Doom 2

It was, of all things, a First Person Shooter that started me on a path of programming. This would be bolstered, of all things. by a Real Time Strategy game, some time later.

Around 1998, there was a computer and software show that stopped at our local mall. We had gone by chance to the mall and found the vendors there. They were lined up in front of the stores. Applications, programs, graphics, designs, etc, amongst other things, were available for sale on floppy diskette or compact disc.

I remember buying three things in particular: a disk with DOOM stuff and two CDs of DOOM II stuff.

One of the CDs had an editing program for DOOM II, with which many mods on the disc were made. The mods varied greatly in quality, but brought a lot of options for playing Doom II again and again.

Using the editor, I decided to make my own changes. I wanted no reload speeds and for all weapons to be fully automatic. This took a little tinkering and I found out that to do so, I just needed to skip frames in the animations. Easy enough. Of course, I found out that if you skip the wrong frames in the animations, you hard lock your computer. A lot.

I recall that one thing I was proud of was that I got the rocket launcher to shoot out the enemy type Lost Souls who burst into evil fire for massive amounts of damage.

Thus the first steps were taken.