Living near a local BBS helped me try the 1.0 shareware release weeks before it turned 1994. Subsequently, it triggered a race to upgrade to a better 486....

It wasn't until 1.2 when I started to REALLY hear about it through word of mouth. "DID YOU PLAY NIGHTMARE DIFFICULTY!!!"

Apparently 1.0 handled network packets in an inefficient way, which brought many a large network to its knees. 1.2 fixed that problem but it was too late - Intel, etc banned it from their corporate network 😀 Worldwide productivity took a nosedive in 1994.

Our school computer network hosted many an unauthorised lunch-time DOOM session too - our I.T teacher, who knew far less about computers than most of us, was easily tricked into handing over the admin password. RAM was stolen, porn was viewed - it was easily my favourite subject 😈

My DX-40 couldn't quite hack it, so I was stuck modding Wolf3D/Spear of Destiny for another year or two until a new Pentium desktop with Doom II came along.
Modem games followed very shortly along with incredibly amateur mapmaking courtesy of DCK32 and NWT, if anyone remembers these. Still sitting on that shitpile of bad 1995 deathmatch wads that will never be released. :)

I was in college. Downloaded it over a 9600 bps modem (took forever) and ran it on my 486sx-33.
Within a week i think anyone on my floor that had a PC that could run it had it.

Where i was? I was a child that didnt had a job and going to school. I actually didnt know what age i then had.. But now iam 31 years old.. So if you want, you can calculate it back..
My dad was the only one who owns the computers and could affort them.. But he bought them (likely to have a good excuse) so we could playing on them aswell. But he bought it more for its hobby (chess)
So he playing somes matches on chess programs on the computers. And when he had nothing to do, you could playing games.. I really know in the back then he sometimes bought some shareware games in the store.
I when where quit happy when i bought some new games on it.. I knowing that my brother had a fried / buddy from school. (i dont actually his name anymore) but took some cd-roms with him..
This was the first time i came in contact with the game doom, he had also the cd-rom from the game corridor 7.. I found these games very awesome.
But i know he installing it on my dads computer. When he went away it was still on that computer.. But that was once the last time I was allowed to play on the computer. I know when it happend.
The computer frozen (why i didnt know) I pushed on the reset button and the system was dead. My dad wasnt very happy on that. So I was thus banished from the computer.. That was the last time i had play on that computer.. Then when i almost got an job i had made my own computer.. My real first build computer was an Intel Pentium 233 MMX.. I bought it when it was on sale..

Then i never played again om my dad`s pc. The second time where i get over the an another school.. There i played it not very long..

I only had my 286 at that time. I just came back from my pre-university studies, and saw my cousin brother bought a spanking new high end 486 with CD-ROM drive. I and my other cousin found a shareware called DOOM II on one of the CDs that came bundled with the PC. We were instantly hooked to it. We played the shareware like there was no tomorrow...

It wasn't until I started working that I got DOOM 1 from one of those collections.

But speaking of Wolfenstein 3D, it was what I was hooked to before DOOM et al. I remember reading the help file within the game which boasted that many big companies came forward to publish it or something of that sort.

I and my friends used to share the cheat codes at high school back then. We were just students back then, and yes, what we had were "shared" floppies too.

I still remember that day. It was early May 1994; I was reading my postal mail when my uncle got home from his accounting job and told me "turn the computer on, I have something really good that I found in one of the workstations". With the Packard Bell up and running, he then showed me 4 unmarked floppies - and began to insert them one by one to find the install program. With the install and setup finished, my uncle got the game running; I just stood there, frozen, looking at the Intro screens and running demos while he read a typed piece of paper indicating the keyboard control keys. Needless to say I became an instant fan of DOOM, and computer gaming was never the same again - it became my new-found pastime (and addiction). This also prompted me to start collecting parts for my own computer; by late September I was done - my P100 came to life and the very first game I installed was DOOM. I was in heaven 😁 .

I probably still have those old floppies laying around somewhere in my room.

My dad got me the Ultimate DOOM CD copy, you know back when CD games consisted of... alot of wasted space.

My mother got incredibly mad and argued with my father even cried to tears over me playing it, I was still a toddler going to kindergarten.

Only thing I never liked about it and Wolfenstein 3-D were the damn secret areas. I never had nightmares or wanted to go around murdering people at all.

Hmm I struggle to remember the details. But I do remember I was quite disappointed how poor it ran on my computer 😀

I therefore didn't play it until WAY later when I had an AMD 486DX4-100 machine with a Sound Blaster 16 and a wavetable Sound Canvas. But boy was Doom fun with that setup...

I was doing tech support for a game company at the time it came out. It wasn't the first time I had played it but it is the most memorable.

I was working the late shift doing tech support. Most of the time I had enough calls to keep me busy which is pretty unbelievable considering how small the market was at the time and the company I worked for, Gametek, was only just starting to branch out and become a bigger company, up until then mostly selling copies of the Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune games. At any rate I had installed Doom on my work machine which was probably a 486/66 and way better than my 386DX 40 at home and was gaming away when the phone rang. I lowered the volume and cradled the phone to my ear so I could continue playing while I took the call. If I remember correctly it was for SVGA Air Warrior, but it's been a while so I'm not 100% sure, whatever the case the guy couldn't get it to run with his 2MB (Or it could have been 4MB) Diamond Stealth card (I think that's what it was). Anyways I'm talking to him about the problem and there's a pause and he says, "Are you playing Doom?" I said, "Yes actually I was just dabbling as we talked.", worried that he was going to get irate I wasn't giving him my full attention. "That game is so awesome!" the guy says, which brought a smile to my face, and I said something like ,"It sure is". Anyways we chatted for like 15 minutes about doom and then both in a joyful mood said goodbye. I'm assuming he got the urge to play doom. Anyways after we hung up I realized we never resolved his problem, we had both got so excited and distracted relating doom stories to one another that we thought we were hanging up with a friend, or at least that's what I thought had happened.

The guy never called back, or if he did he didn't do it during the late shift. I somehow hope he got SVGA Air Warrior running and that he enjoyed that too, but that was the level of excitement around Doom when it had just come out.

Ha! Excellent story Shagittarius!

I was 10 and the only machine I had at home was a 286. A classmate of mine had a shining 486 DX2/66 and he invited all us boys in our class to show off DOOM. I was amazed by the graphics and the violence. I had never seen anything like it before.

Unfortunately I (or my family) never got a new machine at home, and when I finally did, Quake had been released and was just superior.

Heh, I was in highschool when this happened, ~14 years old... all I had back then was a 386sx/20 with 2MB ram... I was drooling over DOOM but I couldn't play it even after I upgraded to some custom IBM 4MB ram, it was awful... (I put the extra 2MB in hopes I would play DOOM 🤣)
So I just messed with wolf3d for a while and when later I upgraded to a zenith 486/66 I finally enjoyed it 😁
I am sure that DOOM is responsible for many computer upgrades back then 😁

To get literal, I was less than a month old when DooM first dropped. 😜 I didn't actually play it for the first time until some time around 2006, when I had finally started getting into FPSs after years of not playing any games in the genre due to worries I had about my parents not approving (what? I was 12 😜). 🤣 Since I discovered how much I enjoyed FPSs from playing TimeSplitters: Future Perfect at a friend's place, I felt that it was worth trying out some of the classics. I downloaded DooM alongside a couple of other old shareware FPSs, fired up DosBox, and had a blast.

I guess we just missed the 20th anniversary of DOOM - released on 10th December 1993.

In 94 I was in secondary school and had a 286 laptop with a VGA monitor and was playing Wolf3D, X-Wing and the Lucas adventures. A friend of mine had just gotten a new Apricot DX2-66 and Doom, needless to say it was pretty amazing. I still remember that all his savegames were called "Holy Shit" and "Arghhh!" 🤣

Before long I had built my first desktop PC (DX4-100) and was playing Duke3D. Now even though I work as a games programmer for a living, when I get home I would honestly rather play Doom than most modern games 😀

That was probably around the time when I built my first PC, an AMD 486 DX2-80. Doom seemed to run just fine on that system as far as I can remember, which was surprising to me since I centered my system around the fastest CPU I could afford and then went the cheap road with everything else. 🤣

I was operating a BBS at the time. I was able to to get it shortly after it released via shareware. My little Gateway 2000 486SX/20 at the time did chug a bit trying to play it, but, man was it awesome!

Only having a Apple IIe till 95 I know nothing about games. I remember hearing a lot about Mortal Combat a few years earlier but never actually seen let alone played it.
Anyway my best mate had a 386 and brought over a few games when we got our brand new DX2 66 so some of his games didn't run. But he had seen the speed of our PC, the 2x CD-ROM, sound card and managed to convince his dad to upgrade and they got a DX4 100 with Shareware Doom preinstalled which I got a copy of, we even ended up having a few modem games.
He was so impressed when I finally finished without cheating. Cant remember what skill level it was but Hurt me Plenty would have been the highest.