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Thursday, October 19, 2006
By Christina VanGinkel
I came to a stunning realization the other day and I do not know whether to be excited about it, or depressed that it is true! I have been gaming on my computer for so long, that games I once coveted, saving up my hard earned dollars for, can now be found not only in clearance racks for deep, deep discounts, but some are even being reissued as classics from the past!
Somewhere back in the very early 90's, 1991 to be exact, a company by the name of id Software released what was to become the precursor to one of the top selling games of all time, and was actually the original first-person shooter to land in the laps of excited gamers everywhere. That game was titled Wolfenstein 3D. It was followed up a few short years later in 1994 by the game that in my opinion, and the opinion of many others, has helped define all games since, and that game was named DOOM. So as not to date myself unfairly, I actually did not play Wolfenstein 3D until it was a couple of years old, about eighteen months before I bought one of the first copies of DOOM available. I remember waiting for the release date of DOOM to arrive, and paying just under eighty dollars for the pleasure of getting a box in the mail that contained the DOOM game on of all forms of media, 3 1/2 " floppy discs! I was the proud owner of a Gateway 486SX, so cutting edge that it did have a CD ROM drive on it, not to mention a whopping 8 megs of Ram (that is not a typo, it was 8, not 80 or 800, but 8!), but the format of the CD was so new, that most software was still arriving on the tried and true floppy.
As they say in the movies, the rest is history. Doom went on to manifest itself as one of the most popular games ever created, complete with sequels, and as I mentioned before, now coming back full circle with the now classic games being reissued in various forms. The one I came across that got me reminiscing about my first forays into the world of computer gaming was actually titled Collector's Edition Doom, and included The Ultimate DOOM, DOOM 2, and The Final DOOM titles. For a mere $9.98 (available through Amazon), I could relive my favorite game without worrying about how I was going to get my original floppies converted to disk!
Through the years, I have played the entire collection at some time or another, but my favorite to this day remains the original. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it was not only the first game I saved for and bought at a price that was then and in my opinion even today was a small fortune for a piece of entertainment, but was the first game that I played from first level to last without aid of any cheat codes. If you have gamed long enough, chances are you have used a cheat code here and there, but something about using them on this game seemed almost sacrilegious! Not to mention the fact that if I was going to cough up that much money for a game, I was going to get as many hours of play out of it as I could.
Yes, I still have my original DOOM discs; however, my current computer does not have a floppy disc drive. Every so often, I do get the urge to play it again in the same fashion as I did that first time, and the thought that I can now pick up a CD with not only it but also several of its sequels thrills me. Then I will spy the case for DOOM 3, or one of my other current games, and I end up playing one of those instead. My time is much more limited too, and I have such a long list of games I still want to play if I ever find the time, that getting back to the original DOOM is probably not something I will do anytime soon. Still, the fact that I could now pick up a copy for almost nothing when compared to the price I paid so many years ago, is very tempting. Heck, ten dollars is nothing when it comes to hours of entertainment. DOOM revisited here I come!
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