Reply To: What’s your DOOM origin story, and what Myths did you grow up believing?

[sorceress]

#9506

My first experience of Doom was at school, as someone had installed it on the computers in my home classroom.

I’ve told this story before, but that was for a different game, so I’ll tell it again… My home classroom was the resources room, which was a room that pupils would go to do computer-related things as part a cookery or geography lesson, such as looking on the CDROM or word processing a recipe. No lessons took place there, and we had the computers to ourselves at lunch time.

I think there were 4 of us in the class who were into computers – two lads were DOS gamers, then myself and another person who had come from the amiga/atari side.

My interest in games at that age was not particularly great, and I wasn’t familiar at all with what was happening in the gaming world.

So when I first saw Doom II, i was quite amazed by it:

– Doom’s rich 3D environments, with artwork that seemed to exist somewhere between cartoonlike and realistic. In contrast, the only first-person games I’d seen on 16-bit platforms were flat shaded, with minimal geometry.

– Doom’s smooth animation and fluid gameplay, that far exceeded the slideshows I’d experienced on 16-bit machines.

– Doom’s first person violence with guns and blood was unlike anything I’d seen before in gaming. It felt liked it pushed social boundaries as well as technical.It was exciting.

I think it was some time that same year I got my own DOS/Win95 PC (iirc: P150 / 2MB S3 Virge Graphics Card / 32MB RAM / 2.5GB HDD / 8xCDROM). This was only partially motivated from playing DOS games at school. I was more into office software, programming, and CDROMs, but my interest in gaming did grow a little, and I did enjoy trying the game demos I found bundled on PC magazines. I did have Doom II for my computer at home, eventually buying a collectors edition as well.

As for myths… I often used to wonder if there were more secret rooms in the levels than what we knew about, and I’d enjoy exploring the maps, looking for walls where a little room might fit behind it. I didn’t understand how the maps were put together at that age, and I didn’t appreciate that that walls and structures were not built like their real-world counterparts. That you couldn’t (theoretically) take panels off the walls and see what was behind it. So I liked to imagine there were rooms that not even the designers had found. :p

Doom II along with Warcraft 2 were my two favourite games for a long time, and even though I rarely play them now, I think they will both always have a special place in my heart. I think I’d still rank both of them in my top 5.