Welcome to the start of a long series of posts about the classic video game Doom.

Back in the early nineties I was living in Guildford and working in Byfleet for a credit card manufacturer as a programmer writing software to control desktop embossing machines.

I used to use my personal computer at the time for developing on as it was better than anything the company had. Bare in mind this was a 16Mhz 386sx (so not even a full blown 386) Amstrad clamshell laptop with a 20MB hard drive, and 4MB of RAM.

It was on this “beast” that I first played the shareware version of Wolfenstein, followed by its successor Doom.

Both games captured the imaginations of myself and my colleagues. We spent every free moment of our breaks playing the games in the office. There was definitely a competitive element between us that saw us competing to make more progress in the game than the others.

I did complete both games.

Doom did really stand out at the time as something special. The lighting, level design, hidden rooms, levels that were at different heights, jump out of your skin moments, and iconic monsters.

Since then over the decades I have played Doom on nearly every capable platform I’ve owned. Whether that was a windows powered pda, member of the GameBoy family, or full blown games console like the 360.

Now some thirty years later I’m once more returning to Mars to take on the forces of hell in a dramatic play through of Doom on the Nintendo Switch.

For the record this will not be the first time that I’ve played the Switch version of Doom. When I first purchased the Switch version I naturally played through a few of the levels. Memory fails me about whether I finished the game or not.

So what’s different about my playing the game this time around?

I think this time around it will be the total immersion of all things Doom between sessions. Such as rereading Masters of Doom, and DOOM:SCARYDARKFAST, plus a first time reading of “I’m too young to die“ by Bitmap Books.

And like my Portal posts (once I put the remaining two up) there will be a look at the table top versions of the game.

So it’s possible you won’t see another post in this series for a week or two as I finish the Portal posts, keep my #dungeon23 stuff going, and prep my lessons. Until then see you in the next post.