What Got You Into Doom?

[rouge_means_red]

I was 3 when Doom came out, and somehow I never heard much about it growing up. In 2014 I watched a youtuber playing brutal Doom, so I gave it a go and I even made a map, which I think turned out pretty good even though I knew very little about the enemies and weapons

[Monocled]

I started last year, I've always been into vintage stuff and modding so youtube just started recommending me videos about doom mods and i thought they were really cool

[eanasir]

Played Doom 2016 originally, and then found the secret levels and such, which made me want to play original doom instead, which is what got me into Doom.

[Murdoch]

My insatiable lust for the blood of the wicked and evil, naturally. The courts say "that's illegal" and "please don't do that" if I do it reality so I have to make do with doing it virtually. Spoil sports.

[EvilSqueegee]

I started with Chex Quest, which I got out of the box. When I heard that it was basically just a non-violent Doom, I hunted down the freeware version -- and then YouTube recommended me some Doom speedrunning videos and that got me to search for Doom on Steam, which I played a little bit before getting into sourceports.

[Skemech]

Some guy made a tribute map of his dead friend, and recreated his house

[ALilGrayBoi]

The very VERY first version of doom I ever played was the gba port. The controls sucked so I never picked it up again. 

I played MyHouse and that showed me a whole world of doom modding but I still wasn’t very into the game. I didn’t even notice I put freedoom as an IWAD instead of the official doom

 

I know you guys are gonna hate me for this but too bad. The first version of Doom that I actually played through was the unity console port. I just got PlayStation Plus and the ENTIRE Doom franchise was available to get with it. So since I played the hell out of mortal Kombat 1 and deltarune I decided to play every doom game I could get. Doom 1 - eternal. I would consider myself to be a doom fan by the time I beat doom 2 because that’s when I fully got into it. 
 

Later on Decino inspired me to try to make a doom mod. First experience mapping was horrible, took me 30 minutes to make a door. 
 

Now here I am, talking to strangers about a cool 30 year old game

[Baron T. Mueriach]

I was 10 and me and my dad were talking about violent video games and he mentioned Doom. Well, I forgot about it but then a year or 2 later I understood what it was and played the shareware version of it.

 

I was excited, followed by determined, followed closely by awe, followed shortly by frustration after realizing I had to pay for the rest of the episodes.

 

So I did what any rational person would do. I pirated all 3 episodes with a smile on my face. And I've been pirating anything that costs money since.

[EPICALLL]

Sometime around 2012-ish, my dad put it on the computer and irked me to give it a try. For him, it was nothing new, he'd been deathmatching regularly since day one, for me however, I went "hm, that's pretty cool" and left it at that. Fast forward to 2019, and now my dad is once again going "hey you should give doom a try." So, naturally, I did. Played through doom 1 and thought "Wait, don't people mod this game?" Looked at some of decino's analysis videos, looked at Civvie 11's video on doom 1, the usual. Anyways, it's early 2021 now, and I'm about halfway through TNT (I was rather stagnant with my playthroughs) when I finally decided to pick up some mapping software and learn to use it. I get doom builder, I get Slade, boot it up, and start messing around. Naturally, I was terrible at it. However, at the end of the day, that's how I got into doom.

[Celestin]

In 2020, I got into old-school shooters after playing Dusk. This lead me to YouTube channels like IcarusLIVES where I saw the crazy Doom mods people made. Now, I've played some Doom games before, specifically Doom 3 and Doom 2016, but they didn't grab me enough for a second playthrough (I've played a ton of Doom RPG years earlier, but likely wasn't thinking about it back then). 

 

Funnily enough, I've since grown out the fascination with GZDoom mods and moved towards more classic experiences, but still, it's the community's creativity that keeps me in.

[WhateverComic07]

Played doom 1 when I was little on my uncles Xbox 360. Then I played a browser version in class throughout my school years. I hadn't really touched it for years going into Covid, but then I suddenly had a lot of free time, due to the lockdown. So I bought the games on PS4. Played them, they came with a few custom wads as well, so after I played the I wads I played BTSX for a bit. I eventually got bored, but then a few weeks later I found Decino and Mt Pain 27. I got the games on PC, and I decided to try Scythe, because I had heard about it for years whenever I got slightly involved with the community. Scythe was what finally hooked me for good. Those last few maps absolutely mesmerized me. I was on Fire and Ice for over a week and I loved every second of it (through the tears anyway). It was my first foray into slaughter, and I wanted more. So I obviously immediately got my ass kicked by Scythe 2, Sunlust and Sunder because I wanted to play the hard stuff. I eventually eased up a bit after they humbled me, but I still to this day play primarily slaughter. I occasionally take breaks from the game, but every time I'm gone for long Decino or Coincident videos/clips end up pulling me back in.

[Artinum]

I first met Doom in the 1990s, when I was at school. Some of my school chums had it on their PCs, and I fell in love with it but wasn't particularly good.

One of them very kindly introduced me to a better way to operate the keyboard, and that made my efforts better.

I bought Ultimate Doom in a sale somewhere many years later, when I had my own PC.

 

Doom kind of lived in my archives for a while, only getting a new lease of life with the discovery online of ZDoom, which allowed me to play it on my PC again. I installed it a few times after that for nostalgic fun, but as far as I knew it was just... well, dead. It was an old game that lots of people remembered fondly, but it wasn't being developed any more.

 

I was particularly disappointed when ZDoom stopped working properly under Windows 10. One day it just locked up and I couldn't do anything to get out of the program - had to force shut down the PC. The second time it happened, I removed ZDoom entirely. It was too old to work properly and the website for it was dead, so no updates.

 

But I could still enjoy Doom on YouTube. There were quite a few videos about the weird quirks of the engine, which I found fascinating to learn about. There were even mad people still trying to break speed records, playing with a style and level of skill I never could.

 

And then one day I found a ninety minute video about a Doom WAD that someone had put together. It was called "MyHouse". I wasn't sure it was real - the engine was doing things that Doom simply Could Not Do - like doors that opened outwards instead of sliding up, or having floors above other floors. It all fit into the mysterious "game changing itself" motif, but that just made me think it was all a spoof. Except... there was a download link, and lots of people were commenting about playing it.

 

That's when I first learned about GZDoom, the newer and much more powerful ZDoom. It also introduced me to the world of custom WADs, because MyHouse proved you could do a LOT of new things. And then I found UDB and started attempting my own maps, and discovered the RAMP 2023 community project, and here I am today, creating ridiculous maps and playing others and loving Doom all over again.

 

[Cadman]

It's been so long ago....I cannot remember for the life of me what really got me started....the only thing I remember is that my only computer was a 486 processor running at 25mhz with maybe 2-6 megs of memory built in on the motherboard!  My upgrade was an "overdrive" processor that beefed it up to 50mhz!  The eventual graphics card I got was a 3dfx voodoo card and I had two of them running in SLI mode.  they got so freaking hot you could fry eggs on them!  We would take the cases off of them and blow regular fans over the cards to try and keep them cool.  There was no such thing as liquid cooling back then.  We had some wild LAN parties back then with some serious deathmatches over at someone's house.  I was really stoked when I upgraded to a Pentium processor.

 

Cadman - Member TeamTNT / Doom2 Grandmaster DHT5 Standards

[eevee231]

I started playing doom when i was 4 years old from my dad who introduced me to it because he was a big fan of the game as well. Never was good at the game and always resulted into using cheats which is also why those cheat codes are ingrained in my memory (thanks dad). i still vividly remember using the Doom 95 launcher to warp to my favorite levels or the secret levels since i never knew how to get to them. when i was 6 started to watch Youtube and still being a big fan of the game i searched up doom in the search where i was met with the world of all the community made doom wads. The first wad i found was Plutonia 2 and asked my dad to download it for me because i didn't know sites like Doomworld existed shortly after i discovered wads like Kama Sutra and Alien Vendetta. i played on and off through 2011-2017 mostly playing through the doom 95 launcher or through dosbox where my dad had downloaded some other wads using keyboard only. in 2017 i got a laptop and decided to play doom on it and using GZdoom im pretty that was the first time i had beaten doom legitimately, after beating all of the Iwads i went into a doom modding phase where i pretty much only played mods and didn't really play much vanilla. fast foward to 2019 and decided to play vanilla doom again and play some custom wads that i used to play when i was younger, so i played and beat AV on UV without the help of cheats and also decided to give PL2 another try which ended in defeat for me. but since then i've been playing doom consistently ever since. The reason why i stick with this game is just the amount of Community made content for this game, each wad more creative than the other. And the community here is just awesome.

[YeOldeFellerNoob]

I had been interested in DOOM since I was in 5th grade, and tried to "legally obtain and run" the SNES Rom on my old piece of shit tablet. Needless to say, it was fruitless; however, it wasn't until I heard of DOOM Touch, when I would soon have the ability to play DOOM. I would then get a piece of shit PC in 6th grade, which would lend me the ability to play DOOM the proper way, and I would soon discover mods like Brutal DOOM, That one Castlevania TC that I forget the name of, Sonic Robo Blast 2, Eviternity, ETC.

 

Basically, mobile gaming introduced me to DOOM.

[ALilGrayBoi]

On 4/30/2024 at 10:16 PM, Baron T. Mueriach said:

And I've been pirating anything that costs money since.

I totally haven’t been pirating doom wads and Nintendo roms, nope not me

[CactusChowder]

I watched my dad play DOOM a few times when I was little, and it made a huge impression on me. I always wanted him to play it, but he didn't spend a whole lot of time on computer games, and sometimes he'd play Command & Conquer instead. It took me a very long time to work up the courage to play DOOM myself, even after the general practice of fighting enemies in video games had become normal to me. But that was part of the charm and appeal of DOOM, that was the whole point. Like, it's right there in the name. It's not a game that lays out a heroic story for you and guides you through filling the shoes of the hero. The game tells you you're doomed and gives you mazes full of hostility and seems to actively take pleasure in trying to trip you up and surprise you and try to make you fail. If you want to get to the other side of it, the motivation to survive and persist has to come from you. As an adult, I find DOOM enjoyable, and other games (like Dark Souls) that ask you to step up and fight to gain ground and prove yourself in an inhospitable landscape that hates you or go play something else. There's something about that, getting pushed and pushing back kind of conversation between game and player that really scratches an itch.

[SkidyBoobFish]

I first saw Civvie-11's Video on Doom II, After that i watched his video on Doom 1 and The Plutonia Experiment.
Then i decided to try it myself since it was labelled a Classic and it was a genre that i never liked before.

After i played it for the first time, i loved it (Even tho i couldn't get past E1M4).

[Stroopwafel]

I remember gaining an interest in playing FPS'es because I always had hardware so terrible growing up that I never could run any fancy shooty games that I wanted,

until I got older and got the very hardware-intensive, fancy, Half-Life 2. I couldn't run it on maximum settings. In 2019. I remember enjoying the game, but the combat was just lacking. Was this the genre I missed out on? Didn't miss out on much. (Not saying that Half-Life 2 is a bad game btw, it's darn good, combat is just ugh) 

 

Then I got my hands on the Amid Evil demo amidst the Boomer Shooter renaissance, and man I was blown away. This was FPS combat, alright. My interest in boomy shooties spread from there, I remember ROTT being decent fun, being unable to stop playing Quake for a good month, and I avoided Doom because even for little zoomer old me, it looked too old.

 

But I got to it eventually, and playing the Steam release, I was underwhelmed. Playing it later with GZDoom, I was still underwhelmed. But I remember just returning to it every now and then, and enjoying it more and more.

 

It also helped that Ultimate Doom Builder was as accessible as it was, I love level editors. I'm the type of guy to spend more time in those than the actual games themselves, including Doom. Seriously, before I finished Doom 1 and Doom 2, I made two entire megawads of Doom 1 and 2 of custom levels. Which I'll never release, because they make the Master Levels look like (insert your favorite wad here).

 

Anyway, that's chapter 1 of my entire life story, chapter 2 will be released when I get run over by a toyota corolla and I can sue for big money

[Critter with Rabies]

ULTRAKILL got me into boomer shooters (even though UK is more DMC than Doom but whatever), aswell as watching Civvie's "Pro Doom" videos.

[vanilla_d00m]

I think I replied here but I got another one.  When I realized DOOM helped me deal with life situations, I got into it more.  Not because you shoot things, but the whole atmosphere of the game and feel I get when playing.  Seeing a doomed green space marine stranded on mars motivates me.  It makes me feel alive.. his life is harder then mine..

[ArchLiver]

I First played DOOM in 2020, It was the Unity Port, since i didn't know anything about source ports, then in December 2023, I saw my friend play it and realized "hey I used to play this game from time to time". I bought all the classic DOOM games and got GZDoom setup, and now I play DOOM, way, way too much. kind of weird for someone my age, since I'm a Teenager, and everybody I know just play's what's new, at least DoomWorld exists, full of people just like me who love DOOM. playing DOOM also got me into Quake.

[Apprentice]

In the 90's it was something of a "successor" to Wolfenstein 3D and the fact that you could play the game in multiplayer. That last part is what got me hooked . . .