Doom can now play itself

[retrogarden]

Doom is 15 years old today, as on December 10th, 1993, the first shareware version was uploaded to the Software Creations BBS Messageboard (according to Wikipedia).

I'm sure most of us had played this game, we played it a bunch in university as we all had different aged computers, and it was one of the few games that everybody could run.

What were your abiding memories of Doom?

And don't you all feel old now!?!?!?!

[Fred83]

first time i ever saw doom was on that tv show "bad influence",thaught it was amazing,then i got to actually play the game on the psone,which really did amaze me,finally when got first pc i installed and played it straight away.

[woody.cool]

first time i ever saw doom was on that tv show "bad influence",thaught it was amazing,then i got to actually play the game on the psone,which really did amaze me,finally when got first pc i installed and played it straight away.

I saw it on Bad Influence first as well. I really liked what I saw, and promptly got a copy of Doom when I got my first PC.

[killbot]

My first sight of Doom was in an Atari Jaguar brochure, and having only seen still images I was left wondering why everyone was getting so excited about what appeared to be a game involving some pixelated soldiers wandering about.

As soon as I saw it moving (probably on Bad Influence! or GamesMaster) I twigged what was so special of course. From that moment I was desperate to play it but I only had an Amiga A500 at the time, so I ended up out of desperation buying the risible Death Mask just because it looked similar. Eventually we ended up getting a PC and I finally got to play the real thing - and it remains one of my favourite games to this day. In fact I'd probably rather play Doom than 99% of modern FPS games.

[Fred83]

thats why i think the console ports were a smart move at the time,p.c's were still expensive at the times,also giving the cost of upgradeing at time,the console ports were plug and play,infact the psone version was the best selling game on psone

[DANW547]

I think I first played Doom on the PS1 which had Doom 2 included as well, absolutly fantastic but I prefer the PC version for the controls and the awesome soundtrack.

[Fred83]

pc version its the best,has more levels+monsters than psone version

[felgekarp]

First played it when someone put it on the network at uni, me and a few mates used to go in on friday nights to play it before going to the pub, I don't think I'd really looked at a pc as a games platform before that.

[Antiriad2097]

pc version its the best,has more levels+monsters than psone version

PS1 version has awesome audio though.

[AlleyKat]

Yeah, when I played Doom on a friends PC, I always played without the music which I found a bit dodgy, if memory serves. The near silence punctuated by the various sounds of growling monsters and doors etc made it a lot more atmospheric.

The PS1 version had a far better ambient musical score, I thought.

[Emperor Fossil]

Not long before Doom came out, I'd seen Wolfenstein 3d running on my flatmate's PC.

I had an Amiga. So did my other flatmate. Prior to Wolfenstein 3D, we were used to our Amigas being the king of games in our flat. The PC? That was a bit of a joke.

The PC-owning flatmate had a VGA card, but apart from the odd cool game like Dune (which was a bit better looking than the Amiga version) most of the games we'd seen on our flatmate's 386 didn't take advantage of VGA and were iffy EGA efforts with pukey colours and juddery scrolling.

And don't even mention the pathetic burps and farts of that PC-speaker sound.

Then he got Wolfenstein 3D and promptly bought a sound card to go with it. Suddenly we were spending hours on this previously sneered at machine. The gaming crown hadn't yet disappeared from our Amigas, but it was certainly looking a little tarnished.

And then not long after that he got Doom. And a maths co-processor. Holy censored! What a game. We were playing it, the guys from the flat next door were over at our place playing it, and when you weren't playing it, you were watching someone else play it.

By the time Doom II came out, one of the guys from next door had bought a 486. In both our flat and theirs, the sound of shotguns rang out at all hours of the day and well into the night. At times I'd go back to playing my favourite Amiga games, but I must admit, sitting back and viewing things on a 2d plane just seemed to be so lacking in immersion after being there on the ground, charging through the demon-infested halls of Doom.

At last the gaming crown had been snatched away.

PS. The other Amiga guy in our flat had a 1200. I remember one day after he'd moved out, I went around to his place to see the newly released Gloom for Amiga. We manfully tried to play through a few levels on co-op. It wasn't terrible, but the sluggish movement and huge pixels made one thing abundantly clear: it wasn't Doom.

Not long after that, he bought a Pentium 100. Maybe a year later, I bought a Pentium 133. Hello Duke Nukem 3D. Hello Hexen. Hello Quake!

One final note: That Pentium 133 is long gone, but I hung on to my Amiga!

[Nintendo&Sega]

First experience of Doom was on the Playstation (Playstation Plus magazine gave a free demo of a level). I'll never forgot showing one of my mates the mag, who promptly rushed out of the pending lecture at Uni and was not seen for a few days; he'd bought a copy of the aforementioned mag with demo and, like me, must've played it for ages until the full version was released.

Even better was when I had to buy a pc for Uni (no really!) and played Doom on the system it was intended for. Doom on my 486 (complete with Sound Blaster and 4x CD-ROM (wow!) was something else!

Not since Street Fighter II on the SNES had I so looked forward to a game being released! I don't think there have been releases post-Doom that have given me the same sense of excitement since.

Happy 15th Doom!

[Mayhem]

First played it just after coming back from Winter break at university, so January 1994. And right then I knew this piece of shareware was going to make a mark on the industry... we managed to get linked PCs running in the computer club for deathmatch action. Hours and hours of it...

[Katzkatz]

Doom was a great game. It happened just as the PC was beginning to be taken more seriously for games. What with a better DOS (in the form of 5.0 or 6.2 with the multiple startup sequences)and soundcards.

My first memory of it was from the magazines at the time. I also remember finally playing it and hooking up my brother's PC and my own PC (I think we used serial link up first), then moved over to using network cards. Loved Doom II as well, and also all the extra levels(WAD files;)). My favourite weapon is the shotgun! From then on Duke Nukem and Quake were great multiplayer deathmatch games.

[Vir_Lucis]

You know i came into this thread expecting it to be about someone programming an AI routine that could play all the way through the game

Anyway...

i remember first seeing Doom being run as a demo in one of those big computer mega-mall type places you get throughout Asia. Almost every shop was playing the thing on their demo PCs and there was a group of people huddled around each one. In fact, the first time i saw it i thought it was a Terminator game (must have been the marine's face...). Didn't actually know what the game was until a few weeks later when one of my friends had picked up a copy.