Thirty Years ago next Sunday, at Midnight, some nerdy guys at a small software company uploaded their new game to the Internet, and started a sensation.
Thirty years after that, we’ll be playing Doom on the official Dwarf Fortress Roundtable ZDaemon server to celebrate 30 years of FPS fun!
I was in college at the time of release, and I remember well trying to elbow my way onto a pc in the computer lab so I could play. There were only a few PCs, as the lab was almost all Sun workstations. It wasn’t long before I went home for break after finals, and by the time I got back the game had been banned on the engineering network. Oh, nostalgia.
How to join the fun:
- Get hold of a doom.wad file from “Ultimate Doom” If you don’t have one stuffed in a closet on a CD-ROM somewhere, you can get it cheap from steam or GOG:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2280/DOOM_1993/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/doom_1993
Ultimate Doom is most likely what you have from the 90s – but if you’re not sure, it’s the one with the fourth episode “Thy Flesh Consumed”. - Download and install the ZDaemon client:
https://www.zdaemon.org/?CMD=downloads - Put the doom.wad file from the GOG or Steam (or CD Rom) in the home folder of Zdaemon.
- Start up ZDaemon Game Launcher, create a username and password (They don’t need any other info about you than that – it’s just to identify you on the server), and find the server called Johans Dwarfy Doom. When it asks for a password, it’s urist (all lower case).
- Join the game.
The actual celebration will be Dec 10th, time TBA, but feel free to get on there and play any time. I’ll be getting on there myself whenever I can, and I’ll message the DFRoundtable discord when I do — join that from the link in the main menu above – that’s also where the voice chat will be, assuming we don’t get so many people it gets unwieldy.