Back in September of 1994 I was a miserable 14 year old boy in 9th grade. We had at home a Pionex 486-25sx with 4 megs ram and a Sound blaster CT2230. I can't remember all the games we had but they were few as we still played mostly consoles. I had seen and played Wolf3d back in 1992 but we never got it.
One day at school during lunch, I wandered into the library and saw 5 guys much older than me huddled around the school's new library computer. They were playing a game I had never seen or heard of before. I stood there, in a coma totally blown away. The graphics, sounds , the guns, the monsters that fought each other when one was hit by another, the sheer violence completely blew me away. I can remember the instant I first saw it and recall the emotion it evoked. I asked one of the guys the name of the game later on after school and he said, "DOOM."
I had to have this game, no matter the cost, this was priority over everything else. I asked my father to bring me to CompUSA to buy it, my mother heard of it and was against the idea. Huge arguments and screaming fights later, we were on our way to buy it. I found the shareware box, we brought it home and installed it and it wouldn't execute. WTF!!!! Our 486 had DR-DOS and DOOM needed MS-DOS. Huge disappointment, I was crestfallen and was unable to play. A few miserable days later my father came home with MS-DOS 6.22 and installed it.
We loaded DOOM and it worked, finally!! From that day forward, my grades in school plummeted and I became a total recluse. I would wake up early every morning to play DOOM before school and come home and play DOOM straight away. Nothing else mattered, this was the purpose of life. In November of the same year we got DOOM II and I was blown away again. Going from DOOM episode one straight to to DOOM II is a big deal. No more fucking around now, this shit got serious. The same month we got 4 more megs of ram and that brought me to 8 megs total which helped out the 486-25 alot.
I still play DOOM alot to this day, I took a long break from it when Quake deathmatch was huge and when Grand Theft Auto III came out. When I put together a computer the next thing I put on it right after vide-cdd.sys and the sound blaster drivers is DOOM and DOOM II. Every computer in my house has either vanilla DOOM or a source port of DOOM. It is amazing how this game has evolved over the last 20 years and never looses its luster. I still think it is funny when a demon's head makes a loud thud when it hits the ground dead. The only game that felt like playing DOOM for the first time again for me is Unforgiven for Quake.