Dissecting DOOM's Most Infamous Myth
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- Опубліковано 26 чер 2024
- have you ever heard anyone say something like, "man, the 90s were weird, you had to play DOOM with only a keyboard because it didn't have mouse support. They added that in later releases", because if you have heard someone say something like this, they are wrong. You can send them this video. They are wrong.
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Video game myths, a cornerstone of gaming culture ever since people started discussing their own experiences in games. Nearly every single person’s gaming experience is different, and unless you’re some Tool Assisted Speedrun robot, no one person plays a game the EXACT same way someone else does. When it comes to single player games, while most everyone will experience the same story, the way they tackled the same gameplay issues can vary wildly. If you played the last of us you might have played through this clicker room methodically, stealthily using every single tool from the game’s sandbox available to you to get past this room, or you could’ve just killed all the clickers. Even in difficulties or games that are meant to be a challenge, people’s experiences vary. It’s common knowledge that Jackal snipers on Halo 2’s legendary difficulty are little bit tricky to deal with, but in that same vein there’s someone out there who had zero issues clearing the Jackal sniper alley on legendary. There’s probably someone out there who fought Malenia in Elden Ring, and found that easier than fighting Morgott, that was just their experience.
So what does this have to do with DOOM? Well like any incredibly popular game, the first DOOM has an extremely large community and fanbase surrounded around it. And with that comes a multitude of myths and rumors surrounding the game. You can go down the list of popular video games and find myths or rumors about all of them. Minecraft has truly unbelievable things, like Herobrine, or extremely believable things like a completely untrue myth about Sugarcane growing faster on sand instead of dirt. A lot of how myths spread, is through word of mouth like this, be it internet word of mouth, or real life word of mouth. One of DOOM’s largest word of mouth myths revolves around this, a mouse.
I can vividly remember a time where I booted up DOOM on my school laptop, and was playing it while waiting for my mom to pick me up from school. On whatever free emulator website or whatever I was using play DOOM, I selected the “modern controls”, which allowed me to move around with WASD and a mouse. My principal at the time came up to me and talked about how much of a throwback it was that I was playing DOOM, but I was playing it wrong. He went on to explain that because DOOM came out back in the early 90’s, it wasn’t meant to be played with a mouse, and the original way to play DOOM was only using a keyboard. And hey I believed him, bro was like 35 years old in 2014 talking about how this game was one of his favorites ever growing up I have no reason not to believe him, besides the fact that DOOM being a keyboard only game was completely false.
DOOM being a game that was built around only the use of a keyboard, or even that you could ONLY control it with a keyboard is completely false from the ground up. For some reason though this myth persisted for much longer than it ever should have, surely there was someone out there who remembers playing doom with a mouse and keyboard, perhaps that person even used WASD before it was ever wildly popularized.
It’s just crazy to me that I only learned about this because of a Doomworld forum post turned into a website that I happened to come across last year. The evidence is crystal clear, The DOOM manual itself recommends that when you’re comfortable playing the game, you might want to try out Keyboard and mouse simultaneously for fine control while aiming. If it’s in the manual, surely it’s possible, and while some people may not say that’s enough evidence, it’s a good thing there’s even more.
John Romero himself, original designer on DOOM, said the game was made with a mouse input in mind, as was Wolfenstein 3D, which came out before DOOM. The original release date installer of the game for version 1.0 on DOS includes a configuration for Keyboard and mouse, you could even configure the keyboard to use WASD and bind your actions in the game to whatever keys you felt like. The last piece of evidence, is literally built into the game on the demo loop, and it’s clear that if you look, this is gameplay using a mouse. With how quick these turns are, it would be highly unlikely that this gameplay was recorded with a keyboard only control scheme. - Ігри
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Your principle was telling you that you were playing doom wrong at school.
You must have been a huge hit with the girls.
Why did it take 5:37 to say that you can play a video game with a mouse if you want
nah, but good video been subbed for a while
How tf 4:30 did you and ani have such a wide wide wide difference in that
What the fuck are you on about? This is a personal story that only affected you.
2:26 hahahah Don´t blame the controller you are just bad with, works fine i beat this with just the keyboard a long time ago
The fact that the principal didn't even get mad at him for playing games is amazing
DOOM is such a badass that even his principal dont mind him playing lol
@@tgnm9615 hell yeah
I mean, granted, he did say he was waiting for his mom to come pick him up, which more than likely means it was after school anyway where rules like that wouldn't be enforced anymore.
@@Jaymez2012 i think some rules can still be enforced as long as you're on school property, even after school hours
Back in the day before smart phones I had a Pocket PC and had loaded it with a NES emulator. The teacher told us that if we finished early we could listen to our CD players/MP3 players. I had finished quite early so I took out my Pocket PC and loaded up Mike Tyson's Punch Out. I was deep into the game when I noticed the teacher had been staring at me at which point I said "Sorry, I'll put it away" and he excitedly asked "Is that Mike Tyson's Punch Out !?"
Long story short I ended up helping him buy a Pocket PC and load it up with roms. Turns out he also loved Morrowind. Was a really cool teacher.
Small side note: Doom can be played perfectly fine using keyboard only, you just gotta use the strafe keys more often. Don't go up to an enemy and try to look at them using left and right, instead hold down strafe (or use the strafe keys) while trying to keep them in frame. It's much better and that's how I got through Doom's console ports too.
That's also how I played on the GBA version. It's still not ideal but it makes the game playable
ALT was my best friend.
I played Doom95 where mouse support was broken on Windows XP so I grew up playing it on just a keyboard.
I completed Knee-deep in the dead (shareware) with keyboard only.
I learned to use the mouse when Quake came around (and went WASD with Quake 2).
Also, holding the shift button would increase your rotation speed, so if normal rotation feels slow, you could always do that.
Yeah, if im playing the original and not a source port with freelook i honestly prefer keyboard only. I don't like the feeling of using a mouse with no vertical look.
Not sure if it was the default but I always played with strafe left and right set to < and >
I remember the mouse controls. They were just so annoying in their default setup, and mouse aiming was so unnecessary, that I stopped trying to use them pretty early. I think it took Hexen to get me using the mouse at all (sapphire wand), and Hexen II to get me into making it normal.
I love non-diagetic myths like this, where instead of a creepypasta or hidden game character it’s about something as simple as Game Design and Game Mechanics pertaining to a person.
also everyone used a mouse ... the principal was just pulling your leg, letting you to only use something silly.
thank you for giving me 5 minutes of happiness today Stryxo
Another contributing factor was that mouses back then sucked. Back then mouses operated using a trackball which could often get faulty overtime so a lot of people back then would rather use the keyboard since we'll they didn't want to deal with the problems that came with the mouse back in the day.
All you needed to do was clean your mouse out periodically. At least until the ball lost texture. Once that happened then your mouse was toast. My Razer DeathAdder Elite is kinda dead now. The number 1 button is shot. That's my fire button to it's taken a beating.
This is the primary reason why I never played Keyboard + Mouse. Even doing my best to keep the ball/rollers clean didn't keep mice I used from sticking regularly. This is a hard thing to describe to someone if they've only ever used an optical mouse, but it was a very real problem.
While I always knew that Keyboard + Mouse was a thing, this combined with the fact that the mouse also moved your player forwards and back (apparently this can be disabled by manually tweaking the config file? but I never knew this at the time) made using the mouse less than ideal.
Obviously people's experiences vary, and I'm sure there were good mice out there that didn't constantly stick, but this was my experience.
For me, even doing things as simple as moving icons around in Windows or drawing in Paintbrush was more tedious than it should have been. It took me quite a long time to finally become comfortable making long unbroken mouse movements after I started using optical mice. The modern optical mouse really was a game changer.
@@adimifus some mice are definitely made better than others are. The better mechanical mice had more than just a plastic rod as the pickup roller. You did have to use a decent mouse pad too.
@@1pcfred oh yeah, I'm sure. I don't doubt it. I was also using a Cyrix 486 33MHz until 1999 so you could say my overall experience was less than ideal 😉
@@adimifus Quake made me get a Pentium.
I think the real reason behind the myth is that people back then (me included) just didn't realize that mouse control was even possible. Doom was usually given to a new player by a friend (of course, the demo version only ;) ) and if they didn't know about the mouse option, chances were good the new player wouldn't learn about it. There was no internet with thousands of tutorials and beginners tips. I remember the first Jedi Knight game (not Dark Forces) to be the one that introduced keyboard and mouse in FPS to me. Before that, it didn't even cross my mind that a mouse could be useful in FPS.
Jedi Knight was my first mouse shooter as well. One would think that it would be Quake, but Jedi Knight's level design just perfectly used the verticality.
I realized the mouse was possible. I just didn't see the point then. You can't even look up with it and the keyboard controls were perfectly adequate when there wasn't a vertical component to aiming.
I really don't remember how i played doom back in the day. But i'm sure I played Duke Nukem 3D with keyboard + mouse.
@@troriski remember playing it keyboard only. And page up/down was to look up/down
It isn't just that people weren't used to using a mouse: A lot of people still didn't have one. (Also Doom's odd "push the mouse up to move forward" thing made using the mouse take more discipline than it does in most modern ports).
Also, a pet theory I have: Hurt Me Plenty was designed for keyboard players. Maybe only subconsciously, but still. If you compare the differences in enemy placement, Hurt Me Plenty generally avoids making you turn to see enemies when walking into a room. Which, like you pointed out, takes way too long with keyboard controls.
You didn't have to push the mouse up to move up in Doom. While binding actions to mouse buttons was limited, you could bind a mouse button to move forward.
You could actually configure Doom to work with a modern WASD control scheme even as far back as the original shareware version, so even the classic vanilla version is still quite playable by today's standards, assuming you aren't turned off by the 35fps cap.
@@Spectere What they're talking about is the fact that by default without any third party applications interfering, Doom makes any forward mouse movement make you move forward. This can feel very unintuitive and slippery, and is why the tool novert was developed for MS-DOS.
@@heyyitsultima Fair enough. I probably read too much into their statement. :)
Thing is, the rest of the game is still very beatable in Ultra-Violence, by just using the keyboard. You should very much switch the layout around, but aside from that, it's not like the game isn't possible to play in this way. Nightmare difficulty is a different story though
@@moodman1151 If you haven't seen Vytaan's Nightmare videos I highly recommend giving them a watch. He ended up playing through most of Doom II keyboard-only because he broke his finger (and kept doing that even after healing-for most levels, at least-because he found it fun).
A mouse is literally shown in the commercial for Doom, this myth is weird.
Edit: Yeah I misinterpreted this Myth, what thr myth actually is, is the fact many people didn't use Mice when playing Doom which leads to the Myth Doom was Keyboard only even if it wasn't. Even though Mice were commonly packaged with Computers by thr 80s many people just rushed through Installation or got somebody else to do it for them.
The myth is that not everyone was using a mouse back then. Mice were standard peripherals since the 80's, and available even in the 70s. Xerox, Sun, Apple, Microsoft all bundled their computers with mice since the mid 80's.
I think this video is a joke. No one ever thought it was keyboard only. I don’t even know how you could possibly even survive a single DM with keyboard only
@@MVBriscoVolante doom purists be like
@@MVBriscoVolanteyou can absolutely play doom with keyboard only. It sucks but you can, and the myth is a real phenomenon. You just haven't heard of it for some reason only known to you
@@MVBriscoVolante Its not. If you think this myth is fake then you have never browsed doom discussions online. The myth has been dying the past few years but even in the mid 2010s youd have people swear that Doom was not made with a mouse in mind and that people who use mice are playing the game wrong or cheating.
Genuinely surprised you didn't mention how moving the mouse forward and backwards forces the player to move that direction. It can pretty easily throw you off depending on how you move your mouse around. To disable it in the DOS version, you had to manually set some weird value in a config. Doom95 removed the ability to do this (as well as the ability to use caps lock to run). Source: I play Doom95 a lot for testing whenever i make a new Windows 98 install in 86box after i break the previous one.
Interestingly, this is how you move in the Steam version of Wolfenstein 3D. The movement in that game is so fast though that it’s surprisingly not too bad.
Yeah, when I started the game I was immediately thrown off by the mouse-strafing. I couldn't find a way to deactivate it, so I started playing with keyboard only, and somehow that felt more comfortable. Wasn't even that bad, I cleared the four episodes+Doom 2 on Hurt Me Plenty without ever touching a mouse
@@GilCAnjos Same. I could never get used to the original Doom's mouse controls. It felt just plain weird. Never had such trouble with Duke 3D or Quake when those came out.
Thats something that weirded me of the video, I once played a version of Doom from the 90s on Dosbox and I also noticed that, thats why I went to playing only with a keyboard, and it isnt to dificult to note either like you just try to look with the mouse and you start to move, which I understand was kind of the common thing at the time for fps since the same happened to me while playing to Wolfenstein 3D and I think even Quake I in Dosbox on the original versions of those games.
Maybe theres a way to configure that out on the games throught some file or on later versions of those games that was changed, idk
It's because it's obvious that they didn't actually try playing the original version of the game with the mouse, only the modern updates with modern mouse controls. They would understand immediately why people were playing keyboard-only if they actually did that. I know that I never assumed that the game was "meant to be played" with keyboard-and-mouse back in the day because of how terrible it was to play that way compared to keyboard-only.
Another contributing factor is the way Steam presents it (or at least used to). It only gave you the option of playing with _just_ keyboard, or _just_ mouse, which was as if all the keyboard binds were applied to the mouse instead, drag left to turn left, push forward to walk forward, ect.
Those are the default bindings for all versions of Doom mouse control. Getting mouse to only control look isn't how the game was built. It's one of the things that is much better in source ports.
@@spudd86 Yeah, won't catch me playing the classics in anything other than GZDOOM
Screw Steam. All you need to play Doom is a source port engine and the iwad file. You can even play multiplayer without Steam. Having the Doom 2 wad is the best though. with that you can use most mods and megawads. I think the Doom 2 iwad can even satisfy any asset requirement for anything made for Doom? Doom 2 has everything Doom had. Then it adds a weapon and additional enemies with new maps. So all you're missing is the Doom maps. There's megawads that kind of recreate the original episodes. They just do it a bit janky. That's the gag. They're the same but not quite the same. But they're close enough.
@@1pcfred preach brother
@@burnttacoconspiracy5786 yeah I don't use Steam and I play Doom hardcore. I compile source ports from git repos. GZDoom g4.11pre-155-g9c3907136 - 2023-03-25 08:06:23 -0400 - SDL version Compiled on Mar 25 2023
I may bring myself to calling it "you can control the game with a mouse", but I don't know if I can ever bring myself to calling what doom has 'mouselook'. Wolf3d does technically have a mouse option too but everytime I select it, left right controls the camera and forward back moves the player. Like early thumbstick controls, the idea of isolating just aiming to the mouse wasn't as concrete back then. No, the first game to let you look up, down, left, and right with the mouse was Marathon, and this is true 'mouselook'. Maybe you had trouble playing Doom with keyboard only, but the FPSes of Wolf3D's generation with no height and boxy walls are perfectly playable keyboard only, and those games didn't quite have strafe/rotate or WASD pinned down yet either.
to be fair doom _could_ do true mouselook but iirc it looks funky since the game doesn't warp the perspective properly so the game was explicitly coded to ignore the vertical axis and use a vertical auto-aim that the devs built in to compensate for crippling the player
@@dooplon5083 you're thinking of heretic and hexen. doomguy's line of sight is permanently locked to be parallel to the floor at all times, and any experience to the contrary is your memories of playing with ports mixing in with the ones from vanilla
I thought Terminator was the first fps with free mouselook. Nice to know it was Marathon.
Doom does the same thing.
I believed that holding the start button on the Xbox 360 controller made Minecraft load faster or Stampy's Minecraft world was hidden in the tutorial
Stampy's house being in the tutorial world was actually true. In one of the tutorial worlds you can find his house.
@@user-sn8zx5mv1x thats pretty kewl
Man I wish I could have played the xbox 360 tutorial world. I couldn't afford one at the time.
I remember that my buddy played the Doom Demo (all we could get for a long time) with a mouse and we all thought he was _crazy_ because we were all bad at using mice and we could STOMP him using just the keyboard. That is probably why Olds like me think you can only use the keyboard, because so many games prior to then _were_ keyboard-only, and you just... got used to it.
People speeding through the setup was almost certainly something that not happened, I'm now 14 and gotten into retro PCs and the amount of times something in dos wrote "CPU incorrect opcode. Killing process" or just crashed due to a small mistake in setting up the soundcard is unbelievable
Yeah. Installing games back then meant knowing stuff about your hardware. I still remember setting up my soundblaster for every game. IRQ 5, DMA 1, Port 220h. Weird shit happened if I got those wrong. I set the DMA wrong once and just got farty-buzzing sounds in some game (some tank commander one or something). Set the IRQ wrong and it would, if I was very lucky, just get me no sound, but it would often crash a game at the first sound instead.
@@NoobixCube and then there's also plug and pray
Normally if you have a relatively clean setup the soundcard and video auto detection succeeds 99% of the time and you don't even have to think about it. Like the system has to be set up PROPERLY for it to work, no conflicts and correct BLASTER and other environment variables. Usually setup disk does it all correctly but usually it just appends SET commands at the end of autoexec.bat, which gets bypassed if you have a menu system set up! So you have to move things around. But it's a one time thing to do it correctly and never worry about it again.
The bane of my existence though was YOU NEED AT LEAST 560KB LOW MEMORY, oof HIMEM UMB EMM QEMM what TSRs can i load HIGH without them crashing ouch. Some mainboards were much much better in this regard than others, like Intel chipset was usually OK, SiS was usually trouble, ALi was very good, but it also varied a lot by mainboard manufacturer how good they have been with their BIOS.
Yeah, setting up games and programs was serious business back in the day. It's part of the reason the smug tone throughout the video annoys me, they literally don't know what they're talking about because they only have a modern frame of reference for games. If you didn't set up your game properly, it wouldn't just run kind of badly, it would crash the whole computer and refuse to run at all.
So much this. I remember my parents letting me have an hour or two on the weekends to play on the computer, but I usually only got about 10-15 minutes of actual playtime after going through the hell of constantly reloading the game and hoping the settings were right this time since my stepdad was infamous for uninstalling my games to make room for his.
I've always played Doom with just the keyboard. It wasn't problematic at all!
bro won a shower argument in his head and chose to make a video about it, not complaining tho
Another factor is how hard it could be to find drivers and get your mouse working in DOS back then. Some older systems didn't even have a PS/2 port, so you had to use a bus mouse that plugged into its own ISA card.
I still remember the day I learned about WASD + mouse. It blew my mind!
I immediately used ESDF when we left the arrow keys in order to use the mouse with our right hands and I'm glad I did before WASD became standard. I've never used WASD except very occasionally, which I think is inferior since you have fewer keys available within reach of your hand, and it shifts your hand off of F which is the proper position for your index finger when touch typing (note the nub on F which is a tactile cue for correct hand placement)
@@cmdrfunk I played around with ESDF for the same reasons. Really handy when typing a quick chat during a deathmatch!
I also tried using D for forward and C for reverse. The idea was it's a little more comfortable to keep forward on the home row since that's what you're doing 99% of the time. The major downside is that it makes it nearly impossible to strafe left/right while backing up.
I think the reason for this myth is that wery few now rememberes or even played the original doom back in the day.
To use mouse you had to activate it by a settings file and not in the game.
A DOOM video from Stryxo? Fuck yeah!
New stryxo vid: A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
Another thing that may have lent itself to supporting the myth could be peoples' perception of a lack of vertical scroll. Back then, the mouse only let you look horizontally. Vertical aiming was auto, as long as you had your target lined up with your reticle, or center screen mass.
I think a lot of kids back in the day just struggled with mouse controls. Since most video games were played with digital D-Pads it was very strange playing a game with a mouse.
Having the mouse walk forward or backward by pushing forward and pulling backward was weird.
Having mice that got gunked up and needed to be taken apart and cleaned regularly meant that they were inaccurate, and having them be low sensitivity meant that you needed to be more physical. So turning around usually involved also accidentally moving forward and backward, if your mouse movement wasn't perfectly horizontal.
And not having documentation for removing that behavior of the mouse was infuriating. I don't think there was an official binding in-game in the original unpatched in-box experience. It required modding or external apps (that would definitely trigger anti-cheat these days) to disable the y-axis of the mouse from being registered by the game (or the OS).
Saying this as one of the few kids that later used GoldenEye’s control scheme that allowed the stick for look and c-buttons for wasd.
More like we had been playing with keyboard only since, you know, the dawn of the MS-DOS era and did not understand why you would use the mouse unless you had no choice. And with DOOM you certainly did have a choice! Ultima VII was the first game I ever had my mouse plugged in to play (and probably the only one before the mid-90s), because even I found the keyboard controls unusable (probably also a choice by the designers)
0:57
“Surrounded around it” might be the most redundant phrase ever spoken
This myth also plays directly into the "kids these days don't know how hard we had it" trope.
Old school doom - a few of us were keyboard warriors (before that term got co-opted for something else) and one bloke was a mouser. He would invariably clean up every time, and so we had to adapt and learn the mouse.
I then ripped him a new one and it was glorious.
Debunking and seeing people debunking myths is my favourite thing to do.
this video is really well put together, i rarely sub after seeing just one video but you have earned it, keep up the good work dude
Too bad he didn't research how to play OG Doom with a keyboard effectively.
4:27 I love the way Ana phrased that.
Stryxo, this is my first time watching one of your videos. Good first impression, good video :)
Myths are eternal.
Yeah I remember. But no one used it properly. Strafe was already a very weird concept for people. And even the people that used mouse did so in a weird way, where they doubled up on the arrow keys with the mouse, never strafing. It was only Duke 3D where I realised myself that it made sense to seperate orientation (mouse) out from movement (keyboard).
Ever since I was 5 I played Doom with keys only, because the mouse feature in my old Doom was probably turned off and I thought that it was never in the game to begin with, and that modern versions of the game, ZDoom and all that just added mouse as an option to use... I never struggled to play the game without mouse, and it feels weird to be able to look around, let alone UP and DOWN, but it's really shocking to see that this was all a myth... great video btw!!
That golden warthog clip at the beginning hit me hard. Grew up without internet and saw a screenshot in a magazine and spent years looking.
I remember Doom being the game I first used WASD and mouse on. I didn't like using the cursor keys, so I remapped them to what I thought made sense. I then did to Duke Nukem 3D, then every new FPS, and also convinced my friends to do so.
I was so proud of myself when this became standard years later, as I'd independently come up with the 'proper' way to remap the keyboard.
This brag doesn't get me laid as much as you'd think it would.
Stryxo you're awesome for looking into this, I've played Doom for years and I've only played on console. The fact it started on PC though would've gave me the assumption you needed the mouse, that's how FPS' normally work anyway, so the principal telling you that seems either like a troll or he genuinely gave himself a harder time. Still cool he didn't get mad at you for playing Doom, though, my school back in 2006 would've thrown a riot.
"Doom is not 3D" has to be the most infamous myth that's still going around, unfortunately.
Doom isn't 3D. Doom is 2.5D. You cannot have a sector over another sector and everything has infinite height.
@@1pcfred
Rooms over rooms doesnt matter. All a 3D environment needs is three things: up/down, left/right, forward/backward. The "2.5D" bit comes from the sprites being 2D existing within a 3D space.
@@SvendleBerries the space is really not 3D though. The Z axis is not fully realized. It looks like it is, but it isn't. It's only about halfway there. That's why it gets a .5 The sprites are 2D. They don't even get the .5
I die a bit inside every time someone says that it's essentially a top-down shooter and that's why autoaim works.
@@kveller555 from the program's perspective that's how it works.
You did not have to bring up that Rathian Ruby. That was uncalled for dude! 😭😭😭
Doom has such a big community and I love it
I played Wolfenstein 3D with mouse only at the time. Didn't know it was supposed to play with mouse and keyboard combined. Had to move the character like moving a mouse pointer.
Well, at least moving using mouse only is better in Wolf3d than in Doom because of the lack of player inertia.
As a little kid, I didn't know you could use the mouse too. Well, I didn't know because I did not understand a single word in English, so of course I never knew that strafing was a thing too until a friend told me in school. Yes, the Cyberdemon was next to impossible until IDDQD.
this didnt stop me from completing the plutonia experiment with a keyboard only
Love the ultrakill background music :3
God, this throws me back to a couple of years ago when i got doom 1 and 2 on my goofy ah laptop that for some reason i couldnt controll doom with a mouse so i played the entirety of both games with keyboard only on hurt me plenty. I had to save a lot, i methodically took out demons, calculating ammo and health for certain parts of the level and had to save and load a lot, took me a few weeks and i felt really good after completing it, one of the hardest gaming experiences.
That's insane I learned 2 things in this video. The minecraft sugar cane thing and the core topic of the video. I learned the keyboard only control from my father and oldest brother so I thought that was just how you played the game. Because I thought that was how the game was meant to be played and it was never questioned in my circle I would even go out of my way to disable the mouse controls when playing using Zandronum. Going to have to play it with a mouse later and be enlightened, thanks for the video :D
Maybe I'm old but I didn't even know this was a myth, especially considering the fact that I played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom with a mouse when they were originally released.
Doom, and most other FPS were entirely playable WITHOUT KEYBOARD. Mouse only, because it was not possible to look up/down, so the mouse was used to WALK.
I can confirm, I was there in the DOS era, while there were DOS programs and even games that used the mouse, most people didn't have one unless they needed it for Windows. There were also competing standards for mouse support and even if you had one it was a crapshoot as to whether it would work in the specific game you wanted to use it in. (There was no unifying driver interface and DOS games would for the most part need to bring their own drivers for sound, video, and input; a fact that is thankfully obscured by modern source ports and emulators.) Add to that the tendency for those old ball mice to gum up and be jittery and inaccurate and you can see why it wasn't people's first choice for game input at the time.
Heck, IIRC, when I used my 386 way back when, the mouse wasn't enabled by default in the OS. You had to run the mouse drivers after booting to get it to start working. The mouse was a really new thing.
The mouse was a point&click device, Sierra and LucasArts games, C&C, Sim City 2000 etc. - it was just very strange to use it to move through 3D space... a joystick would have make more sense. I played 'fps' with keyboard-only up to Quake2 I believe.
I played the original retail release with a mouse lmao
I imagine the myth probably manifested when source ports started introducing *vertical* mouselook, and people said "that's not how it was originally", and people hearing that assumed there was *no* mouselook, and that the source ports added it entirely.
Fascinating! Even the top comment of the doom 2 commercial is referencing this rumor.
I’ve honestly thought about this a lot though, always wondering what the true control layout was.
DOS doesn't have "an incredibly bare-bones GUI" (Graphical User Interface); It has/is a CLI (Command-Line Interface).
This was also an era were Gamepad and Joystick Controllers were popular to play everything. I first played Doom with a Joystick because that's how I was introduced to Quake. I didn't know about Mouse Look until Unreal. And my Dad went out and bought a Sidewinder Dual Strike for Unreal.
Me: (knows about the myth)
Also Me: (is used to using a gamepad)
Also Also Me: Twinstick setup. That is all I have to say.
I first played Doom II back in like 2004 at the age of 8 on a Windows 95 computer, and we played with the keyboard only. Turok 2 was the first FPS game I played with KB+mouse about half a year later and it was a total revelation for me.
Again, this was 2004, on a Win95 PC which had a mouse, so it makes sense that this myth persisted for so long.
I remember a friends dad playing Wolf3D with a mouse and I was completely baffled. However, he didn't use the mouse for looking but for strafing.
Also, remember that Doom had no looking up and down, so using the mouse was only used for turning, which was certainly a bit strange.
Stryxo dropping a banger of a video as always
This is why I don't always go in when someone says "this was how it was meant to be played" or "we didn't have these things back then", so not only would there be a possibility that you missed something, you might not even remember, or even if retailers in that person's area at the time even had such things, it won't always be as simple as someone telling you that a game made 30 years ago didn't come with those game guide magazines.
next video should just be stryxo descending into madness while doing a review of Doki Doki, a fun and casual anime rpg with no murder or disturbing imagery whatsoever
It's very refreshing as a Doom modder to see those that aren't in the community that understand that these myths are bullshit and always have been. Great breakdown!
In my house growing up we had two computers, one that my dad had used before I was born (it ran DOS with Windows 3.11 installed) and one that he was using for professional work (it ran Windows 95.) I wasn't allowed to use the better computer since my dad needed it for work, but he would let me use the old computer to play games. I remember when I first started using it I had to ask my dad to boot the games for me because I was, like, 4 or 5 and didn't know how to do it and he didn't teach me cuz he didn't want me playing it whenever I wanted. I was so young that I don't think I even realized the mouse would work in DOS games since most DOS games didn't work with it. I remember at first that all we had were really basic games from the very early 90s, but eventually when Chex Quest came out I was allowed to play that (Doom was a no-go for a little kid.) I'm not sure Chex Quest had mouse input, I mean I know I never used mouse input with it. I just got good at combining turning and strafing. This video kind of blew my mind because I always assumed that the _original_ release of Doom didn't have mouse support, and it was only the re-releases and source ports that added it, simply because I remember playing a total conversion that as far as I could tell, didn't support mouse input. (I know for certain I never saw any input configuration screen for it, and I do remember input configuration screens for other games that looked very similar to the one you showed in this video.) Of course, in retrospect, id would have supported mouse input. By 1994, computer mice were not niche, even if they weren't used by a majority of home computing users yet (they would be within a year or two, though.) And I remember distinctly that id's earlier games (Commander Keen, specifically) supported joystick input, so if they were able to support that input method, why not the mouse too? It seems obvious, yet I believed the myth too. Thanks for this fun little vid. I wonder if Chex Quest supported mouse too... the only stuff I can find online about it are the re-releases, which all have mouse support, so hopefully some kind commenter will be able to confirm it for me.
part of the myth also stems from the many console ports and how most of them are controlled exclusively with digital input, further cementing the idea of doom being intended to be played with keyboard only.
certified stryxo classic
I remember my dad playing this against my uncle from the very year it came out. And the way he did it: push the mouse forwards to actually move forward. Pretty weird, but that was just how it was back then. Same for Duke Nukem 3D. Pretty intense to be shoving the mouse forward, lift it up and put it back, then repeat over and over again. Especially when you were trying to chase/escape from someone
In my first Bloodborne playthrough, I died less to all of the Old Hunters bosses combined, than I died to the Cleric Beast
Balls
Where
While we're at it lets admit that fine aiming with gyro is better than the right thumb stick.
I know where the myth came from, the doom95 port (also included with doom collectors edition) manual said if the mouse doesn't work, well then "the mouse wanted intended to be used anyway" or something like that.
And the reason the mouse didn't work is because the VXD driver only worked on win9x, and the doom collectors edition version didn't even include the VXD file altogether.
We had to wait until sourceports or use the og dos version to use the mouse again.
The problem with playing with keyboard and mouse was that your mouse also controlled your forward and backwards movement, so when you would look left or right you would also move forwards and backwards.
I was 18 when shareware Doom came out and I remember it vividly. There were many debates among my friends whether ‘playing with the mouse’ or ‘playing with the keyboard’ was preferred. In both cases forward and back moved you forward and back and left and right turned you left and right. You held down the strafe key to make left and right strafe. Maybe these were defaults, I don’t know. It never occurred to us to use keys for moving and mouse to look because no game had ever done that before. It wasn’t until we read online about people playing that way (the internet being very different and much less accessible back then) that we gave it a try. It felt weird at first but of course was much better once you got used to it.
good vid my brotha i remember we used to talk back in the shibe days
4:05 lmao, that clip is perfect
Great way to look at a gaming myths is "Is there footage of this happening?" If not, then it's a myth until proven otherwise
"Babe wake up, a new stryxo video just dropped!"
I'm gonna be honest, it took me until the cameo from Kingani for me to realize that you were *the* Stryxo!
3:01 - meanwhile, modern games treat key rebinding as a privilege and don't even allow some to be rebound
oh god this reminded me of the time i downloaded a gameboy advance version of doom on my pc because i couldnt figure out the DOS version and i was stuck playing with only keyboard
Stryxo i thought this was gonna be about the mussolini corpse sprite
Have you tried rotating your keyboard to where you want to turn
Still to this day some people still think that John Romero played deathmatch with a keyboard only, with to me makes me laugh so much
The first time I saw someone playing Doom it was the guy who owned my local computer shop and he was playing it with KB&M. Guy just sat there most of the day playing either Doom or Civilization, living the dream.
I remember playing that with keyboard only back in it's dos days on my dad's computer. I always had trouble getting the mouse to work so for Doom, Duke 3-d and Dark Forces I use the arrows plus keypad 7 and 1 for look up and down lol! Nowadays I definitely use the mouse and customize EVERYTHING on the keyboard and mouse. My movement keys are actually a combo of mouse and keyboard. R Mouse - forward, Middle Mouse - backward and Left mouse - primary fire. My left hand controls are set for the sake of ergonomics. i.e. where my fingertips lay naturally on the keyboard. Instead of squishing them to WSAD for movement I mix things up based on the game. Generally it's:
S - middle finger-slide left
C - index finger-slide right
AZ - jump-duck-ring finger
Shift - run (and caps lock etc depending on game)-pinky finger
Probably more info than anyone cares about but after watching your video I wanted to share it. :)
I remember when, as a pre-teen playing deathmatch Doom and Doom 2 over IPX via a local BBS, I discovered that holding forward on the keyboard AND holding the joystick forward simultaneously doubled my forward move speed. I was screaming across the maps faster than most people could track. This coupled with the fact that my Sound Blaster was throwing out IRQ errors and causing the game to render colors incorrectly (my friends and I dubbed it "acid colors") it made player sprites easily distinguishable even in darkness.
lol, funny days.
I remember seeing this story where these guys made money selling little plastic things that went over the arrow keys to allow you to control them like an arcade stick.
now i feel stupid because i never even knew it was possible to play with a mouse, the more you know i guess
I actually played through the first episode keyboard only the first time I played it - and I was hooked anyway
4:47 that CSGO clip was nuts
I like WASD to move, arrows to turn+up for shoot+down for use. Q and E to switch weapons.
In Minecraft, sugarcane USED to grow faster(really it was only) on sand, but there was an update that "removed" it(allowed it to actually grow on grass) to make growing it easier on everyone.
I can confirm I played Doom with keyboard only back in the day. I believe the concept of mouse & kb was still new back then
I remember trying mouse in Wolfenstein. But it didn't work well.
They didn't have wasd then, you used the arrows, and left and right arrows turned and didn't strafe.
The game Hunter (1991) used mouse plus JOYSTICK, iirc there were a few other less notable games using that method as well....
Mouse + kb was not new, it was mouselook that was new - and without mouselook, there is very little advantage in using mouse+kb over 2-handed kb.
well now I feel embarrassed for playing Doom 1 and 2 on just keyboard
One major bit about this I always will mention about mouse+key vs keyboard only. Strafing. Try Strafing (side stepping) with a keyboard only, yes it is possible but it's not fluid or convinent. the Side keys (a,d, arrows) will just turn the viewport in that direction. While with a mouse and keyboard, those keys easily naturally strafe and your mouse controls side to side look.
0:21 Thanks to years of MGS tours of duty I was able to stealth break the clickers one by one
Holy shit seeing that installer brought back a whole set of memories 😂
I played doom with only a keyboard. I also beat Wolfenstein 3D ep1 with only a keyboard. Takes me back. Good video.
IIRC there’s also footage of Romero play-testing either Doom or Doom II before release, and in the footage, you can see he’s using a mouse.
Babe wake up, Stryxo uploaded
the weirdest part about that mention of esdf, is because with my keyboard it, just feels right compared to wasd which has me cramming my pinky on the control and shift buttons, which really has my mind on a double take
Doom was huge in the 90s and I never saw a single person use a mouse to play it. I never saw anybody use mouse look for anything until Quake came out and necessitated looking up and down.
Also would like to note that some people, especially outside the US, came to prefer ESDF because those keys are in the same place almost all Romanized keyboard configurations. Krome's remaster of The Bard's Tale Trilogy even has that as an option.