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Another year rolls around, and I lost track of the time. Yet it's that time again? Right under my nose.

Being a 21 year old, I've had the joyful experience of being able to grow up with Doom. My older brother got Doom for a present way back when it first released. So naturally, I ended up watching him. When I was 5 years old, I would secretly play Doom when my parents weren't looking. I didn't really see anything wrong with it. I wasn't that good back then, but I had fun. As I got older, I got better. I was also allowed to play it. Living through the experience of Doom with my childhood. Great times. Doom 2, Doom 64, Final Doom. Played them all time and time again. I learned about source ports, and mods for Doom. Icarus Alien Vanguard and Eternal Doom being the first megawads I learned about. In my early teens, I took up mapping for Doom. I watched communities developed and all sorts of mods get born. Doom was the game never bore me. Even to this day where I basically left all the other Doom Communities (Not that I was missing much anyways.) to be here with MM8BDM and Cutstuff.

Happy birthday Doom, you are still the most meaningful game to me.

Doom be ballin

18 years... That means I knew about it when it was 5 or 6 years old. (and I was 6 or 7).
I remember the monsters scared me a lot so I used to play with the "no monsters" parameter and finding secrets was still fun. (Also took me days or weeks to figure out how to open doors. XD)
I think E1M9, the military base, was my favourite map then.

Happy Birthday, Doom! I personally started with Doom 2 and grew up with it, but only recently did I start playing it more often, probably because of GvH.

Once I saw a Discovery Channel documental about videogames, and it start naming doom and commenting it was "legendary, original, Father of FPS, offender, etc etc etc.". After playing mm8bdm, I started playing doom mods without knowing what exactly was. Several months later I found the same video in YouTube and I concluded "Ohh That is the legendary game that they were commenting".

Oh, snap. Is Doom really 18 years old? Wow...

My history with Doom and its ilk is one of curious, random nature. Seeing as I'm 28 years old, I'm old enough to have experienced the precursor, Wolfenstein 3D, first-handedly. Of course, comparing Wolfenstein 3D to Doom would be like comparing Pong to the Top Spin series. But getting back on-track, I used to watch my dad play Wolfenstein 3D way back in the days of dial-up BBSes and whatnot. (Back in those days, being skilled at computers actually meant something, be it either being revered as a tech whiz... or exclusion from your peers. >_>) Watching my dad play the game, then after I got older, letting me play the game meant something to me. We actually ordered the whole six-episode package for its low, low prices of $49.95 when it was relatively new. And good times were had by all.
What seemed like a short time later, my dad brought home a series of floppy diskettes with the label "Doom v1.2 (Disk x of 4)" written on it. After a length install process, we started it up. We were promptly amazed by how... well... amazing Doom was compared to Wolfenstein 3D! Realistic sounds of a number of weapons blasting away. 3D graphics of varying heights and lengths. Many, many more items, enemies, tricks, traps, and so forth. It was pretty damn spectacular. However, my journey into Doom did not stop there.

About a year later, Doom II: Hell on Earth arrived, and with it, even more new enemies, items, tricks, traps, and so forth. This time, the source of my game was directly from my favorite BBS of the time, "Smalltime BBS" of Apache Junction, Arizona. As much as I liked the game, this was only the beginning... for in poking around Smalltime BBS, I'd also found a curious little product by the name of "NetDoom". What this program was was a simple BBS client which allowed you to dial into a BBS, just like Telix or RIPTerm... but rather than do all the usual things, NetDoom was specifically designed to allow players to play Doom together over their phone line without all the hassle of using the built-in network settings! Did it work well? It worked fantastically. I'd never experienced anything like NetDoom! And on top of that, the Arizona NetDoom community was full of awesome people like "ChainsawJim", "SillySft", and of course the Smalltime BBS co-sysop (and close friend of the time) "Firehawke". (These people would go on to release the widely-recognized first version of "X-Mas Doom", just as a point of reference.) From this same community, I'd also see nationwide-circulated demo files and modifications, such as "Delirium" and "Leprechaun Doom". These were sometimes combined with other things, such as DWANGO5.wad or Super Shotgun Jousting, generally ending in hilarious results. We never played them, but they were fun to watch.

Some time later, my dad moved away to work at a job in another part of the state. My love for Doom continued, but it focused more on a co-operative nature rather than one of destruction. Dad and I would often directly connect to each other via the phone line and play through Doom II: Hell on Earth co-operatively. Though admittedly, I was a brat and occasionally tried to kill him. >_>;; Regardless, we had lots of fun roughly once a week. Little long-distance father-son time. It was fantastic...
Later still, I would go on to find such things as ZDaemon and Skulltag. The ZDaemon community was pretty nice for the time. The official ZDaemon deathmatch map packs had just been released and brought a lot of random fun to the community. I somehow avoided all the drama and just kept playing the game I loved so much. I had a lot of fun, not didn't really make a lot of friends from it. Except Nestea. We fell out of contact a long time ago, though.

And then finally, in 2010, Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch was released. And I am happy to say that I'm an off-and-on part of this community. What a long, strange trip it's been, these last 18 years. From killing former humans to killing robot masters all in what seems like the blink of an eye... Who knows what the future holds for Doom and its variants.