Doom II Came Out 22 Years Ago Today

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Just a little love letter to the game that I lost my PC gaming virginity to.

As we all know, id Software changed the word of gaming with their release of Doom in 1993, but I didn't get my 1st taste until Doom II: Hell on Earth was released in 1994. There isn't much difference between Doom and Doom II. The gameplay and graphics are pretty much identical, except that Doom II has bigger levels, more enemies, and more weapons/bonuses/secret areas. How do you make the greatest game of it's time better? Make more of said game! And they did.

Doom II has a special place in my heart as it was really the 1st PC game that I invested myself into. I had played other games, but Doom II was something else. It was different. It was a rock star of a game in it's time. Word had already spread across the world about Doom so Doom II had an aura of greatness around it before I ever played it. When I'd boot the the Doom II .exe file, it's haunting menu screen and music filled me with dread, but then as soon as the 1st map loaded my dread turned to excitement and the fun began... every single time. Here are three questions that only had to ask myself once.

"Who are these two dudes with their backs turned to me?"

"Why is there a chainsaw hidden behind me?"

"Why are there demons trying to kill me?"

Only once because none those questions mattered once the fun took over. Doom isn't about "Why", it's about "Doing" because that's the fun part.

The 1st time I saw (and heard) Doom II's end boss, the Icon of Sin, it blew me away, and then when I turned wall clipping off and found John Romero's head on a stick, I was flabbergasted. It was truly the 1st game on PC that felt like more than just a game to me. It was huge in level design and in scope. It made me appreciate the skill and talent that goes into making a video game and made me want to make them too. I'm not a game developer but I probably wouldn't have gotten into graphic design had the striking look of Doom II not influenced me at the young age of 10-13 years old. Doom II may not have been 1st, but it was my first, and it has influenced my life as much as anything else from my past.

However the best part, and what I like about Doom II most is, here we are 22 years later and I could still boot up Doom II, or any of the other Doom games and they are still just as fun. A true testament to this franchise.

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great game

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Always wanted to play DOOM since I have never played much FPS games. Only ones I have played are the super linear military FPS ones so it would be cool to see how old school FPS differs from the modern ones.

I will say I did play the DOOM 2016 demo and that was fun.

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@anon69321716 I don't normally suggest doing this sort of thing, but you should really just expirence Doom, or Doom II, either one doesn't matter. Not Wolfenstein 3-D (unless you want to), it's not the same. But You should play a few levels of one of the orginal Doom games just to get a feel for it. It's a piece of living history.

I say I don't normally suggest these things because I know what it's like to play an old game after it's time has passed. I want to play but just can not stick with Morrowind. I can go back an play Oblivion and still have fun, but I can't do Morrowind because of the dated combat mechanics. This is much less of an issue with Doom, however it is still different from modern shooters, namely there is no mouse look. You're stuck aiming on a 2D plane, so it's fake 3D game. There are however programs that will let you play it with mouse look. Here are a couple

http://gzdoom.drdteam.org/
https://zandronum.com/

and if your interested check out the Brutal Doom mod. It really refreshes the game to feel much more modern, but the core flavor of the game is still complete in tack. Still though, I would play Doom just vanilla like it was at release, for just a few levels at least, for the experience.

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They also has a hidden door that took you to a level that celebrated their earlier games

Loved that one room where you had the spider boss and the demon with rocket launcher boss. Run in a circle till they get pissed and start fighting each other!

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Oh I tried Wolfenstein 3-D before and just couldn't get used to the controls at all. DOOM 1 & 2 have always been on my wishlist to play. Besides, if the original somehow bores me, there is always the Brutal DOOM to quench my bloodthirst.

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Doom is STILL objectively the greatest video game of all time, nothing else can compete with it. Romero, in a YouTube video interview mentioned how other people told him that when Doom came out it was the worst time to be a game developer. People would play Doom, be amazed, and then turn to look at the crappy game they were making and ask themselves "what the hell am I doing?" It was a scary time for developers.

It's comparable to a moment in time that Grant Morrison talked about, after Watchmen came out it was a scary time for the comic book industry because they thought that superheroes were dead as a concept and that readers were done with comics.

When you look at it that way, Doom was a real watershed moment for the industry. Nothing even close to it had been done before. It was most people's first step into a virtual world. It was the first game with any sense of realism to it. It was the first game that made people feel genuine emotions. When you pull that trigger you feel those bullets ripping through demons. When you're running for your life your heart is racing. When the lights go out you jump out of your seat. When you hear the cry of a Hell Knight your muscles tense up and you feel dread as you go, "aw shit!"

Doom was the first in so many things. Many people still play it and mod it like mad. Anyone here have any levels they've made? I made a thread about it a while ago but I don't think it got any attention.

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Romero has done a few play through of doom over the years while talking about it. Very interesting to watch and hear him talk about the designs.

Thats the start of the dev's play by double fine. Actually I found most of the series to be good so far but the doom ones are the best.

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There is also the Masters of Doom that chronicles the two Johns that created Doom. I hear it is a great read.

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the audio book is read by Wil Wheaton... superb

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Still, even today, the most addictive game, at the time , I ever played..............complete nights.! And even running a coax cable to the neighbor to play network (fuck at snail speeds, but still) , the discovery of the next levels kept me going for nights. That original feeling and discovery was unique and will never happen again..............unfortunately !
But what a game, what am era; and we were the luckiest ones to have not only seen, but literally were part of it !
Only the lucky ones.............

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hey... I'm 22.

0.0

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If y’all enjoyed the book Masters of Doom, I highly recommend a write-up by Geoff Keighley entitled Knee Deep in a Dream ~ The Story of Diakatana. It is a very long write-up, almost the length of a small book. I am about half way through it so far. It has been a very interesting read, much in the vein of Masters of Doom. Although I am only a couple hours into Masters of Doom, I imagine Geoff Keighley’s write-up would make excellent further reading.

Unfortunately the write-up in no longer publicly online. Somehow I stumbled upon it, and luckily was able to drag it back up using WayBackMachine the internet archive. Here is the link: http://web.archive.org/web/20050308114347/http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-daikatana/index.html

Edit: I have made ‘Knee Deep in a Dream ~ The Story of Diakatana’ into a text document, stripping away any unwanted web formatting in the process. Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AphlbtrYYoPD8QqhZhdVrPk2OIRS8ttj/view?usp=sharing

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Started to play Wolfenstein 3d back in the day, since then I was hooked on all those games that came along, Doom, Doom II, Hexen, Heretic. We played at friends house using, can't even remeber the name of it, whatever cables were before ethernet.

Time flies!

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Null modem cables for a serial link between two machines.

From there people played on token ring networks and then ethernet.

I also remember TEN which was a dial up service for playing online. Duke Nukem 3d used it by default.

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I bought a game today, Nerves Of Steel, A godawful Doom clone from 95, Doom didn't do much new but what it did was encourage many identikit games due to it's popularity with similar simplistic gameplay. It was first past the post at a time of hardware technology catching up with what the masses.. wanted from a 3d shooter, It started a downward spiral to what we see today

screw Doom, Wolfenstein and Tank whatever, Carmack didn't invent shit he popularized it, which is the same cop-out bullshit word used by the media when describing Mario games

a couple of atari 800xl games from 1982 and 1983


Quake was a good game.

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Thank you.

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Commodore_64, Id software more than just popularized the FPS genre, they pioneered it.

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No problem. I am in the process of making 'Knee Deep in a Dream ~ The Story of Diakatana' into a text document. I will upload it, and post the link in my original post, for anyone interested.

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I fricken love this book! I did my disseration on how the progression in technology has allowed sound in video games to become more immersive and this book was super helpful. I don't normally read much outside of fiction, but this book was awesome!

Doom II was one of the first games I got on PC. Me and my Dad were at a carboot sale when I was 12 and I found it the floppy disk version for £4, in the original big box. One of the disks was messing up so we had to use a new floppy but it was so worth it.