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Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Doom Story?
I remember loading Doom for the first time from a 3.5-inch disk back in 1994. In 1997 the source code for Doom's Linux version was released just before Christmas. A hidden Doom level appeared in Microsoft Excel, and a Doom video was also used to promote Windows 95. By 2004 a drummer from Nine Inch Nails was recording the theme song for Doom 3...
There was that weird movie with The Rock and Karl Urban. Last year Doom was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. This January John Romero created a new level, and this weekend's release of a new Doom also featured a mod with one of the the original Doom II levels from 1994.
After a storied history, millions of frags, and thousands of hours of in-world gameplay, Doom holds a unique place in both the history of gaming and geeks. So share your favorite stories in the comments. What's your personal best-loved story about Doom?
There was that weird movie with The Rock and Karl Urban. Last year Doom was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. This January John Romero created a new level, and this weekend's release of a new Doom also featured a mod with one of the the original Doom II levels from 1994.
After a storied history, millions of frags, and thousands of hours of in-world gameplay, Doom holds a unique place in both the history of gaming and geeks. So share your favorite stories in the comments. What's your personal best-loved story about Doom?
Doom was the first game that made me flinch IRL. I turned around a corner and an Imp launched a fireball at my face. I actually ducked IRL believing a fireball was really coming at me! No other game had such an impact on me before.
My family got our first PC in 1994, I was 13 at the time and it came with a Demo disc that had the shareware version of the game. We initially had 2MB of RAM in that 486 DX/33MHz.. so we went out and spent $90 on two 4mb 30pin SIMMS so we could actually play it. Doom was the game that finally pulled me away from consoles and got me into PC gaming, and soon after, programming. Which eventually lead to a career in Network Security / System Administration, and then my own company. I owe a lot to Carmack / Romero's ID software. Anyone else on /. remember the 3-screen configuration: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Three_screen_mode Seeing that in the golden era of LAN gaming was so awesome, good times =)
/* * pope1 */
After we had played the heck out of the one-disk Doom demo, someone gave us a bootleg copy of the 3-disk full game.
We played it, were suitably awestruck, and called the phone number in the game.
"Hi, we're calling because someone gave us a bootleg copy of Doom...
Suspicious voice: "And...?"
"...and we want to pay for it. How much do we owe you, and where do we send the check?"
Stunned silence, then "Send it to this address, and mark it attention [forgotten name]. Oh, and make sure you include your return address!"
Some weeks later, a large box arrived with a retail copy of Doom, and a whole bunch of Doom and Castle Wolfenstein swag.
I was nearly 16 when Doom came out, as a young nerd at a high school in a rough area, it was certainly an influential game (as was my PC in general) to get escapism from the bullying one gets in a shithole neighbourhood and as a nerd, which 22 years ago, wasn't a cool thing.
I played the shit out of the game, at least for the next 4 years. I recall playing RS232 matches with 2 other pals, taking turns since it was only 2 player of course. Until we saved up pocket money basically for 16bit Coax network cards. (I still have my t-piece and terminator) I will say figuring out IPX / SPX when you have no goddamn idea what you're doing is tricky but when it works, wow.
I played basically all released versions of the game, none of the alpha stuff sadly. I recall getting hold of the patches which were differential patches back then. They took forever to patch the data but saved space. IIRC the release for Doom 2 was Doom 2 v1.666 at launch - they eventually patched the Doom 1 engine to the same level and beyond (last I recall was 1.9 or 1.9b or some such)
I learnt benchmarking thanks to Doom, in our MP matches, you had a 1/4 of a second advantage if the ............ loading dots would load the WAD quicker, I got VLB HDD controllers and all kinds of wacky stuff set up to get the game to load quicker and timed stuff.
I was a keyboarder initially, until we played it on a BBS in Melbourne, Australia - where I eventually learnt to go full mouse controls, I was one of the better keyboarders out there, but mouse playing was a whole new level.
I bought specific mice for the game, like the Logitech Wingman gaming mouse, no wheel to get the way or excess buttons, great shape. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=logitech+wingman+gaming+mouse&hl=en&tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr&ei=Zyk5V8rHJ5Do0gS11JqQCQ
I remember E1M1 at some point in development was modified, the original version didn't have the button to the left near the platform, which opens the window, to go out to the slime (armor) secret early. Dunno when that was modified, perhaps at the stage of Ultimate Doom.
I've finished the entire game 100/100/100 (items / secrets / kills) but doubt I could anymore.
Like many advanced MP players, I know the trick to fire the BFG directly at a wall you're facing, then strafe out from behind the wall to kill people instantly.
We used to wall run too, mostly on Doom 2 Map01 along the hallway.
I played in the 1'st PAX Australia 2013 classic gaming Doom event over in their PC hall. I think about 30 or 40 players entered. I came in 4'th IIRC, kid who won was like 24 or 25 (I was 36 at the time) I was pretty impressed to be honest, to see someone so young have a reverence for Doom. (Although I've always had a beef with using the plasma as a bit of a 'cheap' gun and to this day, I'm still reluctant to use the thing)
I know Doom 2, map30 is almost unplayable on a recommended requirements system, if you're not quick at finishing it. The amount of enemies the icon of sin spawns in, combined with the archviles means the map ends up with a heap of enemies on screen at a time and the game effectively 'swaps to disk' Even just 5MB of ram instead of 4MB, makes a world of difference.
I know the BFG noise trick, on map01 of Doom2, if you time your fall off the ledge along with your firing of the weapon, the BFG firing screech is silenced by your drop sound instead so people don't hear you fire it.
I know, in my *opinion* Doom 1, Episode 1 is 'real doom' to me. The atmosphere is fantastic, it's dark, the maps have an overall mars base theme and tileset, there's monster closets, the monster quantity, for the most part isn't unreasonable. I still think Doom 3 was underrated, it captured the atmosphere well. I still don't 'get' Serious Sam, 9/10'ths of the game felt like a shitty .WAD f
with Doom. I remember him working through the levels on nightmare mode working his way down through the weapons. So the final games he played were only using his fists. He said the trick was to maximize the screen so he couldn't see his health, that way he didn't hesitate. Prior to that, we would play deathmatch over the two phone lines we had. Before long, I would only agree to play him if I got the "fast" 486SX and he played on the 386. And he couldn't use the damn rocket launcher.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
I always found the most fun with Doom in using the editors. I liked guns that shot out angry enemies with hacked reduced turning radii, making them like guided missiles. Oh, and I spent way too much time hacking the graphics. Rockets had big smileys and writing that said "Have a nice day". Imps shot signs asking you about how your children are doing. Oh geez, I wish I still had a copy of all of the changes I made....
Most games back in the day you had to hack with a hex editor. So, I mean, it was fun changing the text in Heroes of Might and Magic so that you'd encounter things like a "Cuddle of Kittens" or a "Basket of Muppets" or whatnot. I even changed the game "Worms" to be "Wyrms", with all of the text therein modified. But random hex editing just didn't enable the sort of depths of changes that one could do to Doom with the editors.
Monkeywrench Ex Machina.
Was over at a friend's house and his little brother was playing Doom. Didn't think much of it since he had his screen so dark I could barely see what was going on. A week later my friend suggested we should play it co-op, all he needed was a null modem cable which I had. He already finished the first two episodes so I started with him on the third. Straight into hell! :D
Eventually I wanted to play 4 player deathmatch so I started looking into the cost of network cards. Eeeep. Way to expensive for a student. Lucky for me a friend's father's company was upgrading their network and I bought 4 arcnet cards and a passive hub for $50. Now I just needed cable. As look would have it there was a roll of several hundred feet of RG62 coax in my basement. Asked my dad what he was going to use it for. Nothing. Sweet! Just had to buy some ends.
The other problem is the cards had no jumpers. Configuration was done via software and the software sucked and didn't work. So I ran it through a disassembler and wrote my own version with nice menus and everything. Now I could play 4 player Doom in my basement with my friends. They'd lug their computers to my place around noon. I covered the windows in the basement so we were in total darkness and we'd play straight on through until 6am. Eighteen hours of pure doom, fueled by cheetos and jolt cola with breaks only for the washroom while I grabbed a new wad file from FidoNet (I ran a node).
One night one friend couldn't make it and we were short for our usual 2 vs 2 deathmatch game. Called up one of my SysOp friends and asked him if he wanted to play. Nope. But he had another SysOp friend of his, who I didn't know, three wayed into the phone call. So I asked if he wanted to play. Sure! Thirty minutes later I had a stranger on my front doorstep with a computer and big CRT monitor in tow. We've been best friends ever since.
So transferring the new wad files to 3 other computers by sneakernet was getting annoying. Especially when one computer could not read the floppy written by another. Booting into Windows for Workgroups was a pain so I had an idea. I told my friends to play without me for a bit and I pulled out the packet driver docs I had handy. "What you doing?" "Writing a file transfer program" "Seriously? Guess you're not playing with us tonight" "We'll see".
In half an hour it was ready. One or two minor bug fixes and it worked. The target machines would fire up the program first. The sender would start last with all the filenames to send. It would send to all receiving machines at once. I used broadcast to send out the file and the receivers would ACK or NAK each packet in a round robin manner to avoid collisions on the arcnet. Fast and efficient. They never doubted me again when I said I'd write something quick. :)
Eventually my new friend started complaining that he had to pull out his ethernet card and swap it out with my arcnet card. So we started hunting around for cheap network cards. We eventually found some and I bought 2 (one for myself and an extra) and he bought an extra. Got some RG58 cable and BNC connectors and we finally were on ethernet. We ended up having a flaky terminator one night so I shoved two 100ohm resistors in parallel into one end and electrical taped it in place.
Eventually my friend got a 4 port 10baseT hub and we switched over to twisted pair. I soon got one as well and we linked them together with the hub's 10base2 uplinks. So we started moving onto games that supported more than 4 players. And that was the end of our Doom deathmatch marathons.
Yep, Doom was the cause for my 486DX -> 486DX2 -> 486DX4 upgrades. And it was Quake that pushed our LAN Party group to go Pentium. We would always competed who had the faster processor. One time my friend got ahead of me but on one particular warm night his machine kept crashing. So he started taking the case off. "What are you doing?" "Putting it back to 166MHz" Busted!
We all had Matrox Milleniums for Doom and related games. Those cards had an amazingly fast framebuffer. Eventually I was the first to get a 3Dfx Voodoo card when games started supporting it. I think it was a raceing game called Whiplash that we played that was the tripping point. Next LAN party everyone else had one. :D
Then it was the Voodoo II. SLI. Eventually I jumped off the 3Dfx bandwagon when they started their Banshee and Voodoo 3 fiascos. Switched to an Nvidia based TNT card and later TNT2 but my friends weren't convinced. Then I got the GeForce 256. Next LAN Party everyone had one.
I was also the first to get a Gravis Ultrasound card. The look of amazement on my friends faces when actual musical instruments were playing in my games was priceless. Next LAN Party everyone had one.
I worked at Creative Labs back then. Once a week or so, they would let us stay after the place closed so we could play Doom on the network.
Got hooked, like many here I'm sure, playing on a 386. Had to crank down the quality to half, and knock down the screen display by a few notches to make it playable. Didn't matter, was soon ignoring the world around me. Would get up in morning, clear Doom before going downstairs for a pee, it became instinct. Then speedrunning through Doom2 before going to sleep. Every day. For months.
And the Doom dreams.... Don't tell me no-one else, when playing crazy amounts, wouldn't have dreams where the movement was Doom, the fast speeds, the strafing. Could be a regular other dream, but the movement would snap me out of it.
At Uni, we had a trip down to..hmm. can't remember if it was Birmingham or London, some tradeshow. Met the lovely David McCandless and the rest of the PCPro?(PCGamer? PCZone? Was a bit ago), and didn't do too bad. Everyone else was bitching about the 486's running slow, but after being used to 386, it was fantastic. Got through to the end of the informal matches, just McCandless beating me. Got a few freebies that were much appreciated.
Got into making own levels for when we had a lan party. The local shopping mall level was very popular (so wish I could find it again).
Left Uni not long after, got a job, then had a funny phone call out of the blue. "Hello, you don't know me, but I'm a producer for a TV show about computer games, and we heard you could make levels, we're based in Leeds, could you come and make a level of the studio for us please?" "Sure, uhm, how did you even begin to get my number?" "well, we rang directory enquiries for iD's number in the US and the guy asked us what for, when we told them we wanted a level, he said it'd be unlikely they'd have time, but he knew a guy... and so we're ringing you!" (thanks Malcom!). Funnily enough, was dating a girl from Leeds and was there most weekends anyway. Got to see some film they covered the tix at the cinema for, got to see the Playstation and play Tekken before it was released in the UK ("this is going to change everything!"), and made some levels. The other guy they contacted to make the monsters look like the presenters ended up being the Doom UK champ for a few years, but never got chance to meet him.
Was an amazing game, it was all down to getting it working that I got a network card, learned how to configure it, first ipx/spx, then later tcp/ip, that's come in very useful in my career. Enjoyed the creation of maps/monsters, that's also been a pastime in later years, nothing professional, but enough to amuse me.
Been a blast, BFG blast.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
I worked on one of the 1st editors for Doom. I had written parts of one of the more popular ones for Wolfenstein 3d and was even told to stop by John or John (the one who signed post with something like "the computer is the game"). but at least they changed their minds later when they found out how popular 3rd party levels were. We couldn't figure out a key part of Doom and were talking about it on usenet or fido net and someone sent me a C structure. The names were unlike any of the public editors and there were more details than I had ever seen. I remember it being something like a struct with unions or bitfields or something. After a bit of discussion along the lines of "they can't be doing that", code was written and a great problem solved.
A year or so later I created a level just like work and gave it to a friend who was arguing that he had played that level before since he knew were all the rooms were. In his office was the lamest of lame monster.
I went from Norway to Utah in 1991, there I met John Cash who used to spend a night every week or two playing Doom deathmatch.
When he fired up his network sniffer he discovered that all LAN communication took place over IPX global broadcast, i.e. they would traverse all routers and end up at every single one of the 6000+ PCs on Novell's internal network!
John found the email of a guy at iD who seemed to know something (John Carmack :-) ) and sent off a message stating basically that the networking code sucked.
A few days later he got a reply: "Sorry about that, we outsourced that development. Here is the source code, please fix it!"
This was "put up or shut up" time, so Jiohn rewrote that code over the next couple of days and returned it.
A couple of years later Cash was hired by Carmack and Abrash as the third core programmer on the Quake team.
Terje
PS. I personally sucked at Doom, but since I was involved with Quake asm development from the beginning I became significantly better at that series.
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"