I first learned of Doom when it was featured on the cover disk for an issue of PC Review someone brought me from the UK. (Still have that issue.) I wasn't terribly impressed with it at the time simply because I didn't particularly care for first-person shooters. Also, the only 486 available only had a PC speaker and a monochrome monitor.

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.

Let me see... I got a copy from a friend that had a hacked edition with Beavis&Butthead instead of the monsters 😁 I think I had 486slc-33 at that time and had to reduce the screen size to get rid of the slideshow 😉 But when Descent got released I played it far more then I've ever played Doom.

I don't remember how I got a hold of it. We did a bulk order of shareware floppies around then, it may have come from that. It may also have come from a fellow computer nerd at school. Or it may have been a download from Prodigy Online Service that I waited until early in the morning to download.

What I do remember is my parents found out about it, and they were quite against my playing violent video games on the family computer. However, I stashed it in a hidden directory (I think an Extended ASCII folder name hid it from Windows?) and would sneak up to play it with the volume turned off or way down. And when the cats were away... the mice would play.

Later on, I went off to college and we'd LAN game into the wee hours.

Having gaming be a forbidden, guilty pleasure was unintentionally a great way to keep the hobby going into my twenties and thirties. 😀

Tiremaster400 wrote:

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.

That's weird. Maybe that was a bug unique to one of the early versions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69_rSiQGzg shows the game installing under DR-DOS.

Jorpho wrote:

Tiremaster400 wrote:

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.

That's weird. Maybe that was a bug unique to one of the early versions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69_rSiQGzg shows the game installing under DR-DOS.

Interesting, I know I had DOOM v1.2 shareware. Must have been a very old version of DR-DOS.

Tiremaster400 wrote:

It is amazing how this game has evolved over the last 20 years and never looses its luster.

Yeah it's still lots of fun, and it's unique. In my opinion none of the clones at the time matched it for purely addictive gameplay - I loved Duke3D for example but it was a different game altogether. I heard someone describe DOOM once as a fancy version of Packman, but for all it's simplicity it's not an easy experience to reproduce. DOOM3 was DOOM in name only - I wonder what they'll come up with for DOOM4? I don't have high hopes.

Jeeze, all these awesome stories are making me jealous. When Doom came out in 1993, I was barely a year old. My first exposure to the Doom franchise was playing Doom 3 in 2004 (now THAT game I can tell some stories about!). Later that year, I got my hands on a Pentium MMX laptop and started casting around for games that would run on it. This was how I discovered Doom, Quake, Duke3D, and many other classics.

In a way, I'm glad I played the Doom games out of sequence. When Doom 3 came out, I had no preconceived notions going in, and it subsequently became one of my favorite games of all time. It's weird to think that whenever (or if ever) Doom 4 is released, a whole generation of gamers will play it without prior exposure to Doom 1, 2, or 3. While many Doom fans did not enjoy Doom 3 (or so I'm told), it was at least a polished, well-designed product. With Carmack gone and id Software in turmoil, it doesn't look like Doom 4 will be hitting that mark. 😢

Doom wouldn't run in DR-DOS? I never played with that OS. Wasn't there a free version released?

PS: I think Doom 3 rocked. The graphics were amazing. 1200p at 100Hz back in the old days. Technology has taken a step back since then 😀

chinny22 wrote:

Only having a Apple IIe till 95 I know nothing about games.

Apple II had some awesome games.

I used to play Doom (& II) over the LAN with friends. The game always gives me pretty bad nightmares unfortunately.

badmojo wrote:

Tiremaster400 wrote:

It is amazing how this game has evolved over the last 20 years and never looses its luster.

Yeah it's still lots of fun, and it's unique. In my opinion none of the clones at the time matched it for purely addictive gameplay - I loved Duke3D for example but it was a different game altogether. I heard someone describe DOOM once as a fancy version of Packman, but for all it's simplicity it's not an easy experience to reproduce. DOOM3 was DOOM in name only - I wonder what they'll come up with for DOOM4? I don't have high hopes.

I agree. I enjoy DOOM more now than before 😀

I also like Brutal Doom for it's over the top gore .

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Doom wouldn't run in DR-DOS? I never played with that OS. Wasn't there a free version released?

Its history has been a bit strange. But yes, I'm pretty sure there was a free version out at some point.

My first experience with Doom was around the release of v1.2, as the person who was doing work on my Mother's new 486/DX2 66 MHz computer decided to load it on for me to play, even though I was only 11 years old. I actually found the game terrifying and didn't want to play it. Not because of the graphics... but because of the PC Speaker sound effects that were raping my ears! DX

Eventually, after we got a Sound Blaster Pro and a CD-ROM drive installed in the thing not many months later, I decided to give it another go. Having a proper sound card made the game quite a bit more tolerable. ;)

Truth be told though, once one of my friends introduced me to Descent, I played the heck out of that and preferred it over Doom. Many modem-matches of Descent and Descent II followed. :B

I was a high school sophomore when DOOM came out, and we used to play networked deathmatches on the 486DX2-66 systems in the tech lab during lunch break. I even went so far as to install a keylogger on some of the machines to steal the admin password so I could squirrel DOOM away in a hidden directory on the server. Our tech department was pretty laid-back and I was in good with the teachers, so they didn't really mind our shenanigans.

In later years I got into collecting SGI systems and discovered that a shareware port of DOOM was bundled with the IRIX OS. It's not quite the same running in a window, but it's staggering how many different systems it's been ported to.

I was... a one year old kid who was still in diapers. 😜

But in all seriousness, I didn't get to experience Doom until much later when Half-Life and Unreal were new because that was when I first played the PS1 port of the game.

I was too young to play the game (I was born 4 years after) and even if we did get a copy, do you think an amiga 2000 can run doom?
But besides that, when I was able to play Doom in 2004, It insistently became my favorite game.

I don't remember at which point I came in... I think after DoomII was released, but I was soon engulfed in DWANGO wads on BBS's. IIRC, I was using Juno to connect to the internet and play DoomII on Head2Head for 15 minutes at a time. Of course I steamlined the process so I could maximize my play-time. All this at 26.4k connections. HAHAHA! Good times.

I played this first in 1998 or 1999, I was still in elementary school then. The game was obviously quite "outdated" by that time. I remember liking it well enough, but as far as first-person shooters go I found Duke Nukem 3D much more intriguing. The realism and interactivity was on a different level to where Doom really couldn't compete in my eyes.

Nowadays I prefer the PSX port of Doom. The colored lighting and bizarre ambient music make for a creepier atmosphere which fits the game better than the style of the original DOS version, in my opinion.

I always appreciated it technically but never enjoyed the game, mostly because first-person games cause me nausea and headaches