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Missed it on the actual date, but the original Doom was uploaded to BBS servers December 10, 1993.

I can still load it up, slap on some IDDQD and IDFA, and relieve a whole day's stress in the first four levels of Doom II.

I still remember stopping at a local PC store (a mish-mash of racks and racks of software on 3.5", and shelves of hardware, all beige) and finding Doom on an endcap by the door. It ran fine on my 486 DX2/50 (a Gateway model back when Gateway had some good hardware). I had been playing flight sims pretty much exclusively back then (just like everyone else), so this new FPS was an awe inspiring experience.

The only other gaming moment that was so much of an epiphany was my first time playing Quake CTF. The fact that I was playing against other human gamers was forever etched in my brain. That poor 486 DX2/50 was not up to the Quake beta though ... another upgrade to a Pentium 120 was now in order.

When I see both Doom and even Quake being run on phones these days, I just have to shake my head and marvel at the advances we've made.

Doom shareware came on a shareware CD that was packaged with my parents' first PC. Up until then I was a TV-based gamer. Played on an Atari VCS, NES, and Genesis prior to that, and then playing Doom was a revelation. That 486SX/25MHz could handle it on pretty high settings. Tons of fun.

Had a similar revelation when I got my own first PC, a 166Mhz Pentium MMX with an ATi Xpert 98 (Rage Pro), and I got to play GLQuake for the first time.

Obligatory

Doom Comic

Brutal Doom

I still play it now and again with a modern sourceport (GZDoom) and a modpack (Brutal Doom), plus hirez music, sounds, and textures. Still lots of fun.

First experience with it was at my uncle's house just after Christmas 1993.

idkfa and iddqd just brought back memory i thought i didn't have

To celebrate, I'm listening to the Dark Side of Phobos remix project, an homage to the great music of the original game. But don't take my word for it.

A guy reviewed the DSoP tracks, and for a couple of the songs wrote:

Hangarmageddon (Evil Horde) -- Capcom seeks out Black Sabbath to devise a heavy rockin' Final Boss track for their anniversary edition of Castlevania X. Be prepared: from the intensity and length of this track, you're in for a battle with Dracula unlike any other.
...
Ghosts of Mars (Mythril Nazgul) -- Epic Voodoo ceremonies on Phobos are usually accompanied by freaky women chorale groups...
...

In short, if you are a fan of DOOM, you should listen to this soundtrack

I first played DOOM on my 386 DX 33 MHz machine. It ran in something akin to slow motion, but I didn't know any better until I saw it in a computer store

I think I played the softer version on Super Nintendo or something? I also remember this was the first time I heard the religious right came out with "Video games are evil" spiel.

My computer at the time was a 286 hand me down and I didn't have money for a lot of video games.

Doom on the SNES was pretty good and pretty much intact with violence. Wolfenstein was the id FPS with watered-down violence, along with its tag-team partner Mortal Kombat. I had a Genesis, though, so at least MK was all blood all the time - if you knew the code (also the name of a Phil Collins-fronted Genesis album).

I played it on my AMD Am486DX2-66 back in 1994, I think. Back then mindless shooters were just fine, unlike these days when players demand more. Don't forget Doom 1: it's practically the same as Doom 2. I kinda liked Doom 1's levels more.

It wasn't very smooth on my Am486. Maybe it's because of the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 VL-Bus video card I had back then. ATI and Matrox were the kings of graphics in those days but hey, at least my Cirrus Logic could display 256 colors! Anybody remember how 32K and 64K color depths were totally awesome back then? Forget about games using them though: things would slow down to a standstill.

I'm actually thinking about playing some old DOS games these days but I'm kinda tied up with Thief: The Dark Project at present. Good thing about today's computers is that you could play practically any game in PC history as long as you use DOSBox. DOSBox is such a godsend.

ronch wrote:

I played it on my AMD Am486DX2-66 back in 1994, I think. Back then mindless shooters were just fine, unlike these days when players demand more. Don't forget Doom 1: it's practically the same as Doom 2. I kinda liked Doom 1's levels more.

It wasn't very smooth on my Am486. Maybe it's because of the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 VL-Bus video card I had back then. ATI and Matrox were the kings of graphics in those days but hey, at least my Cirrus Logic could display 256 colors! Anybody remember how 32K and 64K color depths were totally awesome back then? Forget about games using them though: things would slow down to a standstill.

I'm actually thinking about playing some old DOS games these days but I'm kinda tied up with Thief: The Dark Project at present. Good thing about today's computers is that you could play practically any game in PC history as long as you use DOSBox. DOSBox is such a godsend.

In late 1995 we finally replaced our original IBM PC XT with a Compaq Presario 7170. That sported a then-zippy Pentium 90, 8 MB RAM, no L2 cache, ESS Sound Blaster Pro compatible sound, and a 1 MB S3 Trio32 PCI video card. Doom II ran like a bat outta hell, and I learned an awful lot just getting games to reliably work in those days. There was also the inhuman amount of replay time granted by Doom WADs on ftp.cdrom.com's /idgames and dial-up internet. After slapping in 16 MB more RAM Windows 95 greatly simplified getting networking up and running, and LAN parties were a fixture of my teenaged years thanks mostly to Doom.

I wouldn't say Doom and Doom II are totally similar. Generally Doom's a tighter, more carefully crafted experience than its sequel. Doom II makes no pretense of modeling real-world environments - it's just sprawling chaos in ugly but entertaining maps, and the gameplay's frenetic and gets intense early and often. One of the chief distinctions I'd draw between Doom and many subsequent games is that the diversity of behaviors in Doom (as well as monster in-fighting) forces the player to prioritize targets and make monsters distract one another while you fight off others or try to advance. It's been interesting to see variations on this with time, both in terms of games with mutually warring factions that fight each other and in terms of piles-o'-monsters (Painkiller and Serious Sam, where they don't fight each other but they come in insane torrents after you).

Nothing's been quite like Doom or Doom II since, and Doom 3's tonal confusion and mostly failed effort to adopt survival horror tropes was more than a mild letdown. I don't think id's got the touch any more, and have pretty much given up on a proper Doom-style spiritual successor being made for the time being. Onward and upward, I guess - but I still fire up GZDoom a couple of times a month.

Those pre-MMX days were brutal for >8-bit color performance. Don't blame your VLB graphics card too much! The 486 just wasn't a tremendous pixel pusher. And I owe a lot to DOSbox... but the 0.74 release is pretty long in the tooth by now. Let's hope for a new one soon.

This is the game that started it all for me. Definitely a classic. I enjoyed playing all 3...
Did anyone watched the movie?

Ahh yes, I remember when Doom was first released...I had just upgraded from a 386SX-16 to a 486SX-33 and it ran pretty good on the new rig. As good as Wolfenstein 3D was/is, I was surprised to see how much more evolved Doom was in such a short time frame.

I was underwhelmed somewhat when Doom 3 came out. I thought it was good but not great like all the gaming magazines were trying to tell us at the time. Still, it was worth playing through and I also liked Resurrection of Evil. But neither game had the same "feel" as Doom 1 or 2, that's for sure.

I saw the Doom movie when it was in theaters and was disappointed. It was okay but it was missing so much of what the games had. I saw it a couple of times since then and think a little better of it now, but it helps if you don't go into it expecting anything great.

The only thing good about the DOOM movie is the butt on the naked woman near the beginning of the film, IMO.

My first time playing DOOM was on the SNES. I played it on quite a few platforms before I played it on PC. SNES, 32X, PSX, GBA... Really though, until the Xbox 1 port that came with DOOM 3, there wasn't an accurate port of DOOM to any console home or otherwise. DOOM 2 got a pretty good GBA port from what I hear, better than the GBA port(Which was mechanically fine, but censored ).

32X port, IIRC, has a unique final level. It basically throws you into a room full of Hell Knights and all sorts of other nasties from the first two Episodes. For I think cart space reasons(The graphics are loads better than the SNES version, and that means higher res sprites...), the level count is much smaller though.

DOOM was not my first FPS, though. Mine was either Zero Tolerance, an obscure Genesis FPS that is surprisingly good considering the low frame rate and three button controls, or the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D(Which is, fwiw, fine on technical merits. It runs fast and looks good, there's no slowdown, no floaty controls, etc. Plus, you can use the SNES mouse to play it!).

I didn't become exposed to the Doom franchise until the second one. I remember having to upgrade to 8MB of RAM on my 486SX-33 in order to run it. It was also not my first FPS. I think my first was a game called The Colony. It was not really a shooter so much as a puzzle and logic game in a 3d style environment. I played that on a 286 with an 8 bit bus. It was crude and slow, but it was a blast. The best it could manage was the wire type graphics for items in the room itself. Any higher settings and the machine would bog down. My first 3d shooter style game that really blew me away was the first System Shock. I spent many an hour playing that.

DOOM was the first FPS I really got into. I remember it running OK on my 486, but my 386 couldn't handle it (basically a slideshow). Stayed up all night playing it a few times!

Hawkwing74 wrote:

I think I played the softer version on Super Nintendo or something? I also remember this was the first time I heard the religious right came out with "Video games are evil" spiel.

My computer at the time was a 286 hand me down and I didn't have money for a lot of video games.

I was in the same boat as you, and RAM wouldn't have helped because DOOM required 386 or better.

iD was seriously pushing boundaries back then.
IIRC DOOM was 386 required,
Quake I was floating-point required (so no SX processors),
and Quake III became GPU-required, though Quake II might as well have been considering how slowly software mode ran.

I remember seeing Doom being played at PC swap meets and being in awe. I was still messing with 286's and 386's at the time, and didn't have a system capable of playing it until a couple years later. By the time we got our Pentium 100, it was only a short while until Duke Nukem 3D came out, so I didn't get too deep into Doom. I did play a fair bit of the first episode (Shareware) though.

The first FPS that I played was called "Blake Stone - Aliens Of Gold", and ran on the Wolfenstein 3D engine.