his job, it was the shareware version, and of course I had to make a copy. I remember being scared to death of Pinkies (the large pink demons in E1M3), I thought they were the most intimidating beasts I have ever laid my eyes on. This was around 1995.

We didn’t have internet at home or school (this was during the dial-up age), and thus wasn’t aware of the thriving Doom community nor the existence of custom maps and tools to create your own. I would have loved that!

Years passed until I rediscovered the game ten years ago in 2016. The game has been a constant companion in my life since then.

[TigerQuoll]

#9514

I forgot about the myths part of the question!
I’ve only got one that comes to my mind at the moment, but it’s more of an anti-myth, or a meta-myth.
And that is infighting. I remember there being a bit of discussion/argumenting about whether monsters of the same type can infight.
Turns out that officially no, they can’t.
But apparently in some edge cases/loopholes, unintended by the programmers, they can.

There’s a great video about it. While you’re at it, I highly recommend all of Decino’s videos on DOOM if you’re interested in the mechanics behind the game.

[dr_st]

#9519

Thanks for the video link. As far as I know, he covered all the major points related to demon infighting and retaliation.

There is a simple DeHacked patch that makes same species monsters infight.

All major source ports support it. It was broken in MBF at some point, so I worked with the current maintainer (gerwin) to re-enable it.

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=764506#p764506

[watchful]

#9528

My dad’s favorite BBS had a lot of shareware, so I recall getting Doom from there long before Doom 2 came out. It took a while to download on my 14.4 modem, IIRC. Then extracting and installing took a while too.

It was a blast and pushed my 486 (SX?) pretty hard. At some point I recall getting shareware CDs which always had Doom, sometimes even on the cover. One myth with them was that the CDs had *any* whole games. It was disappointing to realize they had nothing but shareware. Still, they were a lot more convenient when trying to install on my friends’ computers.

I also tried mods from the BBS and got warning messages about using them with shareware. Somehow one mod got past that and had some (all?) of the registered version when I only had shareware installed. Being taught to be very honest at all times, I dutifully called to report the WAD to the on-screen piracy reporting line. Only as I started making my own WADs did I realize it was just a quirk of getting mods running with the shareware. (I realized I could apply a registered patch to the shareware.)

Doom 2 came into my possession less than honestly while visiting a friend. We actually went to his friend’s house and borrowed his floppies despite his family being away from home. Doom 2 was fun but felt like an expansion pack, since so little changed. I expected to be able to jump, crouch, look up/down, or at least see more new content or story.

Around 95 I got my first legit ‘full’ copy of Doom by biking to the local Electronic Boutique. This was long before clerks would ask a kid’s age for violent games. Then I played it all afternoon when the parents were away.

My conservative parents were big believers in the satanic panic, so playing Doom required a closed door or very careful level selection when they were around. That’s also why I didn’t get legit copies sooner.

Thankfully my friends parents were more liberal or not around much. We enjoyed playing in the dark, on Halloween, and with Metallica or other heavy metal music blasting. We never really got multiplayer going with it, though we did eventually play MP with build engine games over modem and at school labs.

When Doom modding tools appeared on the BBS, I started making my own around 1995. It culminated in a short, themed level based on current events. While I was proud of the art I did in PSP to change enemies, it was overall in very poor taste. Thankfully that BBS passed away within a few years, and I lost all copies over time. Some things are better left in the past.

Many years later I tried Doom online with Zandronum and stumbled into a pretty sophisticated horde mode, before those became popular with games like L4D. It was surprisingly fun. In the past few years at my current job I’ve hosted a few team socials playing Doom: team DM, Chex Quest, SRB2, and CTF. It’s amazing how far folks have pushed the engine.

[Martli]

#9530

These are great, keep ’em coming!

The link between DOOM and heavy metal is also pretty relevant for me. I reckon if you asked AI to make a game based on heavy metal it would just make DOOM, it’s got it all: music, iconography, gore, limited story line. Needless to say it was a pretty popular game in the metal scene where I’m from.

[Katsumoto]

#9544

I love this. I only ever had the shareware version of Doom, which I played on my dad’s 486 SX. My best friend’s dad had a 486 DX and the full version of Doom (and later Doom 2), so of course I tried to spend as much time as possible over at his house.

My parents and his parents thought it was all entirely innocent fun, amazingly enough, and even though we were only 9-10 years old, they were happy for us to play it so long as we occasionally broke it up by spending some time outside too!

Being rather young and quite rubbish at games back then, we most often played with god mode enabled. To my adult mind now that doesn’t sound quite so much fun, but we absolutely loved it – just exploring the levels and being amazed at the “3D” architecture totally blew our minds.

I have continued to play Doom throughout my life since (obviously I now own the full version on pretty much every platform it was ever released for – including, yes, the SNES!), and I think I can confidently say it is my favourite game of all time. The amount of new content that is still being produced (including by fellow DGCers, judging by some of the other threads here) is just amazing to behold, really.

(You may wonder why my profile pic is of Kyle Katarn. Well, Dark Forces may not be my favourite game of all time, but it is definitely up there – plus, someone already has Doomguy as their profile pic!).

[red.hexapus]

#9582

The first PC I got was in 1996 – it was Pentium 60Mhz with 8MB RAM and 800MB HDD if i recall correctly. My cousin used to visit me and my brother from time to time (especially during summer), and every time he would bring with him some games on discs or CDs. That’s how we got The Settlers and Dune 2 and many other games. That’s also how we got to play Doom 2 for the first time, and that was something unique, even for 1996-1997. The first few levels, I think I know by heart, that’s how often I used to play them.

I never did finish the game back in the day. I got to the last level (The Icon of Sin) when I was younger, I figured out what to do, but I could not for the life of mine aim the rockets into the forehead to kill the boss. So, I just NOCLIPed directly to the Romero’s head and finished the game this way.

As for DOOM 1, it took me a few more years after DOOM 2 to get the hold of it, but at that time (late 90s/early 2000s) there were other game that occupied me (Starcraft, Fallout 1/2, BG 1/2), so I never played it much.

Only a few days ago, I managed to finish both the games and beat the Icon of Sin the correct way 🙂