What made you fall in love with Doom?

Earliest I can remember is being a 3 year old and scribbling in an Ultimate Doom guide book. I loved the automap, and I wanted to create my own "maps", which were just nonsensical scribbles.

I think the thing that made me fall in love with Doom were probably the smooth movement and generally the fluent combat and the depth of the game like the ammonition management, it's not a game you can just blast through without thinking about what you're actually doing, but it's still so simple and yet so deep it can make me stick to my screen for hours at a time just playing Doom or just building Doom Maps, sometimes even for entire days. Also the mods and WADs and generally the user-content is just really awesome about Doom. If you have the Doom IWADs you probably wont need any other game ever again because there are so many mods that are so awesome but dont deliver more of the exact same without being an insult to the game itself, something like Project Brutality. I've been here for only like a month or so I guess but I'm already in love with the game and I already played far more Doom than I played most games. I just somehow keep coming back to it. The only games I played more than Doom are probably Half-Life Deathmatch, Minecraft and Sonic Games... mainly the 2D Sonic games though. And Sonic Heroes... but yeah. I think that's about it.

I'm not sure. It's just fun.

Playing community levels is a very fun experience, because it's easy to make levels that present new concepts or ideas, or that keep gameplay fresh and interesting, even if you play within the few basic rules of standard Doom gameplay (vanilla weapons and enemies and etc); there are probably endless ways to make interesting situations and encounters out of level geometry alone, and there is always something new and fresh surfacing in the community.

Doom mods in general are fun. Heck, Doom is fun. Can you blame me for it?!

Found  Doom in '95 when our family got our first computer and I found the shareware version on a Compuserve CD. It instantly floored me. It was a 3D game that ran on my computer! The design, the atmosphere, it was too cool. I stuck with Doom as my go-to FPS until Half-Life came out in 1998. I dropped it for a long time, but then Doom '16 came out, and renewed my interest in Doom. I downloaded and played many mods, but it's only more recently that I discovered people streamiing their mapmaking efforts. After I got a look at how easy it was to start making maps, I was hooked again, and I joined here not too long ago.

It was 1994. There was nothing else like it.

It's now 2021. Still nothing else like it.

To me Doom is the best fusion of Sci-fi and Horror in a game. Two awesome genres in one.

Great story premise. Great monsters, all unique and memorable. Great weapons, all unique and useful. Great HUD, so simple yet effective.

We all know that the combat is fast and fun but i love the way that Doom is also obscurely a puzzle game. (Looking for keys + key doors + exits). I really enjoy the puzzle element to the game and also secret hunting. Some levels people make are really clever with the progression. 

Every level is a "snowflake" in that no two wads are alike. That's why we keep playing after all these years. Doom has so much variation in it's content that we are still not bored to play a new map. 

Doom is also a game full of contrast, which is why it still feels fresh after 100s of levels. Big spaces, small spaces, long maps, short maps, fast combat, slow combat, strategy, anything goes, light areas, dark areas, inside, outside...the list goes on. So many possibilities. 

The ability to create your own levels has been one one the funnest hobbies of my life. Challenging but rewarding.

Practically endless the things you can do with this game and the places it can take you.

Lots of cool people here on Doomworld inspire me to keep making maps. I like hanging here and seeing how others respond and relate to this game. 

Doom makes the world a better place.

Doom is awesome!

Apparently i got in love with doom because i got those crispiness on the 1993 of doom with those sprites and pixels

and back in that day i never knew what's was the game's title when i certainly found the title in 5 years i was addicted to doom after that

As a kid, I always had this intense fascination with games that allowed me to be creative in some way, to customize and create my own additional content. If a game I had access to contained a level editor or even just a vehicle editor or something, I would spend a considerable amount of time playing around with those, seeing what was possible to create. A game on the PS3 called ModNation Racers which allowed you to create custom vehicles and race courses, and then Portal 2 with its in-game puzzle creation tool a couple years later, fueled my drive to create for a while until I learned of Doom and its extensive modding capabilities. Learning how essentially every single aspect of the game, from the visuals to the music to the maps, could be changed without much difficulty was mindblowing. The fact that a twenty-year-old game still had such a vibrant, thriving community around it was equally as impressive, and I'm glad to see that in the seven years I've been around here, that community has only continued to grow and evolve.

Nothing particularly special, I simply like violent games in general, especially those of the retro variety, so Doom was an easy pick.

Combined with copious amounts of community made content so you don't get bored easily, and that ensures it will probably outlive most of us :p .

Probably how cool the fanbase is and how easy it is to do mods. Same stands for all Half Life games. Fucking lit, and even more so when modded.

That it's one of the most influential fps games of all time and for me the gameplay feels timeless. Also the sheer of community created content kept me hooked.

The astounding talent of its community. ;^)

Doom is the first shooter I played. I guess, Bobby Prince's music draw me in
(In those days I had an SCC-1 MIDI Soundcard, so the sound was fantastic! )

 and the mood of the game plus the rocket launcher, the first weapon,
that I could hurt myself with. Tricky thing, tricky thing!

You know...when I was a kid and had a SNES, the first thing that called my attention was that red hellish cartridge with the titlepic of Doom printed on it. It was like love at first sight.

Later, I've never stopped playing that game...killing pixelated demons, dark atmosphere, mumbling the soundtrack...until I got the Playstation version of the game. That was the marriage point lol.

6 hours ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

Archviles >:D

Back then, I didn't know of those fuckers :D

It was the first game to ever scare me, so I think it's just a simple case of Stockholm syndrome.

My teenage brain was highly seduced by demons.

Gameplay, atmosphere, demons design, music, weapons, level design, mods & wads and especially this community with such talented people that keeps

releasing amazing projects for free. 

While I was doing YouTube work for a solid 6 years or so before I came here, when I started writing for the Cacowards is when I really fell head over heels in love with Doom. The backing of the community and learning mapping after that made it certain that I'll never leave.

When we first got a computer in like '94, when that wasn't entirely common, my uncle installed it immediately. 

Like an idiot I bought into the smarmy magazine nonsense of the early 2k's, glorifying shields and carrying only 2 (way too similar) weapons and laughing snootily at "old style key hunts" whenever that would pop up and thinking shit like story and graphics matters. Carmack was right, story doesn't matter. It matters for 1 playthrough, barely, but if you want a game you can play regularly - only gameplay matters. And no other shooter in history has the feel of shooting the SSG or the plasma.

I get 60 fps @ 4k on a 55 inch screen on Doom Eternal and I prefer the look of Eviternity and shit like that.

In a nutshell, it was the gameplay and the ease of modding it.

Probably because killing demons is fun

I saw a game similar to Maze War at technical college in RML-380Z (Z80 beasts) in 1981 after I left high school; it wasn't a shoot-em-up, just wandering around; think Wolf3D in green-screen wireframe with no weapons, monsters or face sprites; this was 'only' a 4MHz Z80 CPU after all. Then at Uni in the late 1980s I played the hell out of Rogue, ironically subtitled "Exploring the Dungeons of Doom"; and wished there was a game like Rogue played with visuals like the maze game.

Then one day in 1993 at work after hours, the boss had downloaded shareware Doom and was showing it to the rest of us; we were amazed and got over excited, shouting "Kill 'im, kill 'im!" when he faced a Zombieman that was shooting at him. I'd never been interested in platformer games and such so had kept out of video gaming, until I saw that; I knew then that technology had finally caught up with my dream and that DOOM was the game for me! I bought my first PC, primarily to play DOOM :)

Of course for Rogue, they should have made Heretic first, but you get the idea :)

The scariness, gameplay and graphics. I still enjoy the insane speed of Doom so much. Together with the predictable monster behaviour and absence of clip reloads it gives the game such rhythm. I honestly think there's a kind of music to it.

Those things most of all, but of course the plethora of secrets and traps. Demons from hell trope was quite enjoyable at the time and I loved the monster design. That amazing sky you see almost straight off from E1M1. I never stopped playing Doom, even as many of the other kids I knew dropped it for the technological advances of Duke, Quake, Unreal.

My father introduced me to Doom by buying me the full collection of the classic games. I was immediately drawn by the sheer simplicity of it all. Before the first time I played the original doom, I was disillusioned with the FPS genre. Games like Call of duty irritated me with their cumbersome mechanics and never really evolving as a series. Doom, however, had it all. Weapons felt impactful and combat meant something other than just using cover to your advantage. Each monster had some sort of attack or did something unique, or one was tougher than the other. It wasn't jus one long corridor, either. Maps were abstract, but the abstract nature served a purpose, hiding all sorts of secrets to discover ,encouraging exploration.

I discovered the community a few months after finished Doom and Doom 2( and failing miserably to finish plutonia) and was drawn to the awe- inspiring user maps that normal people created from scratch( I'm fairly sure Eviternity was the the first Wad I ever finished). It was simply unreal that a games following was this huge. That people were both kind and committed to this game.

I'm starting to sound like Endless, aren't I?

For me, it was the fact that you could make and play your own levels that proved to be the most addicting aspect.  Sure the game is fun and I might have played it once or twice if we weren't able to play user-made content; but it was the user-made content that kept me coming back time and time again; but what truly made me fall in love with doom was my first successful editing session where I'm staring at two square 64 by 64 columns of BRICK10 in a square room with 2 alcoves (also BRICK10) and a floor of blood that I had made.  I was hooked from then on.

Honestly the reason that I love doom has to do with the modding scene, I remember back when I was like 11 or 12 watching Icarus and trying to figure out what is a sourceport and how it can be used to run brutal doom heh, that's not to say good old vanilla is bad however, I love it alot, but if it weren't for the modding scene I don't think I would have discovered this game until years after. Just the fact that there is over 27 years of wads and shitloads of mods really make this game timeless.

That was the first ever videogame I played. We didn't have a PC at home at that time (I was 7 or so) but my dad had this old thing from 1990 with no screen. One day he managed to connect it to the TV, I saw him play and immediately liked it (it was Heretic, actually, but we played Doom as well).

At that time it was very impressive for me, and what I liked first was the exploration of the maps (that is stilll what I like most). Then I forgot about it for a little while, and when I was 13/14 I saw a video on YouTube, and realised that you could still play it, and at a much faster pace (the old "PC" only had about 1 fps, and even less than that in HeXen).

So yeah, first video game ever + exploration + fast pace.

(and the multitude of mods/wads convinced me to buy the full version)

the Steam sale price, the incredibly fast movement and projectile dodging, the modding, the Civvie

When I bought Ultimate Doom on a whim in April of last year, I had no idea what I was getting into. My dad used to play the game back in the nineties, and always spoke highly of it, so I expected a fun retro experience going in, nothing more. Needless to say, I was sorely mistaken.

At first, it was the atmospheric, 'retro' feel, abstract level design and complete lack of forced storytelling that pulled me in. The fact that you could just start up the game, and immediately get shooting was also a major factor, since my little laptop struggles to boot more complex games in a reasonable time frame. As my skills improved, I also began to appreciate the speed and responsive controls, a far cry from the slow, cumbersome movement of the post-CoD FPS genre. As I started to find secrets on accident, my puzzle aspect of the game began to grow on me, giving a strange sense of depth to the techbases of Phobos and Deimos. Then, after reaching Mt. Erebus and bouncing off of it, I started to explore the world of PWADs, and at that point my fate was sealed. I became a Doomer.

Since then, I've only found more things to enjoy about Doom, from the surprising depth of its gameplay, derived from brilliantly simple core mechanics, to its timeless music and SFX. Above all else, though, it is the possibility of creating my own virtual worlds, something I have always enjoyed, that drives my investment in the game and its community. Custom content is something I have always considered vital to a game's longevity. I've spent far more time playing mods made for a handful of old favourites than I have on the entirety of my 100+ game library. Hell, I've spent more time in the last five years playing a single Victoria 2 mod than I have watching television (and also gotten more invested in YouTube series about said mod than most shows).

Of all those games, Doom is the only one which I personally want to create content for. Something about the elegant simplicity of its core mechanics just makes me want to experiment, to create my own spaces and experiences, for the first time since I quit Sploder (if only they'd release a desktop version...).

I first discovered Doom by Doom 2016,a vid of Glory Kills,so I gave the Classics a shot

It's a very gud game,the simple gameplay which allows freedom of playstyle,the music is very gud,and the monsters are kinda varied(At least in Doom 2,I'm gonna be either butchered for saying or by some miracle some people will agree this but Doom 1 roster is boring IMO,it gets boring after fighting millions of Imp clones)and of course the infinite amount of campaigns the fans made

Also some maps really tell a story without saying anything,and lets your imagination fly to give the maps a mental setting