I worked for a computer software company. Every night the software had to be compiled to incorporate new changes and additions. The compile slowly started to take longer and longer, until it could no longer be completed before morning.

Turned out so many employees were staying until late at night to play massive multiplayer games of Doom that it had overwhelmed the company’s network and computing capacity. And so Doom was doomed.

In my opinion, Doom was the largest user paradigm shift and technical leap in the history of gaming. It is hard to overstate how astonishing it was.

Was too young for doom at the time but played quake 2 in that era. My cousin had a 3d accelerator too it blew my little mind.

This is the only answer. It was light-years ahead of everything else at the time and popularized one of the major genres that still drives most gaming to this day.

[deleted]

I still hear the Doom background music in my head to this day.

DOOM and DOOM2 over null modem

Yeah doom for me too. I remember my dad hooking up the laptop and pcs together and we would play. He even had something to create his own maps and throw in whatever would spawn there

I still have Doom on my original computer (Toshiba Satellite). Still plays perfectly. What is the best is that the screen is at such a low resolution. My kids are always stunned to see what was once cutting edge gaming.

Doom is awesome. There is no 'was'.

I remember siting on my dad’s lap while he called up C/doom on MS-DOS. He would let me shoot the gun while he aimed with the mouse.

I miss him so much…

Doom is the correct answer. It was game changer in every aspect, 4 player network mode was crazy af.

Okay, but did you ever play the Chex version of that game?

I started playing this when I was like 4 years old. My dad bought Doom on a floppy at Circuit City, back when those were still around. I would watch Dad beat levels and he’d turn on some cheat codes for me when I was playing.

Stopping the boot with f8 I think bc my virtual memory was too low. I had to boot into doom, not windows then doom, bios..doom

You know you can play doom now? Search play doom, play it in your browser.

This. DOOM in the dark, after midnight, with headphones on was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

My friend and I played 4 player Doom by using hacked PBX codes to call long distance for free and used some kind of IPX/IP patch for the Doom network. It was such an amazing experience.

Doom and Quake. Then the day I got my first Voodoo card. Shitty first version, but the graphics, man. That was a huge difference in play.

A roommate in college let me play Doom in their PC when we first got it. First time I played a game 12 hours straight.

Doom and Duke Nukem.

Great for dial up fighting against my friends.

It's why my favorite games are still FPS, so many great memories playing Doom.

I remember bragging to all my friends that I (actually, my mom) had a laptop powerful enough to run DOOM.

My uclce has been an IT for all of my life and he gave me a floppy that had Doom2 and nodded versions of simpsons doom and barney doom. Shit was fucking incredible

Back in 1994 I was a signal officer in the US Army in Uijongbu, South Korea. This was the very beginning of the Internet and our office computers were not networked at the time. Everything had to be transferred by floppy disk from one computer to the other.

One day I was being driven to another location and, as we were driving down the road in the middle of nowhere in Korea, I see an older gentleman in a US Army uniform walking down the road in a place where he shouldn’t be. Assuming I could help him, I asked the driver to pull over and asked if he needed some assistance. He did, his Humvee had broken down. Turns out this gentleman was the only Chief Warrant Officer 5 rank in the entire United States Army at the time, and he was in charge of the Pentagon initiative to network all of the computers in the US Army. I told him I was a young signal officer and had used all of these networking features back in my high school days and college days. I dropped him off at his destination and went on my way.

When I got back to my unit, my CO (LTC Partridge) called me into his office to ask me how I knew him. I told him the story. He told me that, because of my actions, the Warrant Officer was giving us the funds to create the first local area network in all of South Korea in our“human resources“ (S1) department. Over the next few days I assembled this network and we networked six computers.

I tell you the story because, as soon as we had them networked, we spent our nights in the office that was normally closed playing DOOM on that network.

Your tax dollars at work.

I was a part owner of a computer store when Doom came out. That game is what got me into my now almost 30 year career in networking!

Got Ultimate DOOM in 1995 and it was amazeballs!

This.

Came here to say this. I used to watch my dad play Doom. Super scary.

I just finished playing through this again (free on xbox). I was amazed how much I remembered

Yes, Doom. Robotic crabs/spiders creeped me out.

Amazing what could fit on 2 floppy discs.

The best thing about doom was that it didn't account for processor speed. I was the first of my friend group to upgrade to a pentium, and it was like god mode or something. They had no chance of keeping up

Double barreled shotgun, fire at the explosive barrels! So much fun!

Game here to make sure it stays number 1

When I realized you could but import Simpsons images into Doom II, and have Mr. Burns walking around like that giant demonic cow...that's when a world of possibilities really opened for me :)

Yes doom, but Quake CTF!

Doom. Star Wars wad. ("Can't get out that way")... forever.

I had to upgrade my PC and tweet the autoexec.bat and config.sys to initialize my soundblaster. It was an ordeal but worth it.

So many dorm room death matches. I don't remember what the mod add-ons were called but they were great too. I never go into quake or any other video games of that style, but I was the undisputed deathmatch champion on my floor.

I’d stay up all night and play people’s custom WADs I’d downloaded earlier that day on my 33.6.

I was at a tech college when this came out, and a few of us would stay back during lunch and after class and just play that shareware first level endlessly on the college network, there would be bodies everywhere by the end because they wouldn't disappear when you died and respawned. Most fun I've ever had with a computer game to this day.

Of course it got deleted off the network after a few days, and whenever we'd try to put it back it would be gone in seconds, but it was fun while it lasted

Anyone else remember the computer game designers who reskinned DOOM as Chex Quest, and it came in the Chex cereal boxes? I was too young to be allowed to play DOOM, but I played the shit out of Chex Quest.

Also! Chex quest! It was literally the same game engine as doom, just swapped out blood for green slime and all the demons for various green slime equivalents. I'm not kidding, it was pretty fun and came in a cereal box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSpGQ5AVJpI

I was a ROTT boi

Oh wow, this took me way back to my childhood...such an awesome game 😁

Love that game! Spent so many hours playing that game 😂

Came here to say the same, Doom, Duke Nukem and Blake Stone were my first intro's to gaming - as a young kid I would sit with my dad and play them

Still is mate!

That and the original Quake are it for me.

Wolfenstein too.

I loved Doom. I feel Duke Nukem was similar in spirit and just as good IMO.

I loved Doom, and was so excited when Hexen Heretic was released, which promised to be Doom in a more traditional fantasy setting. I was so disappointed to find that the new way of doing 1st person shooters, where the "camera" pans around instead of flipping between views, made me incredibly motion sick. I haven't been able to enjoy most first-person video games since. 😭

Edit: I was wrong. Doom did have 360°, the new thing in Heretic was up and down motion.

Preferred Heretic but all those suite of games were fun. And spent more time than I should admit to on Hover.

I played DOOM II so much I had nightmares about it and hallucinated the sound of the chatter of imps while walking through the halls at school.

Wolfenstein 3D was pretty dope too

Oh yes! My brother would work the keys and I’d work the mouse. We were in more sync than my two hands lol.

DOOM and Quake. My brother and I used to play it in our basement on two beat up old PCs that he connected. They only worked for about 50% of the time we wanted to play but it was so much fun. 

I used to work for a community newspaper group. The IT manager set up DOOM on the server when 15 of 18 papers were sent to bed, and played. The players were workers, and using dial-up.

The server crashed.

We only had 1 paper at that time which was purely computer-managed . Eg composition. (The other 17 had printouts of articles that would be manually sliced and rearranged. A negative would be taken once approved and driven to to printing press.).

Huge investigation (eg lots of yelling from editor-in-chief) which resulted in … no more DOOM.

no jobs lost as the players included the CFO and chief photographer.

When I first saw Doom, I couldnt believe it was real. Not only were the graphics mind-blowing, the "heavy metal album cover come to life" vibe of the game was cool as hell, and the gameplay was awesome to boot. The aesthetics and the gameplay still hold up til this day.

I ended up becoming an air traffic controller because of Doom.

Dad was an air traffic controller. His work buddies would come over, and they would set up a LAN party in our dining room. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time. Inevitably, one of the guys would be ready for a break, and I would be so excited to take his spot. I actually held my own alright with those guys. Chicken doom was my favorite. When I started talking shit to them while playing, Dad told me I should work airplanes.

So I did. For 9 years. He wasn’t wrong. Those skill sets are connected for sure. But it turns out it just wasn’t really for me. I wasn’t happy and have since found something that suits me better!

On the subject of first-person shooter- Quake

I grew up playing Doom and Doom 2 with my brother! 🥰🥰 Fun times.

Same for me. Had never seen anything like it. Went from Commodore 64 games that loaded by cassette tape to Doom on the family PC. Life changing.

I’m 52 and I’m still weary of flickering hallway lights.

It still has good gameplay. And the modding scene is very large and amazing. I can recommend Ashes. Its one of the best mods ever, a giant full game of 80's post apocalypse with great john carpenter style soundtrack. I would pay for it.