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I can still remember when I first played doom it was sometime around 1992.  I had just got over the rush of ID's last masterpiece Wolfenstein 3D and the Spear of Destiny add on for it and a I was hearing a lot on BBS's and from friends about the sequel to wolf3D called DOOM (ok I know its wasn't a sequel but you can't always trust everything you read on BBS's) anyway back to the point I was hearing a lot about this DOOM and so naturally I was given a copy on disk (about three 1.4mb ones) by a friend when he came round and I was surprised at the requirements: a 386 processor, 4mb memory and a SVGA compatible GFX card (my machine just scraped in) but one thing I lacked was a soundcard (not many people had one in 92, just imagine it as having a dvd recordable today, nice but not required) this I was told was not a problem as it could run of a PC speaker but without music.  So we powered it up and the loading screen started (this is what a the console used to look like e.g. Quake 1 + 2 and Half-Life) as I had never seen this before I noted what it was doing then the title screen appeared and it struck me as being the best SVGA image I had ever seen the I hit return and started a game in nightmare (my mistake) I was amazed at the speed/GFX and the enemies looked so real until I blasted them to hell that was.  The game play was just like Wolf3D, strife avoiding fire and shoot,  I got into it really quick and it is still my favorite game.

The first time I played DOOM online was around 1994 (my new soundcard had a 28k modem built in) I was with compuserve at this time and I arranged a match with someone in Manchester.  Now this may shock you to know this but in those days games couldn't be played using the TCP/IP protocol so we had to dial direct! the cost of this may shock you but at this time the were only five ISP's I could dial to on a local number! (compuserve was the fastest) so we agreed he would call me so I disconnected and set DOOM to "wait for call" mode two minutes later he connected and the game was under-way (as I had 28k and he had 14k i had to set mine to 14k to make it fair) it lasted about 15 minutes (see people did care about the phone bill in those days) I one 12 frogs to nine and the lag in the game was bad I regularly skipped frames and moved erratically but I managed to counter this with smart moving and good aim.

The Story

In DOOM, you're a space marine, one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action. Three years ago you assaulted a superior officer for ordering his soldiers to fire upon civilians. He and his body cast were shipped to Pearl Harbor, while you were transferred to Mars, home of the Union Aerospace Corporation.

The UAC is a multi-planetary conglomerate with radioactive waste facilities on Mars and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. With no action for fifty million miles, your day consisted of suckin' dust and watchin' restricted flicks in the rec room.

For the last four years the military, UAC's biggest supplier, has used the remote facilities on Phobos and Deimos to conduct various secret projects, including research on inter-dimensional space travel. So far they have been able to open gateways between Phobos and Deimos, throwing a few gadgets into one and watching them come out the other. Recently however, the gateways have grown dangerously unstable. Military "volunteers" entering them have either disappeared or been stricken with a strange form of insanity--babbling vulgarities, bludgeoning anything that breathes, and finally suffering an untimely death of full-body explosion. Matching heads with torsos to send home to the folks became a full-time job. Latest military reports state that the research is suffering a small setback, but everything is under control.

A few hours ago, Mars received a garbled message from Phobos. "We require immediate military support. Something fraggin' evil is coming out of the gateways! Computer systems have gone berserk!" The rest was incoherent. Soon afterwards, Deimos simply vanished from the sky. Since then, attempts to establish contact with either moon have been unsuccessful.

You and your buddies, the only combat troop for fifty million miles were sent up pronto to Phobos. You were ordered to secure the perimeter of the base while the rest of the team went inside. For several hours, your radio picked up the sounds of combat: guns firing, men yelling orders, screams, bones cracking, then finally silence. Seems your buddies are dead.

Things aren't looking too good. You'll never navigate off the planet on your own. Plus, all the heavy weapons have been taken by the assault team leaving you only with a pistol. If only you could get your hands around a plasma rifle or even a shotgun you could take a few down on your way out. Whatever killed your buddies deserves a couple of pellets in the forehead. Securing your helmet, you exit the landing pod. Hopefully you can find more substantial firepower somewhere within the station. As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors. They know you're here. There's no turning back now.

Doom was once the most groundbreaking game ever created.  No-one has every made a more groundbreaking game since (Well that remains to be seen with DOOM3 on its way!).

Doom was in its day the best game to play over the internet because there was never any lag in a game of doom, well more to the point although the was quite a bit of lag it never effected anyone because in those day someone with a 28k modem was considered a LPB so they all had similar pings and therefore no-one had speed advantages.

In 1994 doom had been played by over a million people worldwide and since its creation Ifrag (formally Idoom) has been accessed by over a million users, Doom is now the most played game on and off line in the history of IBM compatibles! (notice I didn't say PC there).

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