How'd you get into Doom, anyway?

I think I watched some youtuber play Brutal Doom, which was at least 8 years ago since this account is from 2014 (I was 24 then). I played some of it and then tried making a map for brutal doom. Over time I got more interested in classic retro Doom, participated on some Joy of Mapping lessons and a few CPs

I've been into retro shooters for awhile and played the Bethesda re-release of the iwads, and I always thought Doom gameplay stood up extraordinarily well today.  Of course played the modern Dooms too.  But a few months ago I saw a PC Gamer article on the Ashes:2063 TC.  Tbh the fact that it was a standalone release helped because I was honestly a bit intimidated by the amount of doom stuff out there, sourceports, mods etc.  Even though there's not much to it.  But anyway that TC was so awesome and so unlike what I thought I could expect from Doom that I just started playing more stuff and I've been playing Doom stuff nonstop for a few months now.  I think I always intended to get into the doom community but I just needed an inspiration.  Beautiful Doom was also a really nice way to get into classic doom with some modern visual flair.  And the doom thread for skill improvement gave me a great difficulty curve to play new stuff.  Now I have unlimited retro shooter content possibly for life and I couldn't be happier!

i know doom because when in 2015 or 2017 ( i cant remember ) i was browsing youtube and i found a video about doom ( its a eps 2 f boss walktrought or a speedrun ) and i was intersted and at the time i dont know doom so i looked at the desc amd it was a video about doom , me at the time does not know anything about doom so i search it in google and people says its a revolutianary game for the pc industry

In 2020 (2019?) I was looking for some cool Nintendo DS homebrew for my flash cart, one of them being DsDoom. It only had the shareware WAD preloaded and wasn't the smoothest in terms of framerate, but I was still satisfied. Shortly after that I bought both Doom and Doom 2 on Steam and the Switch, and the rest is history. Got into map making around that time as well, even if I didn't release anything then.

In 2019 my boyfriend was playing it a lot and got me interested and guided me through setting up GZDoom since I had just finished beloved throwback shooter Dusk. I really enjoyed Ultimate Doom and played Sigil right after it and since then have been playing the game relatively actively (although now my source port of choice is PrBoom+). No doubt Sigil and Eviternity (my first two custom level sets, setting the bar nice and extremely high for my future experiences) helped keep me here since I wasn't the biggest fan of vanilla Doom II or TNT when I played them and somehow I thought Plutonia was too hard but had no complaints difficulty wise with Eviternity once I started letting myself save my game.

My earliest memory of Doom comes from watching a YouTube video by user "whoisthisgit", in which he discussed Doom I's iconic ending.

Since then, I've always known that game as "the one with the creepy ending" (I was very young when I first saw it, so it did have quite an impact on me), but I wouldn't play it until I got my hands on the SNES version.

It was kinda clunky to control, but I got used to it, although I don't remember getting very far into it.

Years later I heard of Brutal Doom, decided to give it a spin, and while nice, I went back and replayed the original Doom and Doom II, this time full vanilla.

Around that period, John Romero had released Sigil, and that's also how I got into more vanilla-esque wads that don't change the game drastically.

Doom95 without sound and music on dad's PDA (I dunno why not on PC).

As far as I can guess, it was around December 2004, Doom 1 shareware crashed a lot, didn't get past the first room then. I even remember that on my birthday in 2005 dad said I would be able to play it again for 15 minutes. Doom 2 was more stable, crashed on map02 somewhere near the first met switch but I found out were I shouldn't step to avoid crash, and got to the brown brick building, couldn't get in. I asked dad if I could jump there, he said like yes, later you'll find out how to. Didn't play Doom until 2009 (except Doom 3), rediscovered it asking dad to get a game with level editor

It was preloaded on my first PC but I didn't think of it much at the time. There was also Duke Nukem, Quake, Descent, and bunch of other games. And weirdly enough, I spent most of my time with Duke 3D and Transport Tycoon Deluxe for some reason. Weird kid grew into a weird adult, who'd have thonked. 

And then, many years later a friend showed me Psychophobia gzdoom mod. Suggesting the community is still alive and kicking. Only then I got involved and was shocked how many people still play and develop doom. Just amazing

Then dwars and decino appeared in my youtube, and David Newton's video on map making. That's when I said to myself that I want to make a map. So here I am, making maps and having a ton of fun. 

When I was like 6 years old, my dad gave me a surprise classic Xbox for my birthday, I say surprise because I didn't know he had bought it, I just got home and there he was, playing Snes Doom in my room (Obviously the console had an emulator). I saw him and thought "What an awesome game!" and after that, I tried to play the game by myself, man I got fucking terrified when I heard the Episode 1 last maps music, I don't remember if I had any nightmares that night (Probably).

After that, I got to the end of the second episode only to die to the Cyberdemon. Again this map completely terrified me, the music, that giant beast hunting you down. But in the end, this became my favorite episode.

Then I found out about Wolf3D, and when I had access to the internet, I found out about the PC version, but I thought it wasn't as great as the Snes version, I was a kid after all.

9 years later, I watched BigMacDavis' epic walkthroughs and said "Heh, I've played this before, but why does it look so different". So, I downloaded GZDoom and blasted my way through the three classic games (Doom 1, 2 and Final)

got doom 3 for my xbox one and it came with doom 1 and 2 

I grew up in the 90s, when the original Doom games (& later Quake/Quake 2/Half-Life) were the hot new thing.  I don't remember what came first, but I remember being initially exposed to Doom in 2 ways.

1. Someone at my high school had managed to sneak shareware Doom onto the school library's iMacs.  The computers were just far enough out of sight that naughty students could sneak in some Demon murder as long as they remembered to keep an eye on their surroudings & keep the volume low.
2. The first version of the original Doom I actually owned was..........the Super Nintendo version.  I never beat it, even back then, when it was all I had it still didn't seem good enough.

Despite that, Doom left a strong impression on my younger self, some time later in the mid 90s, I would find myself with an original retail copy of Doom 2.  I was absolutely terrible at it.....but I quickly learned about the cheats & had a blast just killing demons & exploring these intricate mazes iD Software had cooked up.

I ended getting distracted by life & other games (for a long time I was a Nintendo kid until the PS2) & would barely dabble in Doom at all, remaining completely unaware of this community & most fan works.  I do remember installing an old version of ZDoom & messing around with it, but never really diving much deeper until sometime after Doom 2016 revived the series in an official capacity, then I would start hearing about John Romero's then new Episode 1 maps, but not much else until around 2019 where I REALLY started to dig deeper with SIGIL, Doom Zero & whatever Doom mods Icarus had covered on his youtube channel that looked interesting to me.

But it was in the lead up to Doom Eternal's 2020 launch that my curiousity not only led me here, but also led me to try out mapping for Classic Doom & discovering decino, Doomkid & MtPain on youtube.  The rest of the story is yet to be written.....

Windows 95. Doom Shareware bundled with Doom95 on demo disc, that came with one of 90s pc magazines. Played it too many times and was never able to stop enjoying Doom.

When I was 8 years old, I played some of the shareware version at my friend's house who was kind of rich. This was early '97 and we lived in a rural area, so Internet was still quite uncommon. John Romero could simply not have picked a better confluence of scenery to open the game up. I can even remember the differently-pitched growls of the monsters. I think I must have taken it home because I then ended up playing through the entirety of Knee Deep in the Dead (with cheats, on I'm Too Younh to die) before realizing the main difference involved the higher monster count (though I guess there are some relative damage differences as well, they aren't so noticeable in E1 other than the potential for high damage roles for sergeants) and ended up switching to UV. It wasn't until October of 1997 that we ended up getting a copy of the Ultimate Doom. I wanted the 60-dollar pack that included Doom II, Final Doom, and the Master Levels/Maximum Doom but noooooo. My parents has this issue with me playing M-rated games too, which didn't necessarily help matter. It wasn't until after this that I wanted to play Doom 64 because I remember my older brother deciding between Blast Corps and that game to rent one time (and to be fair, Blast Corpse was pretty fucking good, and Doom 64 has such a bland cover, my god. anyway...). Since that time, plenty of other things have caught my interest, but I'd always end up returning to Doom for one reason or another.   Not to mention, I still haven't found something that's not traditionally casual, yet contains a very pick-up-and-play nature.

(Also, funny story, I found the ham-fisted nature of Sandy Petersen's prose to be quite entertaining and actually quite good at creating a sense of place that 8-year old me could be somewhat impressed by. "It stinks like rotten meat," still kind of kills me to be honest. Of course, it also made me a little infatuated with the military for a while, though I couldn't tell you if that influenced the reality of me being a recovering fascist, essentially (long story and a distraction from the subject here, I should think)).

My dad introduced me to it when I was very young, right alongside Quake and StarCraft. Emphasis on very young. We had an AMD Athlon shitbox he played DOS and Windows games on, and I ended up with distinct memories of him playing maps like Downtown and Industrial Zone most of all. But the time I spent watching him struggle with StarCraft stuck with me more, and it wouldn't be until my teens (the late-2000s) that I came back to Doom in a much different way.

We went to the first ScrewAttack Gaming Convention just outside Dallas, TX mainly out of curiosity. That was the glory days of AVGN and other early video influencers, plus they had Nolan Bushnell as a special guest to sweeten the deal. I caught wind of something else debuting at the con, though: an alpha demo session for Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch. It's a familiar sight on MP servers these days (and understandably ignored/detested in many a Doom community as such), but the novelty of an 8-bit arena FPS for Mega Man had me intrigued. I joined in on the first day and was so into what I tried that I got Skulltag for my OS X Mac ASAP. My first year or so playing Doom again mostly revolved around MM8BDM as it evolved and finally released. But that grew tiring and eventually I messed around with Skulltag's classic DM maps and bots enough to try the classics.

This interest petered for a bit (as seems to be my pattern) until I started visiting 4chan's /vr/ board, back in 2013 when it started. I have very mixed feelings about my time there—it exposed me to things and thoughts which should not be, yet broadened my vintage gaming horizons in a great way. The Doom general threads there finally got me fully into classic/modern Doom, however, for which I remain grateful. (It also exposed me to classic Japanese/East Asian PC software and hardware, which has become my media history passion!) All that led me to plowing through a lot of the 10 Years of Doom and various Cacoward winners. I eventually started frequenting the Doomworld forum in 2019, releasing my first map and participating in CPs.

I took a rather unannounced hiatus starting in early 2021, thus missing out on an incredible year of CPs, speedmapping, and source port advancements. The sheer FOMO I've had in coming back this spring is intimidating to say the least, but I'm sure it's nothing compared to what community elders like ukiro and Dario Casali have faced. It's good to be back, that's for sure.

Doom was the 'thing' for a few years and as the youngest child in a family filled with gamers, Doom was always accessible on all computers (well after Amiga anyway). I was shown cheats so I was able to play and enjoy the mechanics, environment and all without being frustrated.

While most would move on to the next big release (and so would I) I would still request to have Doom on the computer for some easy fun. Also once my brother brought a floppy disc with Simpsons Doom and I loved it. Also first realisation that games can be significantly modified (well for my standards).

For many years I was on and off Doom, but at a decline rate. But then a gaming article covered source ports and Doom mods like Brutal Doom - which unlocked my passion for the game again. Then in 2015 I discovered there is a map editor and you can make your own levels - wow. And while I had to keep Googling mapping questions, Google kept leading me to a forum called Doom World.

And here I am.

I was 11 years old in 1993, Dad had a 486, and we were both Wolfenstein 3D nuts, so it was a foregone conclusion.

I don't actually know, Doom has just been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. 

I feel like I mentioned this in another thread, but I got into Doom when I pointed at a Final Doom case on the shelf of the store we were in and asked my parents if I could have it.

If the cover was less nondescript they probably wouldn’t have bought it for me then. They weren’t too happy in finding out about its violence but they still let me play it, they just weren’t too keen on getting me more violent games for awhile.

…but Star Wars was an exception, and getting Dark Forces with an Oregon Trail game was a great Christmas. Then for my birthday a year later they got me Quake 1 and 2 when they realized Doom wasn’t turning me into a psychopath.

Well, I wasn't allowed to play Call of Duty, or Half-Life, or any of the other shooters except for Halo CE, but I thought that Doom was old and the graphics weren't realistic which meant I would be allowed to play it. After a bit of "negotiating", I was allowed to play Doom.

Doom has been with me for a very long time, mostly during hard moments in my life. It being an escape from parental abuse, loss of friends due to lifestyle changes, as well as my opioid addiction before finally transitioning.

It's a game that's very close to my heart for those reasons listed above, but one memory that brings a smile to my face, is when I first discovered Doom. I was 16 and doing some ye olde internet stuff *cough* pirating stuff *cough* looking for games to play. I eventually discovered a torrent of something called DOOM.EXE, I foolishly downloaded it, desperately hoping for something new--not realizing that I possibly gave my computer a virtual STD--but alas, it finally downloaded, and I immersed myself into a virtual world like none other, or at least that's what I thought back then, now days I understand that Doom was just an entryway to a world of old, yet gold first-person-shooters.

Of course, my memory may not be completely accurate, but I still hold it within my heart.

My dad used to own Doom 1 for the family computer. As a kid I used to watch him play / played it myself.

Early Youtube also had a tendency to recommend Doom vids to me from time to time.

These 2 videos in particular have been stuck inside my head for years:

It wasn't until 2013 though when I finally got to play Doom 2 & 3 after I got the BFG Edition for Playstation 3.

So yeah, I've pretty much been playing Doom since I was a toddler.

I was probably around 8-ish years old when I finally played DOOM (because, back in 93, I was only a baby and my brother @Triangle Box Studio just born lol). I remember when, a little younger, my brother and I would watch my dad play DOOM. It was always an exciting day (er, evening) when he would co-op on the internet with his brother (aka our uncle) to play through the game together. The idea you could play a video game with someone else not in the same room fascinated us at the time. I always remember finding DOOM to be a scary game, but I was still fascinated by it. Around when I was 8-ish is when he allowed me to play it for the first time. I was a bit nervous at first, but it was cool to finally play it myself. My dad sat right behind as I played. I'd say most of my earlier runs with the game he was always there to watch, and eventually when I played regularly, I was allowed to boot up the game myself. My brother liked to watch me play, but for some reason (at the time) didn't have an interested in playing it, in fact I don't think he started playing it 'till he was a young teen for some reason haha but now it's his favorite game ever and he plays it waaaay more than I do! As a kid, I always played through the game using tons of cheat codes; full ammo, invulnerability, walking through walls to get to the exit super fast, etc. and I often would just skip around levels, choosing whatever name looked interesting from the drop-down menu. Nowadays, I hardly play with cheat codes, I just don't find cheating as fun as I used to and prefer to play games the way they were meant to be played. 

Of all the things that could’ve got me into doom, it started with Game Theory’s video on doom not being 3D, which while not being the best video out there, still made me think that the engine seemed quite cool. I then proceeded to not think about it again for quite a long time. A little while later I discovered the YouTuber Ahoy, and watched his videos on quake and doom. I then proceeded to buy both those games and let them sit in my steam library for ages. Eventually we get to August 2020, I’m very bored in lockdown and rewatching Ahoy’s video on doom and after finishing it, I decided to give doom a try. I played through doom 1 and 2 in the dos versions packaged with steam, and I would not recommend that for first time players. Eventually after finishing doom 2 I decided I needed to try Brutal Doom, and shortly after that I discovered I preferred just playing in GZDoom to playing with BD. Eventually I found doomworld and the cacowards and have been loving doom ever since.

12 hours ago, Jaccident said:

Of all the things that could’ve got me into doom, it started with Game Theory’s video on doom not being 3D, which while not being the best video out there, still made me think that the engine seemed quite cool. I then proceeded to not think about it again for quite a long time. A little while later I discovered the YouTuber Ahoy, and watched his videos on quake and doom. I then proceeded to buy both those games and let them sit in my steam library for ages. Eventually we get to August 2020, I’m very bored in lockdown and rewatching Ahoy’s video on doom and after finishing it, I decided to give doom a try. I played through doom 1 and 2 in the dos versions packaged with steam, and I would not recommend that for first time players. Eventually after finishing doom 2 I decided I needed to try Brutal Doom, and shortly after that I discovered I preferred just playing in GZDoom to playing with BD. Eventually I found doomworld and the cacowards and have been loving doom ever since.

Lol the original DOS versions of Doom and Doom 2 is how we veterans started out.  We all thought it was so awesome when Id released the source code in 97.  But I again tried the original DOS version of Ultimate Doom several years ago and couldn't handle it.  No hi-res, crappy sounding music, no looking up and down.  It amazes me how I once played Doom like that and didn't think a thing of it.

57 minutes ago, Kor said:

I once played Doom like that and didn't think a thing of it. 

Yeah it's weird what you get used to. I did go back and set up my own version of DOSBox and found it much better, but how I ever handled the vertical mouse moving you forward and backward is completely beyond me.

A friend of mine showed me Wolfenstein, Doom and another game called Marathon in 1995 - I got the shareware version of Doom a few days later and got into it. I just got another copy of Doom yesterday and have tentatively started playing it again. I used to play a lot of games but gave up once they stopped making new ones for the N64. I've tried to get into other games without success over the years, but Doom is a tried-and-true classic. So...here I am. 

I had just graduated from college and was visiting my High School Band Director (still a great friend).

1993 I believe. Shareware version. I was... mezmorized. Only other game I had played was Star Wars X-Wing and a little bit of Wolfenstein.

He and I played through hours and hours and hours of Doom, Doom2, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Quake2, etc. etc.

Even installed a second phone line. I was a master at sersetup (if you know, you know).

I'm old as fuck now. Over 50. Yikes.

Look at that. Registered June 2000. Holy shit.

3 hours ago, Tolwyn said:

I had just graduated from college and was visiting my High School Band Director (still a great friend).

1993 I believe. Shareware version. I was... mezmorized. Only other game I had played was Star Wars X-Wing and a little bit of Wolfenstein.

 

He and I played through hours and hours and hours of Doom, Doom2, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Quake2, etc. etc.

 

Even installed a second phone line. I was a master at sersetup (if you know, you know).

 

I'm old as fuck now. Over 50. Yikes.

Do you still make levels/music?  I remember in the 90s I liked your stuff.

I really liked DOOM 2016 so i wanted to try the old games, now im addicted lol