My father got us the shareware of Wolfenstein 3D back in '91. I need to say that I played it on an ancient computer and it still ran like a champ. We played it for hours and loved mowing down the Third Reich. We did a 100% run on I am Death Incarnate through out all of the episodes. It took a long time, I think around a year, and that was my introduction to the FPS genre. So, ID wowed me with their new game because there really was nothing like it at the time. We had a NES, but now this was the game we focused on.
Then he got us the shareware for Doom. It was on two 3 1/2 floppy disks and required everything in our current computer at the time. Our computer was a real clunker and only had 6 megs of RAM. My dad went out of his way to get two more megs so we could play.
I remember, when we got Doom working, it was just like Wolf 3D, only different in its capability. Where everything was well lit in Wolf 3D, Doom was dark and gothic. I remember being in awe of being able to go up stairs and being terrified of the pinky demons when I first saw them.
Then there came the time I first made it to Phobos Anamoly and met the Bruiser Brothers. Their little entry points and their strength wowed me to no end. It seemed like I was emptying my chaingun on them and couldn't bring them down. I finally beat them with the rocket launcher and I was mesmerized by the terrible ending. I found myself playing the shareware version over and over again. I didn't memorize levels or secrets, I just loved playing the game so much that I would try out weapons in certain situations and find out ways to kill things faster.
It took us a while to get Ultimate Doom, even though we got the shareware very soon after it came out. My dad was very triumphant when he brought those suckers home. It opened up yet another gate of gaming for me to enter and I had no idea at the time.
As a kid, I only rented the Sega Saturn Doom when I had my original gen 2 system because it was only at the neighborhood Blockbuster for a very short time. My brother and I played it over the weekend. I personally enjoyed it at the time because I simply loved Doom. I didn't notice things like framerates, I just accepted graphics like that because I started out when the SNES was just hitting its stride. I played the NES when I was five so these sort of graphics didn't really bother me. I had already played the Doom shareware and that one didn't run well on our old computer.
I remember playing Doom 2 very near after playing Ultimate. One of my biggest memories was my first bout with the Cyberdemon. Trying to fight him with the rocket launcher was a pain! I didn't know at the time that the plasma gun was far more effective. Still, he's so awesome, it hardly mattered. To be honest, I did hit a few of those stupid Lost Souls up close with the rocket launcher. It was the weapon of choice, of course those little gremlins are going to fly into you. The programmers knew that!
Since then, I've played all of the main titles aside from the mobile games. I have so many Doom ports, it's gotten a little comical at this point. The best levels were in their shareware version and it remains my favorite iteration of Doom to this day for its amazing enginuity and creativity with such limited power and resources. Doom became one of the pillars of gaming itself, along with Wolfenstein. So few franchises affected my gaming quite like Doom and it still remains one of my alltime favorites. Virtua Death!
