Blast from the Past: The original DOOM
Mid December, 1993. The internet was unrecognizable compared to what it is today. A rumbling begins spreading. This new game called “Doom” is infecting the planet. This was pre-WIndows 95, a world dominated by MS-DOS and rather crappy games.
That was all about to change. ID Software released Doom, as a publicly available one episode teaser, and a commercial offering that added two additional episodes.
That is all I can say. At the time, I was running a cobbled together PC, with I think an 80486 clocked at 33MHz, and a fairly bland graphics card. But it rocked.
I think the original one episode game fit on one 3&1/2” floppy disk, the full 3 episodes fit on 4 floppies. It ran a mediocre resolution, and it was faux 3D, but it didn’t matter.
It rocked my world, unlike its predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D, this was visceral, captivating, and fun. It also catapulted an arms race on computers, where I was upgrading about every 9 months to keep up, first a 486DX2 66, then a 100MHz, then the original Pentium 90 MHz, and adding accelerated graphics cards (first 3DFx, then nVidia, etc.)
Doom made way for Quake, which made way for Unreal Tournament, which made way for Half-life: Counterstrike.
But it all began with Doom.
Since I have gotten back into using my aging Xbox One, I rediscovered the Doom port for the older Xbox360, and have been playing it. It has been long enough since I played that the levels are vaguely familiar, and I have to re-discover the secrets and the paths to get though.
It remains a surprisingly well balanced game, fun, challenging, and a good use of a few hours here and there.
Now excuse me as I have to remember how to beat the Boss on the last level of Episode 2
(Oh, and today is my birthday)