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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?
http://m.slashdot.org/story/7923
I beat nightmare mode in 1&2, it took a lot of saves. It also was at like 5fps on my old computer for doom2. Also I made a null modem to play with my buddy before the internet.
God spoke to me
10b2 was the network of choice for playing Doom in my neck of the woods (around 1994-5 I think). I never had a direct computer-to-ISP connection (modem or otherwise) after that.
That game was the reason I got this card called a SoundBlaster that one of my buddies swore I needed. He was right.
One day when I was very frustrated with work and people, I fired up Doom and got to the last level with the Big Nasty...and went into God mode. I decided I wanted to inflict maximum pain (to work out my frustrations) so I went after him with a chain saw...It was WONDERFUL!!! I chased him around and had him howling for a good half hour, but didn't kill him. But that was the best use for Doom I ever had...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
I wasted many hours playing Doom. When my little nieces and nephews came over, I'd have 3 computers networked to run Doom...I was the cool uncle.
I found out that the text chat in Doom used a standard IPX broadcast mechanism - when my father (a network engineer) came in and told me off for my choice of language.
I remember loading Doom for the first time from a 3.5-inch disk back in 1994.
Luxury! I had to toggle it into the front panel of a PDP-11 clone. Or was that "Hunt the Wumpus"?
We only had 1s and 0s, but we were grateful. Not long before, we'd had to program with only zeros.
I remember setting up bus coax Ethernet in our apartment complex to network everyone together to play. This was before WiFi and we didn't even have a hub. Good times, but don't forget to terminate the bus.
Doom was the first software I ever found pirated on the internet. I found it and downloaded it from a gopher site to my unix shell account then x modem to my PC.
I believe Doom was the beginning of my obsession with video cards. My first introduction to FPS games however began with Wolfenstein3D.
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.
Respawn, frags some sons o bitches, and get smoked in under 20 secs. Do it agian. Loved it.
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 */
In high school our computer lab had just gotten new PCs across the board the same time that the original "Doom Test" (playable multiplayer test version) was released. I actually spent a bunch of time playing it before and after school with the computer and math teachers (as opposed to other students).
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 remember paying my month's worth of pocket money back when I was at school to get a book which described the inner workings of Doom. It came with 10 floppies with the Doom source code and tools.
Incidentally, the book was quite good. It described in details the BSP algorithm used to compute the visible areas, fixed point math and the way Doom used non-standard VGA modes to do backbuffer flips. This book got me started on computer graphics (though I haven't used it much in my career).
Apart from having Doom dreams, which I'm sure we all had (yeah?), I remember going to a supermarket after a long session, and instead of turning to walk into an aisle, turning before the aisle, and strafing out into it. At that point, Doom had leaked into real life....
I hooked up my computer to my home stereo to show the game off to my roommates. I lived in an apartment in a bad neighborhood at the time.
I started to play and got as far as two shotgun blasts in before pressing pause to answer the phone. Shortly after the phone rang there was a very loud and forceful knock at the door. Said knock was followed by 'open up, police!'.
I went to the door, confused why the police were banging on my door. Several officers were standing outside with their guns in their hands while I had my phone in my hand. In my confusion I asked them what they wanted. They said they had reports of shots being fired and demanded entrance to my apartment. I let them in and showed them my computer with the game still paused. They were incredulous and didn't believe me, searching the apartment instead.
Ten seconds later they came back after finding nothing of interest. They then let me show them the computer game. I then showed them that by clicking the keyboard I could make the shotgun noise they heard.
Many additional police vehicles were outside. The officers had not yet bothered to tell the many additional cops outside that the shotgun was just a videogame. Much panic ensued as the officers outside started to yell 'shots fired' with their fellow officers inside my apartment..
Moral of the story. Make sure the officers communicate to each other. Amazingly when all was said and done I got off with a warning (since it was before 10pm) and many policeman looking at how I hooked the computer into the stereo.
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
Thought I'd cleared the level, was going back scumming for ammo and goodies when one of those pink things jumped me on the stairs
Yearrghhhh !!!! - oh shit, I'm looking at a mouse with the cable ripped in half and my wife is standing there laughing with tears pouring down her face
Well Doom and Quake were the (3D) killer apps that drove thousands (millions?) of gamers to upgrade their hardware. 386 to 486 in the case of Doom, and 486 to Pentium along with the 3Dfx graphcis card in the case of Quake.
While Wolf3d and Duke3D are an important part of gaming history, no other shooters even come close to the same impact as Doom + Quake which defines the FPS genre for decades. (Although Counter-Strike deserves a honorable mention.)
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 didn't really care for Doom, though a co-worker relating how he ran out of bullets, went melee and punched some dude in the neck was pretty funny. Now Quake, that was another matter. I got a lot of mileage out of Quake. I loved using the grenade launcher to bounce grenades off the walls and send them spinning after people. I haven't really liked the weapon feel in any FPS since then. The ones in Quake 2 felt like plastic toy pea shooters.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I first downloaded Doom shareware in the University Computer lab. People started crowding around me to see what I was doing. Then I figured out the multiplayer, and I started setting it up on all the other computers in the lab. "My first LAN party." That kind of networked multiplayer wasn't something that normal people were used to in 1994. Doom took over the computer lab the rest of the year.
I had a roommate was was addicted to it. He would stay out at the lab until 3 or 4 every night just playing Doom.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
My first experience with Doom was my uncle bringing over two floppies. It was about seven months after we bought our first computer, a Packard Bell 486/DX2. First time I had ever seen or heard of a ZIP file, and in this case, one spanned across two disks. Lots and lots and lots of hours of play, and much frustration from my parents about time being wasted. (Wasn't my first time-wasting game...interestingly, that award belongs to SimFarm.)
My most notable experiences...
1) I had a friend who loved shareware games. I brought Doom over and installed it on his computer. They belonged to an Assemblies of God church in town. Needless to say, she was -not- pleased with what she saw.
2) Multiplaying. Lots and lots of multiplaying. Doom -defined- multiplaying.
3) This one involved Quake, but hey, same company, same design team. My senior year back in '99, our programming class had many long, boring lectures whose time was passed very quickly by multiplaying Quake. A script-kiddie in class found an account w/ a blank password that had write access to the library server. Four weeks later, we got shut down. The network admin didn't understand why the server was super-slow every day at 9:30am in the morning, until he stumbled across a folder with Quake executables in it. Needless to say, he was -not- pleased.
Good times, good times.
I had my first taste of network gaming with Snipes on some old PCs back in the 80s, and later on Netrek, but nothing compares to the leap with LAN gaming (or even dialup) with the first Doom. Such a blast playing with friends. Even though the network code and graphics got prettier, there hasn't been such a big jump in the type of gameplay as with multiplayer Doom.
The other big thing Doom brought was community-contributed mods, from individual maps to total conversion mods like the very well done Aliens Doom. All of a sudden, whole new worlds were opened up beyond the core game and there was nothing like it. Many happy times including being a play tester for some of these levels. Yet nothing will compare to recording ridiculous voices and mapping them over the Doom event sounds when you're drunk. Burps, insults, snippets of political ads, assholes we hated on campus and any other ridiculous crap that only college kids would find funny. We had whole themes done for various things, especially professors in lectures and the odd photo that made certain college classes tolerable.
P.S. The Aliens Doom conversion mod led to the Aliens Quake conversion mod which was the best Aliens game that ever came out (if a bit buggy) until Fox killed it with a cease and desist.
Also I recreated an amazing Doom 2 map (map 7 I think) in heretic. It got kicked of of cdrom.com due to copying id. Yah, fuck you and George Allen.
Gads I am old (and a bit drunk). Just finished getting my ass handed to me in the new game.
Silence is a state of mime.
meh, whaddya gonna do?
Haha yea. I remember my brand new 486 100. Had 8mb of RAM. Went to play Doom, nope not enough Ram. Should of been a warning sign. Had to upgrade to 16mb of ram. 96 bux later.
Hard to believe that 2 historical releases of software, which have defined industries for the last couple of decades, were released months apart.
I was lucky enough to be working for Europe's only network equipment vendor, Spider System Ltd in Edinburgh.
We had a 64K connection to the internet via Edinburgh University and JANET.
This allowed us to download both packages and all their subsequent updates.
As I recall ID Software knew more about games than they did about networking.
The original multiplayer version used IPX broadcast and our office network would grind to a halt ever lunch time.
All network activity LEDs would be on solid green.
An epic time to look back on, even then I knew the moment I saw both Doom & Mosaic I was seeing something very profound.
The word "disruptive", doesn't even begin to cover what they brought about.
Intel DX 4 25 Voodoo 2 This and Mechwarrior with a CH Force FX HOTAS consumed way too much time...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Our software engineering company (FileNet) network performance came to its knees every day between 5 and 6 pm. Networks team and engineering working hard to identify a possible network denial of service attach or an intrusion. Lots of multicast packets flying everywhere at a high rate of speed. Took about a week for figure out it was some staff playing doom.
I NEEDED to play this game no matter what so I run it on my 386 computer with a B/W VGA monitor on a 4MB Trident card and a Sondblaster compatible clone card, but the processor speed was so slow that I had to downsize the window to about an inch and a half so the game could be actually playable. That was my very first computer bought with lots of effort, crappy but I was very proud of it
Beating nightmare in 1, 2, TNT and Plutonia without save scumming every 5 seconds.
I still think it's one of the most difficult "achievements" to get.
I had a Doom port running on a Canon G3 camera, around 2003. I don't know who wrote that port, but it was a very cool demo of how powerful cameras had become by that point.
Jerky low-quality unaccelerated 3D graphics will do that.
Back in high school, a classmate had set his computer to boot directly into Doom.
I remember getting a copy of a DOOM Alpha.
None of the monsters moved, you could jump and crouch (it crashed if you were walking crouched backwards up stairs). It had an option in the menu to hi-color support (which didn't work - crash). But we were in awe of what it looked like, compared to say Wolf3D.
Doom was the reason my friend and I threw phone cable over walls and street to connect our computers through the serial port. The joy of that dm.exe sync sound!
In hindsight that was dangerous, beside RX and TX we should have connected ground as a minimum. But hey.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Our country built on a pyramid scheme? That's doom.
Back when DOOM II first came out, I had gotten my first "modern" computer, and I was between semesters at college. As I had my computer at home, I had no one at school to play against. Fortunately, a couple of my best friends still lived in the neighborhood, so late at night we would connect our computers via modem to play deathmatch with monsters.
(The atmosphere in my bedroom at the time was awesome, too. I would have headphones on, and all the lights would be out except for my bedside lamp, which had this odd plastic orange lampshade. Thus, my room would be filled with this dull orange light...)
Anyway, deathmatch with monsters was fun because not only did we have each other to beat on, we could also take out the level's monsters if they were getting in our way or if we wanted a challenge. What made it even more fun was that if you had multiple players on a level, the game would alter the monsters in the room to match the challenge. In one level ("O of Destruction", if I remember correctly), I remember spawning in, hearing "ker-THWOMP ker-THWOMP ker-THWOMP", and thinking, "That sounds like a Cyberdemon. Nah, couldn't be, there isn't one in this level." I turned a corner, and right after my character was turned to paste by three rockets, said, "Holy shit there IS a Cyberdemon!"
To this day I'm not sure who had the higher kill count that day: us or the Cyberdemon. I DO know we had to call a temporary truce so we could take out the Cyberdemon... ;-)
I remember going to the computer lab at my friends' University and spending a Sunday morning trying to figure out how to get multiplayer working, because that was the only place we had access to networked computers. Turned the admins had put an irritating security setup in place so that if you made any changes to the hard drive, the OS re-imaged on reboot. We knew nothing about networking, but knew we needed some kind of drivers installed, and so there were many reboots trying to work this all out. In the end we got it, but couldn't get all four of us in a game for some reason, but played 2v2 for a solid two hours before we got caught and kicked out. Kids these days have it easy!
December 10, 1993. A day that will live in infamy for me. I had been waiting for the release of Doom for many months and finally the day was here. I dialed up my modem to the Apogee Software BBS and got through on the first try! Oh joy! I madly scrambled to find the game and started the download. About half an hour later my mother picked up the phone and I was disconnected. I couldn't believe it. After she was done with her call I madly redialed. Busy. Again I tried. Busy. And on it went for a tortuous four hours with me cursing my mother the entire time. Finally I got through, downloaded and of course was in heaven for the next several months.
I had played through all the levels of Wolfenstein 3D by the time Doom came out, and I played all of Doom too, of course but it wasn't anything I hadn't already played a lot. That was the era when there were a pretty good number of maze FPS games out. My favorite was Heretic, which had more of a fantasy/magical than a militaristic theme going for it.
Doom really wasn't anything new from Wolf 3D so I didn't notice that much about it. I was given the full version of Wolf 3D on floppy disks by a lover; she was actually a Mac head at the time but had a PC for games.
There were mods for earlier games (a few for Wolfenstein 3D for example) but Doom was the first game that really saw an explosion in modding. The release of the source code in 1997 only caused the community to grow even bigger.
Doom was also one of the first games (if not the first game) out there where the developers officially endorsed modding through the release of the source code for the original Node Builder (and various other bits of technical info like the format of the music files). They also had an official feature to load add-on wad files and were otherwise quite friendly to Doom modding.
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.
We used to hook up our desktop (486 dx) to this little color latop my dad had bought (486sx with the smeariest non-tft screen you had ever seen). It was my first taste of multi player gaming on pc. Incidentally, that laptop was given to me a few years later and was used exclusively for nethack.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I had a college roommate who worked for a computer surplus store that took old computers, recycle some and fixes others. He brought home a 386 PC, loaded up Doom and started playing. Of course, I was greatly interested in playing. He got so disgusted that I spent more time on his computer than he did that he brought an old IBM PC AT (286) in an industrial case that bolted to the floor and weighed 80 pounds. (The token ring card that came with it had an Intel 186 processor.) Although the 286 couldn't play Doom, I could play the older side stroller games from Apogee and ID Software. I ran a Wildcat! BBS with a 2400 baud modem on it for several years. I should have kept the case, it was a conversation piece. I kept moving too much in my younger days and the case modding scene was many years into the future.
I've never been much of a twitch gamer (poor eye hand coordination) and my upstairs neighbor used to rag me good naturedly about my addition to Sim City, Civilization, Master Of Orion and other turn based/strategy type games. So, one evening he pokes his head over the balcony and invites me upstairs to see his new computer (a 486) and this new game (which turned out to be Doom). So, as the game is booting up, he's telling me about how good he is at the game... and then proceeds to lose all his lives in less than a minute. Ok, he says.... and tries again with the same result. This happened about four times before I gave him some grief and wandered back downstairs laughing at him.
Though to be completely fair, he was pretty good at real time/twitch games, just that night he couldn't seem to keep it together. A few days later we tried again, and he gave me a complete tour of all the levels. Never did let him live it down though, every time after that when he wanted to show me a new game, I would ask him "this isn't another Doom is it?".
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.
Early in 1994 (when I was 14) I thought of a masterplan at school. We'd had some brand new 486SX/25 machines delivered and I knew they'd be able to play Doom, the game everyone wanted. We also had a 10Base2 network installed and I'd found they'd forgotten to disable booting from a floppy. Handily, they had DOS IPX packet drivers on the C drive of each machine.
As luck would have it, the head of IT was due to visit a conference in London one afternoon, meaning the IT rooms would be unguarded. I arranged with some friends to "bunk off" of Games, a subject I hated... I was (and still am) rubbish at football, hockey etc. We snuck into the main IT room, left the lights off and got to work. 10 minutes later there was a roaring (albeit mute) game of deathmatch Doom in full swing... we were having a great time of it!
Just as I was introducing my chainsaw to my best friend's face, the door burst open, the lights went on.... and the head of IT walked in, a look of absolute amazement on his face as his gaze moved across the screens. It turns out the conference in London had been cancelled at the last minute.
Expecting the rollocking of a lifetime, all that happened was that he said "Boys, you shouldn't be in here!"
We turned off the PCs and left for the library, in disbelief at what had just happened.
Years later, I suspect that the head of IT was singularly impressed at what we'd got the school PCs to do, but of course he couldn't condone it. I don't know about him, but I ended up logging hundreds of hours at home over the coming years playing co-op and deathmatch Doom (and Doom 2) with friends, family and eventually complete strangers over the Internet.
Happy times.
I remember making a sound mod for Doom with Predator sound effects.
The imps made the Predator/crow noise... clack clack clack ;)
When you picked up a gun it was Blain saying "payback time"
when you jumped or fell it was "get to the choppa!"
we replaced all the sounds... we thought it was pretty cool at the time... but we were young... and unless you were on a local BBS and had a modem you probably didn't see it
Back in the day, 1994ish, you had to run PC games in DOS to run well. But IBM had OS/2, the source code for DOS and Windows and they were doing amazing things on the PC. Great multimedia things like sync'ed video/sound and in multiple windows. Sounds crazy now but it was a big deal on the machines back in 1994. They were ramping up OS/2 Warp for consumers and hired someone to create Doom/2 for OS/2. There were two Comdex conferences, one in Spring and one in Fall. At the Spring Comdex IBM and Id showed Doom/2 and it was all the buzz. There were copies leaked off ftp sites and it was pretty cool playing Doom on the desktop with other apps. They showcased this at Spring Comdex and by Fall Comdex Microsoft had created something for the Windows beta codename Chicago because they couldn't allow OS/2 to get mind share. Chicago was to become Windows 95 was still vaporware. It was the beginning of Microsoft's venture into the gaming industry.
I found a link referencing it here: http://www.os2ezine.com/v2n7/doom.htm
The OS/2 multimedia system was pretty good back in the day and top notch on PC hardware. That is until I saw BeOS. Boy, it so sucked that Microsoft got away for so long doing illegal crap like locking vendors into installing only their OS or having to pay them even if Windows and/or DOS were not installed. BeOS shut down because they could not get any hardware vendors to install it on computers. Palm then bought BeOS and totally wasted any opportunities to use BeOS in ways which leveraged its capabilities.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
iddqd, idkfa, idclip, idspispopd, idclev##, idchoppers
Remember Incredible Universe? The awesome stores before Fry's Electronics bought them out?
The Phoenix, AZ store on Baseline had setup Doom head-to-head for people to play, which was great. Later, a local BBS called The Stomping Grounds setup a kiosk in the store where a local user could play against the users playing on the BBS, and it was presented on a big screen TV. Well, I had become one of the top players by now, almost as good as SillySoft himself. I sat down and just completely wasted people left and right on Level1 (Doom 2). A small crowd had gathered and I think they started calling me "Monkey Boy" because I could dodge everything and constantly destroyed the other players. It was a great once-in-a-lifetime feeling; like a true modern gladiator. If only I had known the line "Are you not entertained?!?!"
it was a Packard Bell 486 DX2 with 4 MB ram. My parents bought it because they thought it would be "good" for me. My uncle came over with a baseball card cardboard box's worth of pirated 3.5 disks. One of them was Doom.
I remember installing doom and then having to have a "boot disk" to give me enough RAM to run the thing. Glorious, pixelated violence meant i was the coolest nerd on the block for years. So many imps died. So many friends looking over my shoulder and taking turns as we cleared Phobos of hell's minions.
Doom taught me a lot. Configuration. Boot disks. Zip files. Ms-DOS commands. Piracy. Modding. The internet (happypupy and bluesnews led me straight to some sort of Doom .wad depository, wherein I could download custom mods of Doom, including an MST3K sound replacement .wad I still insist on using whenever i boot the game up)
My uncle passed away around a dozen years ago, after a futilely stupid battle with type 2 diabetes (stupid as in, not following doctors orders and losing your legs, kidneys, and vision). But i will always remember him as the uncle who brought me Doom.
hookers and grits.
My brother gave me the shareware demo a week after I had broken my finger playing cricket. A few hours later I'd finished the demo, and my finger has never quite been the same.
I remember spending many Saturdays playing death match against my flatmate over a RS232 cable strung across the hallway. Taking breaks to hit the takeaways around the corner. That guy was in love with the plasma rifle, and he used it to beat the snot out of me more than a few times.
Now I'm the head of a computer science department and he's a funding director for a major research organisation. Coincidence?
Doom had *awesome* mods (there were so easy to create because the monsters weren't 3D models, they were just a bunch of 2D textures, like an animated gif). There was a great one which changed the sounds to a Monty Python theme (every gun shot said "Ni", etc.). Throw in two more mods and I got to kill the most evil demon of all (Barney, singing "I love you, you love me") by firing frozen chickens at it, to the sounds effects of the flying cow. I think this is the most fun I had playing an FPS ;-)
Reading some of the other comments is making me remember more stories about Doom.
Playing two player co-op the first time via null modem cable at a friends house. He goes into a room and a door closes behind him that I can't open. "Get in here!" "I can't! Door wont' open" "Help!" So I switch to his view to see what's going on. A huge horde of monsters is advancing on him and he's cornered. "Yeeeeech" as I switch back. "I don't want to watch the slaughter" We reloaded and this time we both stepped through at the same time.
One level in Hell we got toasted quick. So second attempt we just ran for this central building shaped like a Y. I ran up the stairs and cleared out one branch quick and then the other. Since only the two sides were open to the outside we stayed in there and used it as a shooting gallery. It went on for 15-20 minutes as we slowly depleted each weapon. When all monsters were finally dead I had 5 handgun bullets and my friend has completely out. Had to wait till the adrenaline wore off after that.
I started playing the game keyboard only as I would suck with the mouse because of not being used to it. I'd always switch back to keyboard only. Then one time my friend was circle strafing around me and I could not hit him. I got so mad that I moved my right hand over to the mouse and every singe shot of mine hit him. Never went back to keyboard only after that. My friend asked how I did that and I said, started using the mouse.
Had a friend nearly punch me as every single frag I did on him on one level was with the chainsaw.
My friends could not figure out how my computer would load Doom so fast. I was always the first one done with the loading dots and waiting for the others. And this wasn't a slight speedup, it was significant. One day my secret got out. My friend was standing next to me when I rebooted my computer. "Why is is it taking so long to boot?" "Ummmm. It's copying the doom directory into a ramdisk...." "Oh! You bastard!"
Our favourite map was called dick. Yes, the filename was dick.wad :D It was a very small map. Transporter from one side to the other. Lots of open rooms, a few long corridors. Ammo and health everywhere. I'm mean literally everywhere. If someone fails to kill you quick you just run around and you're back to full health and ammo. But because of the small size we actually wrapped the frag counters really quick. The replaced the respawn sound. First time someone died and respawed all we heard was a choir sing the word "Alleluia". We had to stop playing for a few minutes because the four of us were laughing so hard.
Played this one map where my friend Bill was hiding in a room. Every time I opened the door he'd start shooting out of it so I couldn't come in or fire back. He had ammo in there so was not going to run out soon. Switched to the BFG. Opened the door, he fired through it as usual, door started closing down. Fired the BFG and swung over to face the door while it still had a crack left at the bottom. Shot hit the door. Splash damage made it through the crack. :D
Same map. Fired a shot at Mike across the large central open area. I'm up top he's on the bottom. My shot goes straight. Doh! But he gets on an elevator. As he's going up the shot is moving across. They meet at the other side up top. As he dies he yells "What the hell just got me?" "BFG from across the map!"
Same map yet again. Drop Mike with a rocket. "Hey, meet rocket boy!" My friend Jon frags me from behind with the plasma right after I say that. "Hey rocket boy, meet plasma man!" Laughter erupts in my basement as I just groan.
Two vs two deathmatch. One map had a room with pillars in the middle. They were up normally but when someone came through the lower passage they would drop to let the person go through down below to the other exit on the opposite wall. I was in the room lining up a shot on Mike with the shotgun. Just as I pulled the trigger my te
I played its leaked alpha/beta or whatever it was and tried it on my king ant's 386 portable work machine (IBM P70). It was beautiful, but not playable.
Then came shareware release after 12/10/1993, but I couldn't play it (too choppy and no audio card). So, I gave a copy to my next door neighbor with his 386 DX desktop PC. He played it for a little bit and told me it was amazing, but he had to study for his college freshman finals. I finally played it when I got my own custom built 486 DX2/66. Then, came dial-up multiplayer with him. Oh my, that was the best game when we played together co-op.
Then, came in making my own DOOM 2 mods. I also hung out with a local BBS with people in making one/1. Even it got SirDOOM working to have 4-players multiplayer over dial-up! We even recorded demos of it. It was incredible and worth it! :D
I was addicted to ftp.cdrom.com's DOOM stuff. I have many other stories too. I even had dreams!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was a Junior in high school, the year was 1993. 2 of Borland's Tech Support representatives in the C++ group, Jeff Peters and Tom Orci, offered to run a class on C programming for a few interested high school students. We would go to Borland after school on Wednesday (IIRC) evenings and they would teach a class on C programming.
Well, back in the day, the tech support department was a fertile ground for software hacking of all types and they were a Beta site for id's DOOM. I remember sitting down and playing 4 player IPX networked DOOM, it was so scary and amazing!
One of the guys there was actually hacking together a map editor while it was in Beta, he reverse engineered the WAD format and built the first viable 3rd party map editor for DOOM.
I recall those Wednesday evenings with great fondness, I made several good friendships that lasted for years after that, I learned how to program in C on DOS with Turbo C++, and the experience cemented my path in life, giving me skills and a vision of what I wanted to do. Now, almost 23 years later, I owe much of my success to those early formative years in high school.
486 + 386 + null modem cable = 1 new universe of fun
[ Nostalgia ]
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I remember not being able to run protected mode sutff, due to hot having a 386, but only a 286 machine ha ha! Then I got a 386 SX with no co-processor and only 2 MB of ram...Had a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys that allowed me to choose weather i want extended or expanded memory upon startup - if i held down the SHIFT key it would load the ammound above 640 KB as extended (himem.sys) and otherwise as expanded (emm386.exe), cause not all cames could make use of both types of "extra" RAM. When DOOM came out I had 2MB of total ram and i remember reading in a magazine that the game will require 4 MB of RAM just to run? Ha ha and I had 2 MB available, despite all my 'hacks'!
Seeing Doom for the first time was an eye-opener, but I think an even bigger one was when I bought a 3DFX card when it first came out, and saw Quake in openGL. Simply incredible.
My most memorable Doom moment was the first time we had a mouse user play on the LAN with us. We were instant converts. Well, after he slaughtered us endlessly and strafed us faster than we could turn.
In Quake 2 my most memorable moment was killing six people with two railgun shots. I freaked out. The other players on the server freaked out. It was awesome.
And no accusations of being a botter, which was nice.
I remember travelling half way across the country to meet a guy in a car park and swapped an Amiga 2000 for a 486DX2 chip, just so I could play Doom.
Also, during a short term night job, (digitizing gas mains into AutoCAD for a well known UK gas company), I created a custom boot disk for the office Novell Netware network, so we could "borrow" 4 of the office PCs and use them for multiplayer Doom. It was my first networking experience and from that, I got into network and system administration as a career..
I was in college when my roommate told me about the coolest new game; it's like Wolfenstein but better. It being college, somebody kindly left some bootleg copies in the lab computers between the routine clean-up/reimage. I was initially uninterested, but eventually gave it a try. After one all-night session a few weeks later, I crawled out of the lab feeling somewhat ill. Ever since then, playing Doom makes me slightly nauseous. I don't have any problems with other games like Descent, but I'm sick of Doom forever. Maybe, 20-odd years later, the effect has worn off...
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Tonight at 11.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Because there's a new one out obviously. Just talking about a thing that exists doesn't make advertising.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
My grandfather was at the battle of Dunkirk. If it hadn’t been for the floppy disk containing a copy of Doom in his inner pocket, that sniper would definitely have got him.
No wait! The disk contained Wolfenstein! Sorry, I don't have any Doom stories.
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.
It wasn't the real Wolf3D. It was originally an expansion to Wolf3D that iD decided to cancel. I don't expect you to care about facts, but someone else might.
Yup, I still remember buying another 2GB so I could play it on my 386. A lot of people I know did that. I'm sure PC and RAM sales spiked globally around that time. Bought DooM 1.666 for top price back in the day. I remember making up a null modem cable and transferring the game to a mates PC at a whopping 115200 bps. Still faster than installing with floppies. Now that was a LAN party.
I always wanted to get a hold of an early copy of DooM that let you network three PCs to give three viewpoints: left, forward, right, for a triple monitor experience. I never did though.
There was a good modding community for a while too. I still have the Simpsons mod somewhere around here. "This will, this will, this will scare the pants off him."
The Total Conversion mods were amazing too. Aliens, Star Wars. "Can't get out that way".
Later I came to appreciate replacement engines that let you play beyond the 30fps limit imposed by the original engine, as well as of course opengl rendering and up/down mouse look.
The game was a real triumph for Shareware too. The free version was widely distributed on BBSs around the world and in probably every PC magazine at the time. It was every bit as good as the full version, it just stopped at the end of the first episode (okay not strictly true as the plasma rifle and BFG weren't there if you cheated) but left people wanting more, enough to buy the full version.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
He didn't say, so I guess he means all of them.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Careful not to burn your mouth drinking your coffee before it's cool...
You can buy a legal cd key for about half the price if you know where to shop.
John Stalvern waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There were demons in the base. He didn’t see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Cernel Joson were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.
John was a space marine for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the spaceships and he said to dad “I want to be on the ships daddy.” Dad said “No! You will BE KILL BY DEMONS”
There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the space station base of the UAC he knew there were demons. “This is Joson” the radio crackered. “You must fight the demons!”
So John gotted his palsma rifle and blew up the wall.
“HE GOING TO KILL US” said the demons
“I will shoot at him” said the cyberdemon and he fired the rocket missiles. John plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.
“No! I must kill the demons” he shouted
The radio said “No, John. You are the demons”
And then John was a zombie.
March 2002, by Peter Chimaera
Doom was a little before my time, but I did enjoy playing it around 11 years old on the Jaguar. I'm not sure why, but for some reason we ended up with fairly odd names for a lot of the monsters. The pig men were "Biscuit Eaters" the floating balls were meatballs (obviously) and we ended up calling one of them "Leaning Jowlers" which is a pig roll position from Pass the Pigs. We had a lot of fun with it :)
My LAN days focused mainly on CS, Starcraft, and AoE2.
I remember my friend and I getting really high and loading the Simpsons mod. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my life.
When I went to high school, I was one of a number of kids who had privileged access passes to the computer halls.
The first version of Doom we played was the Press-release version. It was date-limited, so we had to turn back the internal clock on the PC to make it run.
The game's popularity spread immensely, and people with passes invited their friends into the computer halls as well. At one time, all PCs in all halls were occupied with kids playing Deathmatch. Because it had got out of hand, all access passes were revoked.
Doom also inspired me to learn more about 3D graphics and programming.
At one time during a regular computing class, I had some extra time so I started Doom just to see if I could get any hints to how it worked. The teacher did not accept my excuse for running it, and subsequently threw me out.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I worked at a mini-golf/arcade complex long ago. I was often assigned to go-carts, which was reasonably far away from the main building, and it wasn't a rare thing to be the only employee working them. The cash registers were just regular computers running windows 95 (98?). Installed doom on the register to help pass the time. Alt-tab back to the register software as needed.
Doom came out while I was in high school, a computer nerd with only 1 friend that also loved playing computer games, it was the game that took over my life for 3 years. From playing the Alpha, found on a local BBS, to buying each iteration of the shareware version until I eventually found someone to swap games with long enough to make copies of their full version of the game. There were eventually 2-3 books released that were over an inch thick, filled with tutorials for creating your own levels and came with a CD filled with 100+ levels and other mods the publisher had copied off the Internet. I bought one of the books and my friend bought another. We kept competing to see who could make the best level and spent many nights just going through each of the free levels that had been included one-by-one.
I would load my heavy desktop (horizontal) computer, a 486 DX2/66 with 1MB of RAM, into the back of my Mom's Nissan Pathfinder along with an equally heavy 14" VGA monitor and other accessories, just to drive half a block down the road to unload the computer and bring it up into my friend's room. We used a null modem serial cable for a few months until I used money from my first job to buy a "Network In A Box" kit that came with 2 10Base2 cards, cable, and T connectors. It was missing the terminator caps which we didn't figure out until a week later. When the Gravis Gamepad came out I saved for 3 months just to buy it and played Doom I/II exclusively with that until I wore the buttons out.
One of the great things about that time was it helped open our minds to other games. We became so obsessed with playing multiplayer that we scoured BBS's and eventually websites seeking out other games that had multiplayer as well. We would play almost non-stop, only taking bathroom breaks, and to sneak out to go to the local 7-11 to get snacks. When the Sun came up that was our signal to finally go to sleep.
When Doom3 was released I bought the boxed version and kept it sitting on a shelf for 2 years until I could finally afford to build a powerful enough computer to run it at Ultra settings. When Doom came out for Xbox360 I played through the entire thing on Nightmare up until Episode 4, I got stuck at E4M2 with only a few shotgun shells and 35% health remaining. Tried many times to get past that but eventually lost my save after my 4th RROD. With Doom 2016 I've been taking my sweet time savoring every minute of the gameplay. They finally brought back the speed and visceral thrill of the first game. If I have any complaint with the new game it is just that they made it too easy. Simple things like the rails along ledges make it "too safe".
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
May the jewce be with you. Always - Obi One Jewnobi.
Our former student who used the engine to model and run simulations of Gettysburg.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Okay, so it was Quake but still retro cool.
Ah, Whiplash. That was fun. I followed a similar path. I think I built a new rig every year to keep up. Even the the Gravis. Thanks for the memories...
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I had a Soundblaster card long before Doom came out. Also, I remember Doom came on like 6-7 floppies and not the 'launching of a 3.5" floppy' as the OP says.
I was about five years old or so when I first played Doom. My foremost memory is of trying to convince my older brothers that the BFG was actually an elephant based off of its map sprite (see the above here: http://vignette2.wikia.nocooki... )
We had ordered a brand new Gateway for a new project for my boss' company, which was just him in his house. We bought Doom II as a, ahem, stress test.
It didn't run. We called the Gateway tech support, and they stated they "didn't consider Doom a PC-compatible program they needed to support."
Back it went and we got a different one elsewhere, which did run it.
As Gateway didn't go out of business, they must have changed their tune quickly.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well Doom and Quake were the (3D) killer apps that drove thousands (millions?) of gamers to upgrade their hardware. 386 to 486 in the case of Doom, and 486 to Pentium along with the 3Dfx graphcis card in the case of Quake.
While Wolf3d and Duke3D are an important part of gaming history, no other shooters even come close to the same impact as Doom + Quake which defines the FPS genre for decades. (Although Counter-Strike deserves a honorable mention.)
I think Unreal and Unreal Tournament(UT) fans would disagree with part of that statement. UT brought actual color to shooters that were different from the brown and green pea soup (color palette) that Quake only seemed capable of. Also the models (monsters, et cetera) of Quake were pretty bad compared to the fast moving dodging monsters of Unreal and UT. UT had a different 'style' that was great.
Before going nuts, I acknowledge fun was had by all, and having some really great choices, for all, was terrific. Choices that seem lacking today.
I first saw Doom when a coworker was playing it after hours. When I saw that, I thought, now that was a game I could get into. Plus the first level was free to download! I remember playing the crap out of Doom2 when I was sick with a particularly bad cold, it took my mind off my misery and sore throat. I usually played single player, I thought the multiplayer looked a bit silly, as the Marine just sort of glided around (that was actually pretty funny), but I did a little bit of the multiplayer too. Still, there were enough mods around to keep single player mode interesting. I loved blasting the hell out of Barney: "I love you, You lov-" Blam Blam Blam "Aauughh!.." That was so soul satisfying.
My main memory though is building a huge custom wad I called Incubatr, which I uploaded to to CompuServe, where it got about 90 downloads or so. I still have it around, my son played through it last year using DOSbox.
I'd have to admit that Quake was my all time favorite FPS, however.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Hmm, I don't recall that software. However, during that time period, I do recall using this cool new network stressing software to do network performance testing.
We tested the crap out of the network with that software.
Also -> Using DoomEd on my NeXT pizza box that we used to create the test profiles!
John Romero has made you his bitch. Suck it down!
We were in our early 20s and a couple of friends had a computer store. We'd go there after work hours, each one bringing their own computer (no laptops, actual desktop computers) and a few bottles of beer. We'd connect two computers at a time using Serial link and do tournaments. Rules were: "No god mode and whoever loses pays for the beer (or buy more, depending on the day)". Fun times!
I was 14 when Pearl Jam's 3rd album was released on December 6, 1994. While at at the music store getting my copy on release day, I also stopped into Electronics Boutique and bought the two-disk Doom Shareware. I couldn't get home fast enough!
My Creative Labs 1x cartridge-loading CD-ROM used a TSR driver. You could put the disc in the drive, then use a command-line CD player program to play the music from the disc while in DOS...or in DOS games. I fired up the new album, and began the installation of Doom. Once the game was installed, I turned the in-game music levels all the way down and Vitalogy became my soundtrack for slaying demons and exploring endless corridors. Later, I even wrote a batch file to start the CD playing before starting the game.
I don't know how many hours I spent playing that game the first time, or how many times the album played through, but I remember vividly still seeing the hallways flying by my peripheral vision when laid down and closed my eyes. It was incredible.
I still have the box the shareware came in, but I think the disks themselves have degraded to where they're unusable. I also still have the boxes for D!Zone 150 and Ultimate Doom. For many years now, I've had zDoom and the Doomsday Engine both installed, and I typically play through all 4 episodes when I'm off for Christmas. I have since enjoyed the game's original soundtrack frequently, but from time to time, I still launch WinAmp with the PJ album on repeat before getting into the game.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
My favorite Doom story is about when Bungie released a much better game around the same time.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Back in the day my colleague and I stayed around late often to play Doom on the network or on the 10 foot screen in the conference room. I recall a few late evenings walking to my car in the desolate fifth subterranean level parking garage in a very elevated state of awareness. Luckily (for them) no one attempted a mugging. A couple of guys from other departments begged to play so we paired up, put our desk phones on speaker, and started it up. One of the other guys was a(n apparently frustrated) former CIA employee and eventually just stood still firing rockets at the other (a Major in the USAF Reserves). You never know what apparently mild-mannered persons harbor inside.
So I'd been playing around with Quake a little and my 4yo son wanted to play. I let him take over when he could shoot nails at skeletons. He loved it and called his mom over to see. But by the time she arrived it was over and starting at the beginning, with Cujo and a blood-dripping axe. I felt the heat of that stare for a while.
1994. I used to go to the Univ. of Kansas computing center to play DOOM on the LAN, it usually was the shareware version, and all computers got wiped weekly anyway. I was too young to go to college but I didn't have a computer so I spent a bit of late nights there. Eventually got a copy of the registered version and there were many pick up games to be had. The hours spent designing levels on DoomCAD and playing ledges.wad, T2.wad, etc, was amazing. One night I was in there alone playing single-player mode and a cop walks in, his mind was blown. He asked if we could watch and spent a couple hours watching me play and I taught him how to play. I went from being barely able to learn how to install the game from disks to a sysadmin a few years later. DOOM was what kindled my interest in computing in general.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Sounds similar to my upgrade path as well. :-)
A friend of my brother showed me the Doom Alpha. There were monsters but no moving enemies. I was blown away. Same friend a few years later also showed me the 3Dfx. 60 fps, texture mapped. And here our SGI Octane machine at our university had cost 100,000's of dollars. I knew the 3Dfx was literally a game changer.
I got a 386SX16 for graduation. The 386SX16 was so slow I had to shrink the screen down a notch or two to keep the frame rate. :-/
My cousin got one of the new AMD's 486DX4 hot off the press -- IIRC the 80 MHz so I was quite envious :-) But that chip was dam HOT. Playing Doom on a 486 was SO buttery silky smooth.
A colleague friend introduced me to Doom LAN but it was a PITA to travel so I skipped most of the Doom LAN scene. There were TONS of mods for Doom I remember playing. The special mods we called TC for Total Conversion. These mods had custom textures and sound effects. I remember Aliens, Barney, Simpsons, etc.
I held off upgrading to the 486 mobo's due to the VESA Local Bus clusterfuck. Once it became obvious Intel was pushing PCI my father picked up a Pentium 90, Pentium 100, and a Pentium Pro 180 for his business. The latter which of course was "accidently" overclocked to 200 MHz. True story! IIRC I was checking the mobo manual and saw that the motherboard supported a PPro 180 and PPro 200 -- I just had to change a jumper. I checked and saw that it was _already_ set to 200 Mhz but our PPro was a 180 Mhz chip! WHOOPS-a-daisy! That was my first introduction o/c (overclocking) -- I've overclocked every x86 CPU since. :-) Years later I had an Abit BP6 dual Celeron's ~300 o/c to 550 Mhz. Cheap SMP baby! :-)
I used to run glQuake on the Pentium Pro 200 at 512x384 resolution with low-quality mip-maps on the Voodo so I can keep the frame rate high in a fire fight! Of course once I got the Voodoo 2 I could run the proper 640x480.
I got into modding and made a Duke-Nukem mod for Quake. It had tripwires, cameras, hologram. I couldn't get the shrink way working though.
I also did a little bit of map mapping. I made a "smallish" multiplayer map that my brothers and my best friend played for about 3 hours straight. Why? It had no dead ends, and lots of picks to intentional keep the pacing fast.
I used to follow Blue's News and managed to even get a LAN party mentioned. I met a friend of Zoid that way. Many, many, many, weekends playing Quake CTF, ThunderWalker, and eventually TeamFortress, MOO2 (Master of Orion 2), and Diablo 1 & Diablo 2. Once we had a cable modem at home that pretty much killed the LAN party, since I could frag online and kill those LPB (Low Ping Bastards) for once. Spent many weekends playing Quake CTF from 9 am till 9 pm.
> We all had Matrox Milleniums for Doom and related games.
I had a crappy ATI card before I picked up Matrox Millennium to go with my Diamond Monster 3D 3Dfx. Yup, those were very nice for 2D -- it had a _sweet_ VGA DAC that nVidia / 3Dfx coudlnt' touch for years! glQuake was the reason I bought the 3Ffx Voodo, and of course the Voodoo 2. I skipped the TNT Riva and TNT2 to hold out for the GeForce 256.
Oh wow, Matrix was founded in 1976. I see they are still around! How sure how though.
> I was also the first to get a Gravis Ultrasound card.
I'm not surprised! That same friend of my brother who showed me Doom + 3DFx also had one. Dam sweet card! I never picked one up, since I wasn't sure if it was going to become the standard or not.
I'm still bitter that the GUS never became the standard. /me shakes fist at the Sound Blaster.
Good times, good times. :-)
Well considering id shipped the first Quake killer, aka Quake 2, before anyone else, I don't think UT was as important as id creating the whole FPS genre in the first place.
* Wolfenstein
* Doom
* Quake
* Quake 2
But I *do* have a soft spot for UT -- seeing the introduction running on software rendering and then on the 3Dfx was an amazing experience. Especially those fire dynamic textures !
Someone re-created the castle fly by sequence in WebGL !
* https://www.shadertoy.com/view...
I can remember playing this in college, my first experience with networking came from hooking four PCs up with coax cable snaking out 5th story windows to each consecutive room. It constantly crashed because one guy's network card was super cheap. I think it was ArcNet.
I also remember, fondly, playing the game and walking behind one annoying classmate. Whenever monsters would appear, I'd shoot him in the back of the head, he'd die,and everyone would shout "Oh, they got you!'" He never figured it out.
Yeah, VESA Local Bus was a royal pain. Fortunately I bought a ASUS 486 motherboard that had PCI slots. It had a bridge chip to translate the signals. The version I got also had LAN and SCSI on board. That made it very easy to transition from 486 to Pentium for me.
I had the Orchid Righteous 3D 3DFx card. I went with that one because it had the relays to cut in the VGA signal. I still have that card and the Gravis Ultrasound in my desk as souvenirs. :)
I recall playing the DOOM beta, which had the best BFG ever. Instead of a single giant shot it spewed a bazillion pulse rifle shots all at once. I think it was removed from the release version due to performance concerns.
This was during university, at an institution that was primarily Mac for student-owned computers. I had a 486DX2/50 which got a lot of attention. For LAN play we went to a lab.
We'd do speed runs of levels and send the screenshots to Romero to taunt him.
Creating levels was a thing. A roommate created "Escape From Detroit" which started at the Joe after the Red Wings lost in the Stanley Cup finals and the fans were rioting.
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"
I remember creating/modifying Doom & Doom 2 levels/WAD files back in the day. After playing with the graphics and music, I came across that weird sound byte that plays when you get to the last level of Doom (or Doom 2, maybe?)...It's the one where you have to fire rockets from an elevated platform across the room into an opening.
I took that sound byte and reversed it....to find probably one of the most cleverly-hidden easter eggs. It ended up saying "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero"
Good times....
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
When I saw it running for the first time, I couldn't believe that those other characters were actually people on their own machines. It was incredible and so fast moving. Just out of high school and I was hooked. I spent the next 10 years playing FPS games at competition-level before quitting. To this day, I don't think I've focused my mental energies for that long, that intensely on a single task since.
I was the #1 ranked Pyro on earth, once upon a time. Fought with Forces of Evil in the MegaTF Team Pro League under the moniker [FoE]War.
Any other TPL members here?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's so obvious when looking at Unreal and listening to the music, that a lot of the developers at Epic came from the demoscene. Those fire/water/lightning effects, that MOD music, it was all proper old-school stuff.
Eat the rich.
I always preferred the Quake games to the Unreal games. They just *felt* better, more meaty and less floaty.
And the sound effects in Quake are some of the best ever. They're right up there with the original Diablo for some of the most iconic game sound effects of all time.
Eat the rich.
Doom was so popular that there were several ports made of it. The shareware version, you had to buy the game to get the maps to play though. One was for Silicon Graphics SGI machines, these were small desktop versions we had at the Artificial Intelligence University Lab. Well we had Doom on them :) We had 5 of them networked together in a small glassed in room next to the robotics lab and we would play Deathmatch everynight, night after night (like from 9PM to 3AM) for about a year, then people finally started to get stuff done and graduate :)
This was in the good old days where it was keyboard/only vs keyboard/mouse. Yes you learn great moves like how to strafe and your fire and how BSP trees were set up on the levels so you can take advantage of that to shoot in 2D and get someone above or below you in 3D, and how to do rocket jumps, I never got a hang of that would always blow myself up. And where the BFG was at :)
We had an un-official leaderboard and you could tell who was better then others at it.
Wow yes, good times, everyone there went on to do great stuff, and is still doing great stuff. Good Times captured in a fleeting moment of computer and game history when everything was new and still developing.
When I discovered the original Doom, and played late into that first night, the scratching, snorting, howling sounds were weirding me out, especially some new noise that appeared as I advance further. It was immersive. Good times!
Doom 1 came on four floppies, Doom 2 came on five, and having to optimize stuff like ram allocation and TSR's meant that some people made a boot floppy (others made an autoexec.bat menu).
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
... allegedly. In the late 90s I received a cease-and-desist letter from a law firm representing DWANGO, the BBS-like gaming service which allowed 4-player Doom/Heretic games over a regular modem connection.
Apparently, I allegedly wrote a DOS TSR (Terminate&Stay Resident) program which behaved similarly to AOHELL (America Online fake account creator), only under DOS. It changed the hard drive serial number, which DWANGO used to prevent you from re-registering for a free trial account, and then it called up the DWANGO login windows and typed everything in for you, as a random person with a believable name, address, and a usually valid phone number.
Of course this is entirely hearsay because I can neither confirm nor deny writing such a program, but if I did, I sure would've gotten a kick out of it.
When the level editors first came out, I edited the map Lowdark to put a Cyberdemon in one of the item rooms. My buddy and I used to murder each other on that map - we'd always race each other for the good stuff in that room. He never played single player and remembering his scream when he beat me to the treasure room and found it occupied makes me smile over 20 years later.
I also played through the entire first 7 levels of the game without taking a hit for some stupid contest that was going around. It took quite a few tries.That pales compared to my buddy losing his composure though.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
I was showing the finance director of a company I used to work for how good Doom was. He got used to all the controls, managed a simple part on his own, got engrossed and an Imp jumped out. He leapt sideways off his chair and split his head open on a door jamb. Real gaming!
Recently I saw an Ultrasound sell on EBay for a godawful amount of money. I should have kept mine :(
That was one hell of a card. I still watch Unreal occasionally, just to listen to the music.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Yeah, what is with Half Life 3 in any case? Was that not promised?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
If you aren't sick of it, submit a story where you can discuss it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I don't have any one particular story, just that I loved using the chainsaw in particular against the pink pig-like monsters, and spent most of my time trying to lure monsters into attacking each other. Ever since Doom I've been annoyed when a game does not give me a way for enemies to attack each other...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I got a 486Dx2-66 before my friends, but a few years later, in college, people had pentiums and I bought Quake. They could all run decent framerates, but not my 486. I went through all the console commands and found a mode that discarded textures and just did a solid fill, for whatever reason pink was rather prominent, but I picked up about 5fps, which made it playable.
Quake-C then was a good time sink in college. I eventually got a Socket-A ("slocket"), and did the tape-over-the-pin overlock hack on a celeron. I actually worked on the very early versions of Team fortress, with things like the gib gun and the initial sniper dot (it was an X, not a dot) TF. I checked the earliest TF releases still available for my name in the credits, but they only go back to about 2 releases after I stopped working on it. (Feel free to be skeptical)
Why mention the NIN drummer for Quake 3? Trent did the original soundtrack, which is why the nail gun ammo boxes are all marked "NIN", or was that too obvious?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It must've been close to the original launch when I arrived at a friend's house to see everyone playing this hot new game called "Doom". My first thought was, "Holy shit, somebody went and did it; they created cyberspace."
I enjoyed showing off by completing levels using only punches. Good times.
Yep - Was the catalyst for me to start learning how to tweak underspecced hardware to get games to run faster than a slide show or even at all :-)
'95 386SX-25, Cirrus Logic VGA, 2meg RAM 40Meg HDD
Still about 5 years behind in hardware :(
Made me find PRDOOM and load it on this Linux box though, so there's that :-)
I remember being so freaked out and in awe when my friend showed me DOOM video-out piped through an ASCII rendering engine and playing it in real-time... with colored characters, to boot!
No sig for you! Come back one year!