What made you fall in love with Doom?

[Weird Sandwich]

First time I played it was on a Windows 95 games demo CD which had the shareware episode, and it was the music that really hooked me. Starting up and hearing the E1M1 music really gets you excited to play. Since I was a tiny child at the time I also had never heard music like it before which made it even more of a unique experience.

[Mayomancer]

When i played the PSX version as a little kid, all the weapons, monsters and sounds left a big impression on me and i was terrified of the game but loved it, then after re-descovering the franchise through Doom 3 it became part of my childhood/teens so getting into all the source ports, mods etc was very exciting and cool.

[LudicrousFPS]

I don't really know. I initially wasn't interested when my friend showed it to me, but I found myself watching more and more doom videos, and playing more and more of it instead of other games. 

[DynamiteKaitorn]

DooM Builder 2.

 

I just like level editors in games and seeing how easy this was to use, it was like gold to me.

[snapshot]

Ease of moddability

Zombie Horde

Who Dun It

[LexiMax]

Two reasons.

 

Doom was the pinnacle of cool to kid me.  The game was actually a little scary when I first saw it with just PC speaker sound effects, but as soon as I heard At Doom's Gate and heard that shotgun blast I figured out what the game was putting down and picked it up with the quickness.

 

Secondly, the game looked amazing for its era.  Like, maybe I didn't internalize exactly how amazing the graphics were because i didn't really have an appreciation for how limited a 486 was, but good grief the state of the art at the time was flat-shaded Virtua Fighter in the arcades.  Doom not only smoked that game graphically, but smoked it for free on a Personal Computer that I already had, as opposed to an arcade cabinet that probably cost thousands of dollars and didn't do anything else besides playing a single game.

 

EDIT: Forgot the third reason.  Those first two made me enjoy the game at release, but what brought me back and why I've stuck around was the fact that the source code had been released and people had made multiplayer ports with it.  I soon realized that it was actually more fun online than any of the Quake games.

[spineapple tea]

Pretty sure I was trying to find a game to map for and gave up on trying to learn Hammer. I was already playing Doom a lot but it was mainly because my brain just decides to fixate on random games I play (currently it's Minesweeper) so I felt like mapping for Doom would just be fun. But to say what made me fall in love with Doom, it's probably the creativity that can come from mapping due to how limited the engine is at times.

[Murdoch]

Atmosphere, gameplay mechanics, and weapons - particularly the shotguns. Seeing that pump action in, well, action for the first time was mindblowing. 

[TuomasGaming]

I like DOOM, because I like the concept of shooting demons with Sci-Fi surroundings. The first DOOM game reminds me of those Unity Web Player games from the 2010s, which I used to play as a kid.

[YeOldeFellerNoob]

I had heard about DOOM ever since I was, I think, 8 or 9. However, I wouldn't have tried out DOOM until I was, I think, 12 or 13. I was, one day, after finding an android SNES Emulator, I wanted to try it out with DOOM. So, I pirated a copy of SNES DOOM (At that time I was stupid, also, I don't pirate games anymore, and soon bought DOOM 1, 2, Final, and Master Levels, along with the Serpent Riders Trilogy). I tried, it, and it was still a corrupted mess of clown vomit. So, one day, I went onto the dark side of YouTube and found an interesting video, at the time to me at least. As it turns out, there was a Source Port, well, more so a collection of Source Ports for Android, called DOOM Touch. So, I set it up and I fell in love with it. Soon, I had gotten a laptop, which soon would have been destroyed by me spilling a fuck ton of tea on it and downloaded DOOM onto it. I learned about WADS, Wads Builders, SLADE, Source Port Compatibility, and so much more.

 

Not only did DOOM Touch make me love DOOM, but so did H-Doom. So, I was partially introduced to DOOM via hentai.

[Kokoro Hane]

Honestly, I just adore any sort of storyline or concept that involves demon hunting. DOOM fits into that criteria. Of course, my first exposure to the game, when I was allowed to play it I was about 8 years old. I always thought the game was scary (okay, it still is) but enjoyed playing it nevertheless. I've always enjoyed playing the game, but years later, now as an adult and learning about the modding and mapping community, and the fact I like to dev myself, was enough to pull me into wanting to get involved with the community by joining this forum, playing wads people got, and dabbling a bit with the editor myself. I just find it amazing how the devs immortalized DOOM by releasing the source code. Best move those guys could make! It means a lot to me to see creatives CARE that their product not only is popular in the moment, but for the future, and I think that is the one thing that really made me fall so deeply in love with DOOM. The devs care as equally as the community about this game's survival, new stuff is always being made, and none of us have to worry about never being able to boot it up as computers advance... source ports will just keep updating!

[Orchid87]

My first tastes of Doom were Doom II arond late 94 and Doom Shareware around 95. Played Registered version a bit later. So what really made a fan were novel first person view (I also played Wolfenstein 3D around the same time, but Doom varied architecture and sector lighting effects were much more impressive) and the exploration aspect. Being a 7 yr old kid, Doom II levels were huge, mysterious and full of secrets to me. Sort of the same feeling people get from Dark Souls games. I really miss the feeling of being lost in Doom, now that I know most of the vanilla maps by heart.

 

Only recently I've started to appreciate the thing that I didn't even notice as a kid - the tightness of Doom gameplay. It just feels good to shoot the demons.

[LainKreuz]

super shotgun.

[CazeL]

Jumpmaze 

[Ashurion Neonix]

My dad introduced me to the doom franchise. I experimented with a few sourceports. I later found out how easy it was to edit maps. Played eviternity a a day or two after it's release. And at that point I was fully invested in the series. I now know more about doom than him.

[NoXion]

Classic Doom is of course a masterpiece of game design that still stands up all these decades, and it has a still-active community that has produced an ever-growing vast ocean of custom WADs and mods. Whether such custom content merely expands the base gameplay with more levels, or utterly transforms the whole experience into something entirely new.

 

I think I really got into classic Doom when I discovered source ports. Combined with a frontend like ZDL they make running Doom completely painless.

 

[Andromeda]

The gameplay - simple to learn, hard to master. Incidentally it's why I tend to stay clear of most modern games since they aim for the opposite, but that's a story for another day...

[Samuel Slayer]

I was born in 1993 so Doom was always there in my childhood. The cultural zeitgeist sort of introduced me to it. I wish I was there experiencing its launch for the first time and to have been part of a very similar story I hear people saying as they played Doom for the first time in the 90s. Them ordering Doom from a magazine or buying it somewhere after trying the shareware. Playing with their kid brother and awkwardly navigating the halls of phobos with a keyboard... 

 

The first time I saw Doom was when I was just a little kid of couple to few years (I have no idea how old I was, definitely a toddler or little older), waddling the hallways of my grandparent's place. Someone had left Doom running on what seemed like a mid-90s computer, likely a Compaq DeskPro, with a pinkie demon gnawing at the player screen. Someone must've used IDDQD because the player never died. But I never forget the face of that Pinkie looking at me menacingly from that personal computer in an empty dark room. I hadn't been exposed to any video games yet so that thing was the scariest thing I had ever seen! 

 

When I was older I had games like Rayman & Colin McRae's Rally, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 & Unreal Tournament 99. PSX was my first console & I played Crash Bandicoot and several other games I have forgotten. Then came PS2 and I was playing games like Tekken & SSX & Tony Hawk. My first FPS was Unreal Tournament 99 but somewhere down the line I remembered Doom and ended up playing the Shareware episode. In my teens I went back to Doom 1&2 and played them proper, as much as I could with my Xbox 360. Doom was an arcade game and we even played Doom single-player with friends via split-screen coop, which sometimes devolved into us fragging each other in the single-player. But I didn't think of much Doom back then. I was playing other games in 2000s. Halo & Xbox was big among the kids and our friends had it. Then when I was in school, Half-Life 2 was the big cultural zeitgeist. Then I was playing F.E.A.R and then came the Call Of Duty rave. 

 

This sounds like rambling but the point is that me and Doom have history and why I went back to Doom is tied in gaming history. Living through 2010s I had become tired of games becoming similar and companies competing who could dominate the market with their flavor of a Modern Shooter. Mechanics introduced in Halo became commonplace in countless Call Of Duties, Battlefields or Gears Of War. The gameplay slowed down & classic shooters vanished, becoming nothing but a memory. I remembered a time before being invested in some cinematic military story and playing a heavily scripted rollercoaster of a level, taking cover and running slowly in a game where levels were reduced to empty setpieces where the most common collectible was a gun. I remembered how in Doom & Half-Life you collected medkits & supplies. How I was exploring levels to uncover caches or secrets. And how you had wacky guns and your enemies were interesting monsters and the levels were open-ended. I went back to Doom & Brutal Doom had come out. I fell in love with Doom all over again, but stopped playing once I had finished them. The content had ran out. Then, I was watching videos about stuff called WADs and couldn't believe that people could actually make their own levels! 

 

I went back to classic games and never looked back. This sounds like a lifestory but talking about Doom gets me rambling! It plays a big context in my life & I love it because to this day it has a lot unique qualities games don't deliver anymore. Be it open-source mod support, countless free content, lots of different commercial expansion packs, active community, classic shooter mechanics, involved dungeon-like level design, cartoony aesthetics, secrets, item-pickups/loot. Episodic format. Orthogonal system differentiation, great enemy design, iconic music, I love it all!

[ketmar]

4 hours ago, Samuel Slayer said:

and couldn't believe that people could actually make their own levels!

this theme is so common in this topic... and as with gameplay, creating content for Doom is easy to learn, hard to master. two key things, both sharing the same trait.

[JezChrist]

The moddability.

 

I spend more time in WorldEdit than I have playing war3.

After Reforged, the mapping community collapsed.

 

I played Doom some time ago, and I liked its simplicity.. I was suprised by everything the game had up its sleeve.

I liked the humour too.

 

So one day, after quitting SC:BW modding for political reasons, I decided to try out mappinh for doom.

So i played the game again, and it fueled my imagniation... it gave me sights of what could be accomplished.

It offered me the option to try and make the game my way.

A solid game with infinite moddability is what I needed.

And I got it ^^ So I stuck with doom, and I intended to stick with it for a long time.

[Retro Dino]

I'm not even sure honestly. I remember playing a Doom WAD on the Xbox 360 along time ago, and I feel in love with it. I sucked back then and i just remember playing the same starting level over and over. It was like the only game I had so I guess I just played it so much that I feel in love with it lol. Now it's the community and making WAD's. I feel like every guy at some point wanted to be a game developer, and making WAD's kind of fulfills that dream in someway. I've really been trying to show off my WAD's and asking people who test them how I can expand on my WADS. I've only made three of them so far, but with each one i feel I'm getting better and better. I'm so impressed with the WAD's some people in this community make, it's crazy! There's so much ambition! The community as a whole is great, but it can be hard for new comers. This community definitely has some assholes, but once you get through that everyone else that I've met has been wonderful. Most people are willing to help you and answer any questions you have. Heck even just having people take time out of there day's to play my WAD's is great. Also one last thing, I love the history of this game. I mean wow I don't think a game has so much history. Everything from being a cornerstone in FPS games, to Eric Harris, to still being relevant and winning rewards to this day. It's amazing, and I want to be apart of it until I die! (I can't believe I started this with I'm not even sure honestly, then go on to be sure about why lol.)

[Retro Dino]

9 hours ago, ketmar said:

this theme is so common in this topic... and as with gameplay, creating content for Doom is easy to learn, hard to master. two key things, both sharing the same trait.

Aint that the truth. I spent a whole day just fixing little things in a wad I made. Easy to learn, hard to master. 

[Swordofdanu]

Doom 2 (94) running on a roommates PC, the Chainsaw done it for me, never seen that level of brutality before in a game. Now I buy it on whatever platform I can. 

 

[The Lone Wolf]

My father love Quake and I worship to it. Then one day when we were QDMing. He told me that "Did you know the same people who made this game also made a game called DooM ? Hell... it wasn't bad but way more simple than this." Then I started to play DooM with the help of my father.

[Sunnyfruit]

3D, horror and blood in an era where videogames were toys at most. This set Doom as a representative of the "forbidden" set of videogames. When you're a kid, you want to break borders but not too much and Doom was exactly this kind of thrill and prestige you craved. Duke Nukem and the interactivity offered by the Build Engine pushed this even further but it didn't have that unique biomechanic surnatural aesthetic Doom had.

Add to that that it was a PC game in a console era, which elevated its devious prestige even higher.

 

Today? Mostly the solid arcade structure in an era where videogame design became muddy in the name of innovation.

[Chat-Chan]

The simplicity. Other games have a bunch of random shit packed into em and sometimes don't even teach you about them. Doom is just kill shit and listen to metal. I prefer that over any other game.

[Lorenz0]

Infinite content

[ZeroTheEro]

I was a kid when I played Doom for the first time

I guess the way it all looked so cutting edge back then, and the guns made me still remember it to this day.

[Vic Vos]

schut schut

[Pixel Fiend]

 

Buckethead did. The album comes with the soundtrack for Sigil. Goes great with the atmosphere of the wad. I wish I'd played 90's games sooner. Vanilla Doom 2 in dos is the best. I also particularly like Eviternity.