010194

The year is 1994. I was in 8th grade. For Christmas a few days ago, my parents had gotten me a sleek MS-DOS PC, and was working on fixing it up to play some new games, like DOOM and other stuff. There was someone kind of of virus on it that made it overheat and shut off, so I had to gut it and put new parts in. I walked to the pawn shop to see if there were any parts to use. After asking the sales clerk, I navigated to a glass case that had an old Maxtor disk in it. I figured 8gb would be enough, so I forked out the cash and went on my way. On my way out, though, I noticed a disk that had the word "Doom" lazily scrawled on it. I picked it up and bought it as well. When I got home, I hooked up the IDE cable and put the latest MS-DOS on it. I tried out the Doom disk, but all that was on it was some PWads. One was named "WEED" (I hope ironically), and one was in some weird ASCII format that I couldn't read. I set it off to the side and grabbed my fresh copy of DOOM Registered to install. I played through the whole game that night. I watched some VHS recordings of The Andy Griffith Show and fell asleep.

The next day my mother and father were out to do some stuff, so I decided to try out those WADs. "WEED" was only one level, and it was just a level filled with cannabis leaf pictures. The odd WAD was still present, so I loaded it up and it put me in a black room with demons grunting all around me. The MIDI track was screwed up as well, so I switched to the PC speaker and reloaded the game. This time it was a different level. A serene forest with a dirt path. I walked along and examined the trees. After walking for some time, I saw a carving on a stump. However, when I approached, the game randomly shut down and left a message at the prompt: "WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?" Strange, I thought. I decided to try one more time, this time with my Sound Blaster loaded. The track was a distorted organ with a weird, echo-y bass-like instrument in the background. The skybox was blood red, and the ground was littered with high definition sprites of corpses. The level of detail was gratuitous, to say the least. There were bodies with their organs strewn out on the grass, and people strung up in trees by their own intestines. I can imagine how pale I must have been. I swallowed, and moved on. There were so many bodies. The game was so detailed, it even had flies buzzing around them. I gagged, threw up in my mouth, and choked it back down while tearing out the power cord and going outside. I stood on the door step, heaving. The neighbor asked if I was okay. I put on a cheap grin and nodded. I grabbed the 3 1/2 inch floppy, smashed it, and flushed it down the toilet. I only went back to play Doom a few times, but never more. I haven't said a word about it till today.

~A.B