Visiting the Nintendo eshop is dangerous. Especially when they have stuff on sale to tempt you.

The latest temptation for me was something that I own or have owned on several other gaming platforms over the years.

And yet I found myself buying the game again on the Switch!

That game is…

I’ve been playing Doom since it came out in the early 90’s as shareware on the PC.

I owned an Amstrad clamshell 16Mhz 386sx laptop back then. Which had I want to say a 40MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM. I seem to remember that I did upgrade the RAM at some point as well.

At the time I was playing Doom for the very first time I was working in Byfleet for a credit card manufacturer, writing PC software to control desktop credit card embossing machines and cheque printers.

We were a young team, all of us in our twenties. Obviously one ore two were more mature than the rest. But the majority of us were not. Practical jokes were often played. Several times that involved strippers! Like the time I was told I was needed to give a demo of my new software and the hardware it controlled to a client. They let me do the demo for over 20 minutes before giving the signal to the stripper to start her act!

It was a different age. Times were a changing, but they hadn’t reached our office. You couldn’t do that sort of stuff now days and I’m glad. I was a different person then to the one I am now. I’m embarrassed and ashamed of who I was back then.

That was were I was when Doom came out.

I had played and completed Wolfenstein 3D, so Doom was a no brainier for me.

Where I got the game from initially I’m not sure. I think the shareware version was on the cover of a PC magazine.

But wow I was hooked, as were one or two in the office as well. I think we had more than one lunch hour that saw the definition of what a lunch hour was stretched a bit.

I think it would be fair that the competition between those of us playing the game drove us onwards. It was especially fuelled by the end of level stats that told you how many of the secret rooms you had found, and items collected.

The strange thing is we never networked up our PCs and played multiplayer. We played it solo at our desks or at home. Networking PCs together then was a bit of a hassle, which probably put us off the idea.

By the time I had completed Doom I think I was the only one in the office still playing it.

During the years after if Doom was released for hardware I owned then I got it. I had Doom on my HP ipaq pda, and on the gba. I rebought it on the PC. I have it on the 360 and PS3. It’s on a raspberry pi I own. You get the picture.

So it was no surprise that with the game and it sequels (Doom 2 and 3) on sale on the Nintendo eshop it seemed the right time to grab them all.

I like playing original classic Doom. Now days it is almost a comfort thing and like getting to know an old friend again. With the gap between plays being several years there is a haziness to what I remember, it is familiar and yet new!

Anyway I will look more into Doom and how it plays on the Switch in a future post. But first I have Bioshock and the underwater world of Rapture to finish exploring.

If you are a fan of Doom you really must read “Masters Of Doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture” by David Kushner, and “DOOM Scarydarkfast” by Dan Pinchbeck. The later is a more academic look at the game. There is a Game Engine book about Doom that I haven’t read and don’t own (it’s expensive).