What Got You Into Doom?

Comment How You Found Doom, Why You Decided To Continue Playing Doom After Beating It. And Overall Why You Still Enjoy Doom.

I found Doom to be quite nice, actually. 

I got into Doom in the mid-90s when it was still a relatively new game that everyone had to check out. I had always been interested in modding and making games with whatever tools I could get my hands on, so being able to build custom levels and modify assets for Doom is what kept me fixated on it indefinitely after the initial amazement wore off. Something about the feel of Doom's gameplay also just always appealed to me, I think — I tried Quake not too long afterwards, but it never managed to captivate me in the same way.

For years I was infected with the nonsensical 2000s-era dismissal of 2D and particularly 2.5D graphics in favor of full 3D, which led to me ignoring the original Doom games and instead only ever trying Doom 3, which was always boring as shit to play so I never got far in it, but in late 2015, in the lead-up to Doom 2016's release date, I decided to finally try out OG Doom and discovered that it was in fact vastly more fun than Doom 3 ever was.

While Doom is a solid game at its core, the sheer breadth and depth of its modding scene is absolutely its biggest asset, with an endless variety of content to play of wildly varying levels of resemblance to the original game.

I've heard the E1M1 music before and thought it was cool, so that put Doom on my radar. Years later when I started getting into VR, Doom was mentioned as a good VR port so that further put it on my list of games to play. The final push I got to play it was a few months ago when I was watching my brother scroll through Xbox Gamepass games and Doom was on there so I told him to download it, that was the first time I played it. Shortly after I got it on my PC and finished it in VR. The aesthetics, music, and plot were all cool, plus the modibility is infinite so that's why I still play. 

When i was around 4 or 5, my dad had a copy of Ultimate Doom & Doom 2. Much to my mom's dismay, i'd often watch him play, and i just thought it was the coolest thing i'd ever seen. As I got a bit older I even started to play it myself, even if I probably shouldn't have, ha ha~! My interest in it would fluctuate over the years, but even as more impressive games came out, something about it always pulled me back in.

Around the late 2000's, as a teen I came across various projects made in Zdoom on YouTube, I even still remember one of the first i found, called "Town Infection". Some even piqued my interest enough for me to give them a try. While I wasn't hooked yet, it did introduce me to a wide array of community-made projects. Over the years other channels like ICARUSLIV3S got me into gameplay mods, and that's when I really started to get back into it, enough that I started using a source port exclusively. MtPain27's video's played a big part in that too. They introduced me to a ton of level sets, some of which are now my favorites ( Speed of Doom, Epic, Hellground, Struggle, etc.), and got me to look at Doom a little differently. One of which: Eviternity, single-handedly made me want to try making my own map.

What kept me playing, is how over time as i played more and more community-made works, i started to appreciate this game that I've played for almost 25 years more and more. I always knew it was special, I loved the bestiary, the gameplay, and the shockingly versatile visual style. I think it was the realization of what a wonderful tool of expression it could be that sealed the deal. It made me hungry to see more of what people had made, and once i learned how much fun it was to draw lines in Doom Builder, that ensured i'd be a fan for life TBH. That and the drive to get better and play harder maps was also a big driving factor.

But yeah... Doom is good.

I got into Doom relatively recently, actually. In 2019 my boyfriend was talking about Sigil (he had talked at length about Doom related things in the past) and it sounded cool so I asked him how one plays the 1993 game. I had recently binged through getting every achievement in New Blood's Dusk and was in the perfect headspace to have more of something similar. So, that night I bought Ultimate Doom on Steam and he helped me get GZDoom running; I remember blasting through the first game (although I resorted to cheating a lot in episode 4) and even streaming my first playthrough of Sigil, which remained the main reason I even wanted to play classic Doom, as the very first Doom thing I streamed.

After that I played through Doom II in my own time and none other than Eviternity was the very first PWAD for that game that I tried out. Truth be told, I wasn't a fan of it at first because I had a particular idea of what I wanted out of the game (in retrospect, relatively pretty easy levels that I could make my way through at a reasonable pace only using GZDoom auto saves at the start of every level, continuous, quite the far cry from how I typically play now) and Eviternity properly kicked my ass. Even then, I was addicted to replaying Ultimate Doom, seeing how far I could make it without dying. Eventually, my boyfriend convinced me to try saving more than barely at all and I came back around to wads I otherwise bounced off of and finally started to enjoy a ton of custom content (including the aforementioned Eviternity).

While I remained passively interested in Doom thanks to the tons of insanely high quality free fan projects, what I think solidified Doom as a thing I wanted to actively stick with was streaming Jenesis. While the wad itself has its ups and downs, that was the first time the lovely Twitch Doom community found their way to my stream (all the love in the universe to KvotheSixString, it's always an absolute pleasure to have them around) and genuinely, they're why I want to keep playing new stuff and exploring what more the community has created in all the time it took for me to finally get to it.

The larger Doom community being responsible for insanely passionate projects from huge game-replacing level sets to source ports to speedruns is truly incredible and it makes sticking around so beyond worth it.

I had Doom 2016 in my Steam library for who knows how long. I decided to give it a go and I really loved it. I always liked Wolfenstein and Quake, so I decided to give the original Doom a go and it turned out to be fun so I stuck around.

I was a big fan of Wolfenstain 3D since when it came out, and was eagerly waiting for the following came.

I played DOOM the week (maybe the day ?) it came out !

Stopped to play the game in '97 (when Quake II came out, for some reason I didn't play Quake back then, and I was not that impressed with Duke Nukem), and came back to DOOM around the year 2009, when I was looking for light fun games for my mini-PC.

I started thanks to Wolf 3D, as many other people surely did.

I was still too young in 1993, so I got to both Wolfenstein and the other games some years later, like 1995 or 1996, but I remember clearly that Wolf 3D was the first FPS I ever played and back at the time I loved it. So when I found out that the same developers had also released Doom and Doom 2, I simply had to try them, and managed to get the shareware version of Doom from a friend. It obviously became one of my favourite games ever. Some time later I got my hands into Doom 2 because one of my schoolmates had it, and then convinced my parents to buy me the "Depths Of Doom Trilogy". The rest is history.

It was the same years when Quake and Quake 2 also came out, and I played them too, Hexen, Heretic, and then Duke Nukem 3D which I consider my personal number one of all time.

I really have to be grateful for the shareware philosophy that was still going strong at the time, 'cause if it wasn't for it, here in Italy in the mid 90s it would have been very difficult for people to find out about computer games, as the Internet was almost non-existent and there were still very few specialized video games stores that sold DOS and Windows games... most were just Nintendo and Sega.

But in the 90s, there were really a lot of GREAT games.

Anyways, I have loved Doom ever since, but I've had a phase in my life where videogames basically walked out of the radar, and I spent YEARS not playing anything that came out after 2003/2004. Doom 3 had been the last game I'd played for ages. Then, years later, I have restarted to get into gaming sporadically, up to 2020, the year of the lockdown, when I finally decided to fully renew my interest in all things computer, and started rediscovering my love for Doom, and catch up on a lot of community content, which ultimately lead me to join this message board too. 

As other people have already pointed out, obviously the sheer quantity of user-made mods and levels is one of the key factors in what has made Doom really an Eternal game... but to me one of the aspects that's also been essential to its success is the fact that it has basically the PERFECT gameplay. All of the weapons are super-balanced, the monsters are challenging but never impossible, the engine makes movements smooth and calibered, and I think in terms of pure shooting gameplay, Doom is still WAY more fun than most other games that I have ever played, including all of the other titles from Id.

6 hours ago, Gibbitudinous said:

For years I was infected with the nonsensical 2000s-era dismissal of 2D and particularly 2.5D graphics in favor of full 3D, which led to me ignoring the original Doom games and instead only ever trying Doom 3...

I found this funny because to me it had been the exact same opposite. When true 3D games started to come out and become the norm, I literally "hated" them and thought the graphics were terrible. I had played Quake and Quake 2, Turok, and many others, but I enjoyed them way less then their by-then surpassed 2.5D counterparts... and I still think that games like Duke Nukem 3D, Rise Of The Triad, Blood, Hexen, Witchaven, Shadow Warrior, even non-shooters such as Stonekeep, Lands Of Lore, etc, had phenomenal graphics in comparison. Took me years to kind of get accustomed to low-poly true 3D, and coming to terms with it. XD

Totalbiscuit introduced me to Brutal Doom, which is what I played first, and then I started sliding into more Vanilla/Boom waters.

i played it and half life when i was like 3 years old and its always sorta been around but then it came to my attention again around 2016 and stuff, I decided to revisit Plutonia and liked how that played so just casually would play some stuff like Eviternity 1 or Valiant but was super casual about it, some time in 2022 I saw a Decino vid about Holy Hell Revealed, and thought "hmm.. this actually kinda looks managable" (big mistake.. it wasnt), but then decided to chew off some smaller stuff like MSCP, which was also too hard, ended up downloading Rush.wad because I thought to myself "wouldnt it be awesome to get good enough to beat something stupid like Sunlust?" and now I'd say ive gone from casual to sorta avid player, trying to take on the biggest challenges and git gud. But its always sorta been around me.

edit: no i didnt know what i was doing as a 3 year old on my older brothers computers playing Half Life and Doom I just found the interaction and movement stimulating and my brothers prob thought it was amusing to watch a 3 year old play Doom.. the map I can remember most vividly was e4m8 something about that map sorts sticks in my brain, the marble opening area, its one of my earliest memories.

My first DOOM game was 2016. Then after, i acquired DOOM 3 : BFG Edition (Mostly just to play the classic games).

Been a huge fan ever since.

I was shown the classic titles by my father when I was 6 years old, and they scared the hell out of tiny me. Despite my fears of playing it, the series caught my intrigue and I consumed a lot of online content at the time related to it throughout the rest of my time in elementary school (this was the late 2000s to early 2010s, so think flash parodies and Aquarius199 videos). During middle school, my interests shifted to other games until I'd rediscovered the series in 8th grade and started figuring out how to play the classic games with mods. That's when my obsession REALLY blossomed into the grotesque thing it is now, namely with the fond memories of discovering various WADs like Impossible: A New Reality and Bahaus, as well as the time my brother and I would spend playing co-op in Zandronum. Now at age 21, I still play it a lot and still enjoy trying out maps, it's more or less become my comfort food game.

I watched some of Stop Skeletons From Fighting's Doom content a few years ago and thought it looked cool and retro, I always adored the look of sprite-based fps games. But it was only after I found out about the huge modding community and Doom Builder when I actually wanted to download and play the game. I always wanted to make my own games since I was little and was big into stuff like the shitty 3DS version of Mario Maker & Mega Maker (which is still excellent for a fangame). Doom served as a kind of wish fullfillment in that regard, obviously a 3D engine allows for much more creative control than something like a 2D Mario level. Publishing my first works in 2020 / 2021, I was almost suffering from imposter symptom because I really hadn't played many custom maps or even completed Doom 2.

By now I've learned to enjoy the game and have become quite enveloped with the community thanks to some amazing people and finding out more about who I want to be. It helped to see that the community doesn't just consist of 40 year-old doom diehards (if you're in this group, no disrespect at all!) but also queer online weirdos who I could connect with. This is probably getting too personal, but one reason I'm still wearing pride flags online despite considering the more specific labels beyond "queer" or "gay" somewhat unnecessary for me is because I'm hoping to attract more people who aren't so sure of what they wanna be and will get turned off by the community's more reactionary spaces, like Doomer Boards.

I’ve played the original game in 1995 or 96 (in fact, just Knee deep in the dead) then got Doom II and it felt very unique (even though I’ve also played Wolfenstein before).
It was on a Macintosh, not that powerful for video games, so I was reduced to play it on a very small screen… though, the atmosphere was haunting and nothing really came close to the very special fun of that game (at the time, beyond Wolfenstein, I was only playing lucasart point’n’click (loom, Indiana jones, day of the tentacles), Legend of kyrandia, Another world, Flashback and other old games like Lode runner, dark castle or fury of the furries).
I remember having tried Duke Nukem but it was terribly lagging.

Then we’ve got a more powerful computer… and Quake. At first, I felt no need to come back to Doom because of the upgrading quake was…. But the seed was already planted in me.

After that… sort of a U-turn : In the late 90’s, until recently, I was not at all into videogames… but when you grew up with something as prominent as Doom, it never leaves you…
In 2004-05 I recovered an old laptop for my « chambre de bonne » in Paris and heard about Doom 3. Wanted to try it but a nice and honest guy from the store I went to told me it would be money thrown out the windows since my computer was not powerful enough. So I came back to my chamber, disappointed but with intense, going from beyond, remembrance of Doom.

I spent some time on internet looking for a way to download the original doom games but failed (not really gifted for that kind of stuff) BUT I vividly remember having seen a capture from a Doom level I was not aware of, with huge amount of monsters… saying to myself : « Oh boy ! Does it really exist ?»
It was taken from Nuts…

With that picture in mind, and teenagy — but not intense enough — curiosity, I’ve tried again two or three times in the 00’s to find again Doom, without success.

More than ten years later, full of nostalgia and also some incomprehension towards modern video games, I’ve downloaded all of my old point’n’click mentioned earlier and, at some point, said to myself : « let’s try again Doom !»

Some kind of a miracle : first, I’ve found two stand alone files containing TNT evilution and, lucky I was, Going down.
Quickly after that, I discovered gzdoom which was easy enough for me to manage, some wad archives, blinded downloading, Sunder, Sunlust, doomworld, a creative community that blew my mind… and the rest is (already written elsewhere) noise.

Back in the '90s, my dad was all about Doom, and that game used to spook me big time! Funny how things that scared me as a kid became my grown-up obsession. In my teenage years, I was on a mission to snag copies of Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom after losing the ones my dad got. Around 2003, I finally tracked them down online, and once I started, there was no turning back. Somewhere around 2010/2011, I stumbled onto something cool – fan-made levels. Requiem was the first I played, and I've been hooked ever since. From those early scares to exploring the worlds crafted by fellow fans, my Doom journey's been one wild ride, and it's still going strong today.

I've been a doom franchise fan since mid 90s.  I remember playing ultimate doom as a kid.  It was my favorite game.  I loved using cheats just so I can gib all the lower enemies.  

I never owned doom2 but I did play it a lot at my babysitters after school.  I think she had it on her PC due to her older stepson.  She wasn't very good babysitter but that's a topic for another day haha.  

Read the cheesey doom novels, liked doom3 a lot I convinced my dad to buy a better graphics card for it so I could play it.  

I dabbled In doom modding when I heard about brutal doom in 2015 ish.  I played doom1, 2, scythe 1 and 2, and final doom with brutal doom.  Then didn't touch classic doom again until mid 2020.

Doom Eternal was my favorite game of 2020, I played it religiously.  I did all the weekly content.  I was also laid off due to the state of the world at the time so had lots of free time.  Watching lots of doom content on youtube, Decino ends up in my recommendations and the rest is history basically.  I learned more about source ports, started coming to doomworld etc.  

I now prefer classic style gameplay, the nostalgia and the comfort it gives me helped me get through the worst parts of 2020.  The harder maps and slaughter maps give me a similar rush as playing doom eternal at high skill level so I frequent, and now make those type of maps. 

First got into Doom in the mid 90s when I played it at an acquaintance of my dad's, CRT monitor, the whole shebang. I remember being absolutely fascinated by the possibilities. Back then I did not have a PC, but I got a PS1 around the early 2000s and one of the first games I got for it was Doom. You could say I was raised with PSX Doom. 

I started focusing on other games after I got a PC and had a gap until the late 2000s when I discovered GZDoom and played the IWADs again. Was very happy to see that the game was still a thing of interest after so many years. The second gap was between 2009 and around 2018 when I got much more serious about it and started checking out the immense quantity of custom content, becoming a bit more knowledgeable regarding the ins and outs. Started a channel for Doom stuff a little over a year ago when I also joined these forums.

I think my decision to continue playing Doom and my enjoyment of it have two sources. First, it's simply such a visceral, tight, fun experience even when compared to more modern games. The second one is the community, the constant labour of love that still makes Doom relevant and bursting with interesting ideas, themes, colours, shapes, and so on. Doom has become a sort of canvas in the hands of the community. You can paint over it in thousands of ways and you'll get thousands of different experiences. I love how modular it is and how that modularity is perfectly suited for creative impulses.

Found Doom 2 on a school computer when I was 7 - in 1995. I actually enjoy modding it more that playing it these days.

I just stumbled across DOOM and said, "There is no way that I could not play a game called DOOM," and I continue to play it because I am addicted to it. Me not playing DOOM after I beat it is like, if I only took one bite out of the best sandwich I have ever had, it is not going to happen.

I stumbled across brutal Doom in 2012 or 2013 and played it on and off for a bit before I saw someone playing Eviternity and was like "holy shit I need to check out!" After that I was addicted and needed more, devouring Scythe 1, BTSX, Valiant, and a lot more. It became my comfort game for quite a while. 

I'm early Gen Z (1999) so I couldn't have played it back in its prime

But I think what got me into it was a screenshot of it back in a magazine about nostalgic games.

I remember a couple of imps in the screenshot

I got curious about how the imps looked and then I figured they must be fun games

Boy was I fucking right...

After that I played Wolf 3D which I liked the bosses and the music but not much else

I think this was in late 2014-early 2015

Probably a year later I played 3 and started checking out Half-Life

Honestly I'm glad I decided to play these games

I played some Doom when I was a little kid, TNT and Doom 2 but I never got very far in it and didn't play it much later.

Fast forward to 2014 when I was 15 years old and I was watching some of Aquarius1999's videos and then I was like "This is Doom? You can do all this with Doom???" And then I downloaded Skulltag and fell in love with it.

Still play Doom on and off to this day.

The super shotgun.  My dad brought home a copy of Doom 2 when I was 10, and I thought the first level was neat.  Then I had one of those transformative moments when I found the SSG in map 2.  Underhalls is still one of my favorite levels, mostly for nostalgia for that moment.  

I eventually moved on to other PC games, then got out of PC gaming altogether.  Then in 2018 I'm home with my infant kid one day, scrolling Youtube, and for whatever reason it decided to recommend a Decino Hell Revealed video.  I think it was for The Path.  The combination of great memories for Doom 2 and curiosity (I didn't know custom wads and source ports were even a thing) got me doing some research, I bought the iwads on GOG for like $2.50 each, and I've been re-hooked ever since.  The community's creativity and passion, plus the absolutely rock-solid fundamental design from id, make it something I want to do forever.

Played Doom 64 on a N64 emulator on my phone, after that I emulated GBA Doom. Not the best ways to play Doom but, oh well, it was fun and I had a good time with both games. I still get a bit ""nostalgic"" with Doom 64 even though I was introduced to it, like, what, 2 years ago?

Brutal Doom, then I switched to vanilla experience and fell in love since, I enjoy old stuff more, they had soul.

Through myhouse.wad, to be honest. I liked the mod and how bizarre it was, so then I played Doom 2. I don't know why I overlooked this franchise for so long, or "boomer" shooters in general.

Now I want to play the newer releases, already have Eternal on Steam so I may start with that one first.

Doom 2016 being boring. Then I got curious and tried old Doom and Doom 2 in Dosbox and was surprised how such a "simplistic" shooter, where you can't even look up and down, could be so much fun. A year later, I installed GZDoom to play through Doom again. That was around the time Eviternity was released, the gateway drug.

Thanks, Doom 2016!

30 minutes ago, treulosetomate said:

That was around the time Eviternity was released, the gateway drug.

 

Yeah, Eviternity was the first custom wad I played through too.  It set quite a standard.