I remember it like it was yesterday. It was somewhere around 1994. I went to my friend’s house, because he called me up and wanted to show me something amazing on his 386DX. He said he had installed a shareware version of a game called “DOOM”. I thought to myself, that’s a cool name, so that was a good start. My friend already pre-played it, and I saw at his body language, that he was anxious to demonstrate it to me. He typed in ‘DOOM’ at the dos prompt, and then the famous loading screens appears, you know … the one with the dots appearing, which was maybe the first version of an progress bar in DOS, to indicate that one needed to wait because of stuff in the background loading up your 4 megs of RAM 😉

The game menu appears; the most awesome music is beginning to play throughout the speakers! It was my friend’s Gravis Ultrasound which he had bought recently which was processing the MIDI music. All sorts of sounds of monsters and gun shots were heard. It was the demo which was played as a background on the game menu. Choosing new game loaded up the first level in which we appeared. Again, the first EPIC E1M1 Doom song was being heard by my ears for the first time, and you begin to have this feeling to really wanna play this game. My first visual memory of DOOM is this place further in E1M1 :

At that moment we both knew that this was a big hit in gaming history. We played it for hours and hours, wanting to finish it so badly.

1994, the year were internet was not known to the common people. Networking was something you only saw in offices, schools, … imagine, one night I was reading the readme file of Doom and noticed that there was an ability to play against each other through a local area network with 4 people, or even with 2 players via a null modem cable, a cable you can hook up through a serial connector. I remember I took my PC Case one day to my friend’s house and explained it to him. I bought a null modem cable the day before, to try it out. After some trial and error, we succeeded in our goal. Again, one epic moment when my friend and I were sitting next to each other on our own computer and saw each other in the world of DOOM !

I want to dedicate this article to ID Software and all of the people who have worked there that changed my life 😉

Thanks to John Carmack & John Romero !

To conclude, enjoy my 1Life RetroRun :

– Vulturius