Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Doom Story? 351
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?
Beat nightmare mode (Score:3)
Re:Beat nightmare mode (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Beat nightmare mode (Score:5, Funny)
Doom 2 would have got me into lots of trouble if I had gone to school in modern times. Using the editor I built a crappy level based on one of my school buildings and used the teachers photos out of my year book as the pictures for the enemies.
Sad to say I can't even remember how I did any of that any more.
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Re:Beat nightmare mode (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Dragged me into 10b2 networking (Score:4, Informative)
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10base2? You must have been rich to afford that kind of hardware. :)
We played doom on 4 arcnet cards and a passive hub I bought second had for $50.
Re:Dragged me into 10b2 networking (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? Well me and my friends had to play Doom while carrying the data packets by hand, in a snowstorm, both ways.
The latency was excruciating.
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Well me and my friends had to play Doom while carrying the data packets by hand
by hand? hah!
we played via pigeon!
snake
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Did they get the idea for RFC1149 from you? :D
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This. And some of us worked in hospital IT and uni IT and other IT shops where networks were being converted to 10bT using dual network cards, so we often "helped with" the conversion by putting in 10bT-only cards instead of dual cards and taking home the 10b2/10bT and 10bT-only cards and cabling, er, "lost" in the wash.
(Sorry, though I'm pretty sure no one ever missed a packet.)
The only reason I got a SoundBlaster. (Score:2)
Re:The only reason I got a SoundBlaster. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I remember having to set up the sound driver IRQ's and other junk before playing. It was common back in the DOS days to have to configure your sound card before playing a game.
God Mode and the Big Nasty (Score:3, Funny)
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I keyed into acid mode one night, right after dropping two tabs.... it got REAAALLLLY weird after a half hour or so... man. That was 25 years ago.
Text Chat was standard IPX (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Luxury! (Score:2)
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.
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I beat nightmare mode on my abacus.
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You had zeros? We had to use the letter "O"
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You had zeros ?
You lucky lucky bastards
IVX all the way and a C if you were very lucky. Addition and subtraction were bad enough, gods help you if you needed multiplication or division and forget exponentiation. And make sure you remember where you are in the number and get the ordering right or it'll be crucifixion* for you.
*if it's a first offence
Networking (Score:3)
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3dfx voodoo card anyone. (Score:2)
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It sure as hell did make sense. The slower VGA frame buffer implementations required many more wait states when accessing video memory than the fast ones did.
The Tseng ET4000 chipset was particularly respected back in the day, but God help you if you got stuck with some POS with a Trident or WD Paradise chipset, or if you don't get off my lawn in the next 30 seconds.
IRL (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:IRL (Score:5, Funny)
The first video game that made me react in real life was Leisure Suit Larry.
Oh, Eve...
On my first PC (Score:5, Interesting)
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 =)
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We initially had 2MB of RAM in that 486 DX/33MHz.
My lord... with respect, how in the world did you end up with 2MB of RAM on a 486?
My 386DX/25 purchased in April 1991 from Gateway 2000 had 4MB of RAM. My 486DX/2 66 purchased in 1993 had 16MB of RAM.
In 1994, 2MB was... I wouldn't think that would be very useful. Would that even run Windows 3.1? Ok, 2 MB was the "min system requirements", but that is like saying Windows 10 runs fine in 1GB of RAM (which it doesn't).
Ouch, the pain, ouch!
High school (Score:2)
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).
We called id Software...to pay them (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I miss those days of the game business... back when companies were small and run by people who cared...
The other cool person I remember was Ken Williams, I had the occasion to meet him once and he was way cool. Never met his wife, but I still follow his blog...
Shame, the games are "flashier" and "better" in some ways, but then we have to deal with EA, which sucks. :(
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I wonder if you did that today. Would it work? :P
I paid for a 10 floppy distribution of the source (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Doom Dreams (Score:5, Funny)
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....
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Doom dreams? Of course.
But the thing that still gets me all these years later is flickery fluorescent lights in industrial looking settings. My hindbrain is now convinced an imp is about to come out.
Shotgun (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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I think that guy deserves the "Most interesting Doom Story" award, ever.
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Calling bullshit on this one. Cops know what actual shotguns sound like, you clearly do not.
Well he said he barely got started, then answered the phone so the first rounds were only heard by whoever called the cops. As far as the final rounds go, you have cops that "know" there's shots fired with a shotgun and they hear loud bangs coming from that very apartment, right after the cops entered... it fits the story of a gun desperado perfectly, even if the sound was a little off. I mean there's different types, different ammo, it's muffled and distorted by being inside a building so to conclusively s
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Noise ordinance.
No stories many tidbits (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [google.com.au]
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
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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.
Oh! I loved that trick!
Fired a shot at my friend Mike but he dodged it. Very long corridor. Switch to shotgun and we were having a shotgun duel for a good 10 seconds. Then my friend just dies. "What the hell was that?" "BFG Splash damage, that shot I fired finally hit a wall"
Another time I ran into a room where Mike and Bill were fighting. Fired the BFG and took them both out. Bill respawns in the same room! He bolts for the transporter. I follow and was trying to time it so I fired it after I ste
Tearing the cord out of a mouse (Score:3, Funny)
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
My Dad was obsessed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Didn't Really Care For It (Score:3)
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Always liked Doom, but I agree, I ended up putting far more hours into Quake for the reasons you state - the full 3D world, rocket jumps, and the bouncing of grenades and so forth meant there was much more to learn to perfect and much more skill involved.
I never really liked Quake II apart from co-op campaign, and was really disappointed by Quake III.
For what it's worth I tried the new Doom the other day, I don't know why they called it Doom, it's just Quake III really with a storyline, slightly updated gra
University Computer Lab (Score:2)
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 pla
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Gosh, where to begin... (Score:2)
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 sharewa
Network gaming and conversion mods (Score:4, Informative)
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.
my story (Score:2)
Also I recreated an amazing Doom 2 map (map 7 I think) in heretic. It got kicked of of cdro
Doom & Mosaic. Released months apart. (Score:2)
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
Yup (Score:2)
Company Alert: We have a network virus!! (Score:5, Funny)
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We specifically had 'network testing' time at the university computing center where I worked. The games varied, but it was always 5pm (technically, after 5pm & after the last customer was out of the back staff area), and generally ran until just about 6pm (a few of the staff had night classes that started at 6pm).
For Doom (and Doom II), you'd have to sub in a 4th person when you left, or they'd have to start the game & restart it. Duke Nukem allowed more people to start (8?), and you could drop ou
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Beating nightmare in 1, 2, TNT and Plutonia without save scumming every 5 seconds.
My 'self imposed' rule was i would save at the beginning the level after arriving from the previous level. No saving during the level, thus all reloading returned me to the beginning of the level.
I have incidentally beaten ep1 and ep2 without ever reloading. But I've never beaten ep3, ep4 "Thy Flesh Consumed"; or Doom II without reloading to the start of at least some of the levels on "Ultraviolence".
I haven't played TNT or Plutonia... although I do see I have them on steam. (as "Final Doom").. I really sho
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But I've never beaten ep3, ep4 "Thy Flesh Consumed"; or Doom II without reloading to the start of at least some of the levels on "Ultraviolence".
My goal (achieved) was to beat ever level on ultraviolence starting with only a pistol (i.e. the default start state). I did that, but never got faron nightmare. Recently, I saw that guy do the speedrun of the entire Doom II on nightmare with no restarts. I was not as good as I thought I was at the time.
Also, I never used the mouse. I used my dad's laptop for which
Canon Camera (Score:2)
Headaches and motion sickness (Score:2)
Jerky low-quality unaccelerated 3D graphics will do that.
autoexec.bat (Score:3)
Back in high school, a classmate had set his computer to boot directly into Doom.
Doom Alpha (Score:2)
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.
Ghetto networking (Score:2)
In hindsight that was dangerous, beside RX and TX we should have connected ground as a minimum. But hey.
Out country. (Score:2)
Modem deathmatch with monsters. (Score:2)
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
Multiplayer hassles (Score:2)
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 e
Doom is the game that kick-started modding (Score:2)
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
18hour Marathon Doom LAN Parties in my Basement (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The ol' null modem (Score:2)
My own Doom story... (Score:2)
My upstairs neighbor (Score:2)
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 l
Doom/2 for OS/2 (Score:2)
How is it I can still remember? (Score:2)
iddqd, idkfa, idclip, idspispopd, idclev##, idchoppers
I was an Incredible Universe "star" (Score:2)
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
I was 12. i had just gotten my first computer. (Score:3)
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.
I was an under-grad when Doom came out (Score:2)
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
Monty Python, frozen chickens, and Barney! (Score:3)
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I have somewhere my soundfile of barney singing that damn song, merged into the doom shotgun twice, with the death scream after.
Still makes me giggle when I find it.
Various stories (Score:2)
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 t
My stories... (Score:2)
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 dia
Borland, C programming, and tech support (Score:2)
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 pl
Null Modem FTW (Score:2)
486 + 386 + null modem cable = 1 new universe of fun
[ Nostalgia ]
Doom is great, but.. (Score:2)
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.
Doom and Quake (Score:3)
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.
makes me sick. (Score:2)
DOOOOOM! (Score:2)
Tonight at 11. [youtube.com]
Where to start... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Where to begin? (Score:2)
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,
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Did anyone else spot the mistake?
I of course meant 2MB. I had to buy an additional 2MB to bring my system up to a total of 4MB, the minimum required to play DooM.
IPX LAN gaming at Novell (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can an ad be more blatant? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Can an ad be more blatant? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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May the jewce be with you. Always - Obi One Jewnobi.
Re:Can an ad be more blatant? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can buy a legal cd key for about half the price if you know where to shop.