What I liked the most about my gaming journey was the fact that it was imperfect, almost as if someone had kicked the puzzle box and then hastily tried to rearrange the pieces, but without any idea of what the final image was supposed to look like. I have always been drawn to the results, because there's a certain realism to them (painful as it was to figure out and navigate through).
I was not supposed to first see Google by hooking up the Dreamcast to a landline first thing out of the box. There was no reason for me to find out about the Nintendo Wii through some bootleg CD being sold at a minimart... and I definitely wasn't intended to discover Doom through the damn PS1 version.
We weren't even supposed to be playing the PlayStation that day, we were going to enjoy a normal Saturday afternoon playing football on the local park, but the seething Summer sun had other plans and, after trying to cope with the melting heat for a few minutes, we all flocked back inside, to the icy contrast of the AC-powered modernity of my rich friend's house.
After a few minutes of intense kid-like debate over what to play (I vetoed Resident Evil 1 hard), we settled for what otherwise looked fun: Doom.
This is how I first saw the famed Doom.
I kinda knew what Doom was at the time, but my understanding of the franchise was muddled at the best, so I thought that it was a PlayStation 1 exclusive, yet another game I couldn't play at home due to lacking the appropriate hardware... but something about it looked really familiar. And as my friend kept blasting his way through E1M1, I finally asked him directly if this had any relation with Wolfenstein 3D, one of my favorite childhood games. He told me he didn't know about that game, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the two had more than coincidental similarities. Still, all I wanted was to get some gaming in before my grandpa would pick me up from that house (which wasn't easy, because my friend kept sneaking in cheat codes to get himself fully healed, thinking we wouldn't notice). I eventually got up and went outside to play with his dog while the argument raged inside, but I couldn't quite forget about it.
A few weeks later I learned that Doom was available on PC, and that I could possibly even run it (trust me, that wasn't a fair assumption to make with my system at the time). I even felt somewhat vindicated by learning that Wolfenstein 3D had, indeed, been developed by the same company... so I went online through the sheer power of my half-dead 56K modem and began searching for it.
What followed was perhaps the stupidest thing ever, as I could locate everything you could think of about Doom, except the actual game.
I would run into levels, WADs, IWADS, custom maps, custom weapons, custom websites, custom tools to edit and run it... I even ran into the goddamn ALPHA BUILD, with no further luck. Tired and annoyed, I decided to go back to Wolfenstein 3D (which was just a little easier to get) and to revive my memories in there. Screw Doom, man. Screw it.
The fact that Google felt the need to direct me to the Alpha Build of Doom when asked for a download felt extraordinarily trollish to me. And I kinda respect it.
Wolfenstein 3D was one of the few games (alongside International Super Star Soccer Deluxe on the Genesis and the trivia game on Zeta Multimedia's Historia del Mundo) that my dad and sister actually wanted to play with me, and the source of some damn funny arguments, as our playstyles clashed and collided. My dad, being an "old-school" gamer, wanted to explore every nook and cranny to rake up the points, my sister wanted to wander around to see it all, and I wanted to run and gun from one end of the map to the other. Naturally, that meant that it was sheer torture whenever we had to witness the others play, and it made it almost therapeutic when they died and had to hand the controller back. If it was up to me, that was where the story should have ended. I was having fun and bonding with my loved ones, what else could I possibly need?
But, of course, things can never be that simple. This was the dawn of the age of the internet, and Doom was starting to regain its footing through the much-anticipated release of Doom 3, the fact that its source code was rumored to be released soon, and also the fact that it had been getting a lot of traction through the newly-established multiplayer format, with programs like ZDaemon and Skulltag making it easier than ever to just jump in and kill everyone.
I finally located the Doom files on one of the first sites I had originally checked (I had no idea what "Abandonware" meant at the time) and, let me tell you... running the game for the first time was nothing short of mind-blowing. Sure, this was literally a decade after the fact, but the game looked and felt so spectacular as to send shivers down my spine. Was I really playing one of the greatest games ever made on a rig so rickety as to forbid such experiences with steely "resolve" time and again? Yes, yes I was. I just flew through the first few maps, happily blasting at anything that looked at me the wrong way and checking every wall in search of secrets (my Wolf3D habits were hard to kill). By the time I managed to glance at the clock for the first time it was already three in the morning and I had been playing for two hours straight, almost sinking and erasing the Control key due to sheer overuse. To say I was hooked would have been the understatement of the decade.
And I just... kept going at it, playing more and more levels with pure joy. Killing demons became my chief hobby at the time and reporting what I had been doing on my favorite gaming forum formed the basis of what would eventually become a career on game reviewing. I just liked everything about this one, and I couldn't see myself deleting it any time soon.
Awww, HECK YEAH! This was the real deal.
Then, one day, came the ultimate surprise: the secret Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen maps.
Going through those was amazing in ways that I find hard to describe, as I thought that the game had already exhausted its supply of curveballs when it threw me in that pretty damn good city map, which reminded me of some of my favorite Internet Cafe experiences, giving off strong Counter-Strike and Vice City vibes through its semi-open spaces and almost-believable infrastructure. Killing zombies and demons on the brick-and-stone halls and corridors of my childhood felt like the crowning achievement for a game that had nothing left to prove.
Finishing both Doom and Doom 2 was amazing, but it simply wasn't enough... not after all that wait! So I looked up the system requirements for the upcoming Doom 3, and promptly got depressed. Instead, I looked for something to freshen the experience and found out that someone I talked with had started developing a Total Conversion for Doom 2 that aimed to give it the "look and feel" of Doom 3, upgrading the maps and weapons to match what the trailers and promotional screenshots looked like. It was... awkward, and the team behind that TC was paranoid to the point of self-parody, so I just deleted the whole thing and turned to ZDaemon instead, ready to take my demon-slaying skills to the next level.
Well... it didn't work.
Windows 98 SE REALLY hated that program and just refused to run it, so I kept fuming in there for a while (not that my 56K internet speed would have worked) before upgrading to XP out of necessity. To my infinite surprise, ZDaemon actually worked on XP, but I found out rather quickly that I was a small fish on a big pond... I mean, what did I expect? Those people had been playing since the game originally released a decade ago, so I was no match. I was eventually limited to the incredibly cheap tactic of hiding on a corner and ambushing other players with BFG and RPG shots, which was extraordinarily frowned-upon at the time. I hated to say it, but my own lack of skill made the game super less fun for me.
The ZDaemon launcher encompasses everything I love about the internet of old... I mean, just look at it!
I kept trying, though, and I eventually chained enough "legit" kills to earn myself some begrudging respect, but it still wasn't enough. Something HAD to be done to even the playing field... and so, in a strike of evil genius, a few friends and I got together and managed to show enough "rank" to launch our own clan, designed to make other players see us as a force to be reckoned with. We even got our clan's name featured on the program's official site, which was a huge deal at the time. But the kicker? The clan never once competed, it was a smokescreen designed to mock the ironic "holy" status they gave to rank and status on a game about killing hellspawn. By the time they realized what had happened, the damage had already been done.
I eventually got bored and went back to offline play, trying more and more custom maps to keep the experience interesting. I even got one last "FU" from the Nintendo 64 by getting a hold of Doom 64, a game so broken in the emulation department that it had me killed in complete darkness, only displaying my rapidly diminishing health meter as the sound glitched and every sprite and texture failed to load. IM-F-PECCABLE.
Needless to say, I adore Doom. The struggles it put me through in order to even play it guarantee that it will never be forgotten, and the fact that it was the first game I played online from the comfort of my own home was just the icing on the cake. A broken, somewhat spoiled, delicious cake.
What about you? What were your experiences with Doom?
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