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
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.
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.
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 >
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
@@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.
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.
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.
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).
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 😉
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.
@@juanfangio3483 i just watch the video, it says what you state is a myth, and i can back up Stryxo because i was alive when doom demo was release free and let me tell you with100% certainty that doom was a huge hit that everyone played with a mouse
@@juanfangio3483 also "deathmatch" was so popular that bill gates stated more people installed doom than windows, you don't know how big doom was went it came out
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
@@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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
@@1pcfred The Doomtuber BeefGee UV-maxed Plutonia with just a keyboard. Additionally, Vytaan completed most of Doom and Doom II on Nightmare like that. It just takes practice, and the knowledge that you won't be able to make snap turns (though some ports offers an instant 180° turn button, which helps).
@@Spectere just because things can be done is no justification for doing them. So you citing examples is not building a case for your argument. You can do all manner of unacceptable things and the simple fact that you can do them in no way legitimizes those actions.
@@1pcfred I pointed to someone who was able to do exactly what you were implying was out of reach so, yes, the example certainly does fit in this situation. A lot of people really don't know that higher level keyboard-only play is possible. That's all I'm trying to point out here.
I have completed Doom 1 and 2 and Blood using only keyboard cause I didnt know how to disable movement by mouse at the time and I hated that. Think it was around 2003
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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!
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.
One of the id Software developers, (RIP) J. M. P. van Waveren had a nickname Mr Elusive. Citing Fabien Sanglard's website: ""Mr Elusive" nickname comes from back in the days when he was one of the first to use a mouse to play Doom I. "
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.
3:32 "DOS had an incredibly barebones GUI." - And that's where you're wrong. Because DOS didn't have ANY GUI whatsoever. It had a text interface, not a graphical one.
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.
There's also another major reason this myth persisted. Before community-made source ports were a thing, the only official "Windows" way to play Doom was using a port called Doom95. This was the port that was distributed with the Doom Collectors Edition CDs. Among other flaws, it used a driver called DMOUSE.VXD file that was incompatible with Windows 2000 or newer. This meant that for a lot of players, the mouse was literally unusable for the most widely available way to play Doom at the time.
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
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.
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.
This is one of those myths that I've only ever heard in the context of myth. I've never actually heard someone say that you couldn't use a mouse to play Doom.
It was more common 10+ years ago, it's all people who played it back in the day. MOST people did play it with nothing but a keyboard because most people didn't even have a mouse at that point.
It wasn't until unreal tournament that strafe keys and moving forward and backwards were put together as the default config so it seemed intuitive to have keyboard and mouse at once. Doom may have supported mouse and keyboard, but it was really squirrelly trying to use it by default.
That was the moment where it made sense to me as well! Before UT99 I couldn’t get my brain around using the mouse and the keyboard at the same time, even going through Quake with A/Z to look up and down
I can't believe I actually used to play through Doom 2 without a mouse. Trying to go back and play without a mouse is such a pain. Even playing with a controller takes a lot of getting used to, and its never as good.
Well, then try to go back to using the original games mouse controls, where moving the mouse would not just turn but at the same time move forward and backward. It sucked more than keyboard only.
Growing up in the 90s, I had this weird complex about playing the handful of first person games we had (Doom and MechWarrior 2 are the two I can think of off the top of my head) using keyboard only. Obviously, being X years old, I didn't really care too much about ideal performance or challenge (I didn't play MW2 without all the infinite ammo/infinite heat cheats turned on), just blowing stuff up or killing bad guys, so there really was no sense of "oh this is less than ideal precision". Obviously today I'd not dream of playing anything in a first person game without m+kb, but it's just a weird thing I remember from my childhood.
I always played keyboard only as a child, finding the mouse too awkward. I did just fine with it, being quite adept at dodging and weaving and never feeling limited. Tried experimenting again in Duke3D with similar results. Perhaps it was the crappy ball mouse we had back in the day. It wasn’t really until Quake that the advantages of a mouse look couldn’t be ignored.
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.
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.
As an old guy I that grew up with wolf3d and doom. We did not play doom with a mouse because most PCs didn't have a mouse. We were using DOS. Games were usually played with a joystick if not just the keyboard. You can mimic that intro demo with a joystick.
Some other reasons: mouse didn’t always work in DOS applications even if you tried to set it up. And, when it did, the up/down axis would affect your movement rather than look up and down, so most people found it disorienting and ignored it. Playing with a mouse probably wasn’t normalized until Quake and more Windows based games came out
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
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.
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.
Come on, the mouse control in doom was unpractical no one used it. It wasn’t like later mouse to look and keyboard to move configuration. It was just horrible.
I played DooM with keyboard only. There are several reasons why. -In DooM you have vertical autoaim, so you only need to turn left and right, no up and down needed. This simplifies the controls. -You have to change the key mappings. The default one is very bad. Most important is mapping the strafe-right and strafe-left keys so you have a dedicated finger for them. The strafe key you can unbind, it's useless. -You can turn fast if you keep the run key pressed. In DooM, you never release the run key. -Mouses back on DooM's launch were awful. They used a rubber ball and rollers to track movement, had abysmal resolution and two buttons only. Also if the mouse wasn't new or recently cleaned, movement was randomly choppy. -Default config for mouse in DooM used left and right to turn (as expected), but up and down to go forward and backward. That's awful.
I remember playing Doom with a friend over modem back in the days and we always played keyboard-only. One day, I decided to try playing with mouse to see if I would be able to turn much quicker and own him severely. But, for some reason, the default setting (was it even configureable? I never tried!) was that the mouse not only controlled your VISION but also your MOVEMENT. SO, when you moved the mouse, that would not only move your viewpoint but also move your character forward/backward/left/right. That was soooooo freaking weird to play that I immediately turned it off again. I would have expected the mouse to just control where I look and still move the character with the arrow keys.... never found out if that is possible because the experience was so incredibly crappy. ^^
No, this was the norm in those days. Left+right mouse rotates, up/down moves you. Pretty much every first-person game that allowed mouse use did this. Using the mouse to look up and down WAS pretty much unheard of in them days, hence why Doom and Quake both have unlimited vertical autoaim. Without mouselook, mouse+kb was not superior, and probably worse, than 2 handed KB (especially combined with the garbage mice of those days), hence why pretty much no-one used mouse.
Something similar happened in GTA V of all things, people saying Trevor changing radios while free roaming when that only happens in one specific mission.
3:50 Not only are there people who start a new game without setting things up, they have the absolute audacity of complaining about the key bindings not being what they want, even though they didn't set them up before starting.
Several years ago now, I downloaded Ultimate DOOM, DOOM II w/ Master Levels, and Final DOOM, and after a couple of attempts to get used to the default control scheme, I learned my lesson. I realized that if I know a control scheme that will work better for me than the defaults, I *should* reconfigure the controls.
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.
If I recall correctly, the default movement keys were the arrow keys. Since most games at the time used them too, people probably assumed that was the only controls available and didn't bother to change them. I always used the mouse in Doom, but my first play of Doom was well after Windows 95 came out, so having a mouse was more common.
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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 >
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
@@ginxxxxxnah, people really played this with keyboard only
I was born in 2002, and I recall people playing with keyboard only as a kid
@@juanfangio3483 you were not even alive when doom and doom clones hit the world hard, and i mean hard ... i find your untruths very funny,
@@juanfangio3483 i just watch the video, it says what you state is a myth, and i can back up Stryxo because i was alive when doom demo was release free and let me tell you with100% certainty that doom was a huge hit that everyone played with a mouse
@@juanfangio3483 also "deathmatch" was so popular that bill gates stated more people installed doom than windows, you don't know how big doom was went it came out
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.
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
thank you for giving me 5 minutes of happiness today Stryxo
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 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.
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 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 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.
I need to go back in time to tell your buddy about circle strafing
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.
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've always played Doom with just the keyboard. It wasn't problematic at all!
0:57
“Surrounded around it” might be the most redundant phrase ever spoken
"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.
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.
bro won a shower argument in his head and chose to make a video about it, not complaining tho
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.
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.
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.
A DOOM video from Stryxo? Fuck yeah!
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.
4:27 I love the way Ana phrased that.
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.
New stryxo vid: A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
Myths are eternal.
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.
Stryxo dropping a banger of a video as always
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).
I played the original retail release with a mouse lmao
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've never been one for WASD either. Personally, whenever I mouse and keyboard, I would always use the arrow keys.
On an old shitty laptop, I was forced to switch to ESDF.
I hated it. I don't understand how someone can like this control scheme.
Hello, fellow arrow keys user :)
Balls
Where
_AND THEN_ you had all the weirdos that played Doom with a goddamn _joystick_ 😂
imagine you go to your friends house after school to play doom and the mf whips out the Logitech Wingman 3D Force Feedback i would run
I play just fine with a keyboard on Doom. Mouse makes it feel unnatural.
Good luck playing Plutonia with just a keyboard.
@@1pcfred The Doomtuber BeefGee UV-maxed Plutonia with just a keyboard. Additionally, Vytaan completed most of Doom and Doom II on Nightmare like that.
It just takes practice, and the knowledge that you won't be able to make snap turns (though some ports offers an instant 180° turn button, which helps).
@@Spectere just because things can be done is no justification for doing them. So you citing examples is not building a case for your argument. You can do all manner of unacceptable things and the simple fact that you can do them in no way legitimizes those actions.
@@1pcfred I pointed to someone who was able to do exactly what you were implying was out of reach so, yes, the example certainly does fit in this situation.
A lot of people really don't know that higher level keyboard-only play is possible. That's all I'm trying to point out here.
@@Spectere naked bungee jumping is possible. I just wouldn't recommend anyone to do it.
I like WASD to move, arrows to turn+up for shoot+down for use. Q and E to switch weapons.
I have completed Doom 1 and 2 and Blood using only keyboard cause I didnt know how to disable movement by mouse at the time and I hated that. Think it was around 2003
Jesus christ. Keyboard only Blood? Do you remember what difficulty you where on?
@@NSluiter It was on "pink on the inside".I had a great time allthough no mouse, but I can't imagine playing it like that again. Lots of strafe kills
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.
Also, DOOM is 3D. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
This myth also plays directly into the "kids these days don't know how hard we had it" trope.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
Debunking and seeing people debunking myths is my favourite thing to do.
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!
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
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.
One of the id Software developers, (RIP) J. M. P. van Waveren had a nickname Mr Elusive. Citing Fabien Sanglard's website: ""Mr Elusive" nickname comes from back in the days when he was one of the first to use a mouse to play Doom I. "
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.
3:32 "DOS had an incredibly barebones GUI." - And that's where you're wrong. Because DOS didn't have ANY GUI whatsoever. It had a text interface, not a graphical one.
Doom has such a big community and I love it
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.
A more reasonable (?) reason: Almost nobody had a mouse. Unless you were using Windows 3.x or a high end UNIX workstation, you had no use for one.
There's also another major reason this myth persisted.
Before community-made source ports were a thing, the only official "Windows" way to play Doom was using a port called Doom95. This was the port that was distributed with the Doom Collectors Edition CDs. Among other flaws, it used a driver called DMOUSE.VXD file that was incompatible with Windows 2000 or newer. This meant that for a lot of players, the mouse was literally unusable for the most widely available way to play Doom at the time.
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
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.
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.
This is one of those myths that I've only ever heard in the context of myth. I've never actually heard someone say that you couldn't use a mouse to play Doom.
It was more common 10+ years ago, it's all people who played it back in the day. MOST people did play it with nothing but a keyboard because most people didn't even have a mouse at that point.
I've actually seen a fair share of people on RUclips comments saying that like it's a fact, though it's usually followed by someone debunking it.
3:12 btw this is not the max turning. Hold shift to maximize
It wasn't until unreal tournament that strafe keys and moving forward and backwards were put together as the default config so it seemed intuitive to have keyboard and mouse at once. Doom may have supported mouse and keyboard, but it was really squirrelly trying to use it by default.
That was the moment where it made sense to me as well! Before UT99 I couldn’t get my brain around using the mouse and the keyboard at the same time, even going through Quake with A/Z to look up and down
I can't believe I actually used to play through Doom 2 without a mouse. Trying to go back and play without a mouse is such a pain. Even playing with a controller takes a lot of getting used to, and its never as good.
Well, then try to go back to using the original games mouse controls, where moving the mouse would not just turn but at the same time move forward and backward. It sucked more than keyboard only.
@@Freakomator Nah, it's fine when you get used to it, and clearly superior to keyboard only. You wouldn't have got far in deathmatch on keyboard lol.
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.
3:01 - meanwhile, modern games treat key rebinding as a privilege and don't even allow some to be rebound
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.
In my first Bloodborne playthrough, I died less to all of the Old Hunters bosses combined, than I died to the Cleric Beast
2:20 Skill Issue
Growing up in the 90s, I had this weird complex about playing the handful of first person games we had (Doom and MechWarrior 2 are the two I can think of off the top of my head) using keyboard only. Obviously, being X years old, I didn't really care too much about ideal performance or challenge (I didn't play MW2 without all the infinite ammo/infinite heat cheats turned on), just blowing stuff up or killing bad guys, so there really was no sense of "oh this is less than ideal precision".
Obviously today I'd not dream of playing anything in a first person game without m+kb, but it's just a weird thing I remember from my childhood.
I always played keyboard only as a child, finding the mouse too awkward. I did just fine with it, being quite adept at dodging and weaving and never feeling limited. Tried experimenting again in Duke3D with similar results. Perhaps it was the crappy ball mouse we had back in the day.
It wasn’t really until Quake that the advantages of a mouse look couldn’t be ignored.
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.
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.
Shitloads of people played doom and wolfenstein with only a keyboard
3:51 dude I can't believe there are people like that. The very first thing I do with EVERY game is endlessly search the options
As an old guy I that grew up with wolf3d and doom. We did not play doom with a mouse because most PCs didn't have a mouse. We were using DOS. Games were usually played with a joystick if not just the keyboard. You can mimic that intro demo with a joystick.
Some other reasons: mouse didn’t always work in DOS applications even if you tried to set it up. And, when it did, the up/down axis would affect your movement rather than look up and down, so most people found it disorienting and ignored it. Playing with a mouse probably wasn’t normalized until Quake and more Windows based games came out
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
0:21 Thanks to years of MGS tours of duty I was able to stealth break the clickers one by one
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.
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.
Come on, the mouse control in doom was unpractical no one used it.
It wasn’t like later mouse to look and keyboard to move configuration. It was just horrible.
I played DooM with keyboard only. There are several reasons why.
-In DooM you have vertical autoaim, so you only need to turn left and right, no up and down needed. This simplifies the controls.
-You have to change the key mappings. The default one is very bad. Most important is mapping the strafe-right and strafe-left keys so you have a dedicated finger for them. The strafe key you can unbind, it's useless.
-You can turn fast if you keep the run key pressed. In DooM, you never release the run key.
-Mouses back on DooM's launch were awful. They used a rubber ball and rollers to track movement, had abysmal resolution and two buttons only. Also if the mouse wasn't new or recently cleaned, movement was randomly choppy.
-Default config for mouse in DooM used left and right to turn (as expected), but up and down to go forward and backward. That's awful.
I remember playing Doom with a friend over modem back in the days and we always played keyboard-only. One day, I decided to try playing with mouse to see if I would be able to turn much quicker and own him severely. But, for some reason, the default setting (was it even configureable? I never tried!) was that the mouse not only controlled your VISION but also your MOVEMENT. SO, when you moved the mouse, that would not only move your viewpoint but also move your character forward/backward/left/right. That was soooooo freaking weird to play that I immediately turned it off again. I would have expected the mouse to just control where I look and still move the character with the arrow keys.... never found out if that is possible because the experience was so incredibly crappy. ^^
No, this was the norm in those days. Left+right mouse rotates, up/down moves you. Pretty much every first-person game that allowed mouse use did this. Using the mouse to look up and down WAS pretty much unheard of in them days, hence why Doom and Quake both have unlimited vertical autoaim. Without mouselook, mouse+kb was not superior, and probably worse, than 2 handed KB (especially combined with the garbage mice of those days), hence why pretty much no-one used mouse.
Something similar happened in GTA V of all things, people saying Trevor changing radios while free roaming when that only happens in one specific mission.
3:50 Not only are there people who start a new game without setting things up, they have the absolute audacity of complaining about the key bindings not being what they want, even though they didn't set them up before starting.
I played Doom back in the mid-90s, and I originally played it with a joystick before moving to the far more efficient mouse & keyboard combination.
Several years ago now, I downloaded Ultimate DOOM, DOOM II w/ Master Levels, and Final DOOM, and after a couple of attempts to get used to the default control scheme, I learned my lesson. I realized that if I know a control scheme that will work better for me than the defaults, I *should* reconfigure the controls.
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.
certified stryxo classic
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
If I recall correctly, the default movement keys were the arrow keys. Since most games at the time used them too, people probably assumed that was the only controls available and didn't bother to change them. I always used the mouse in Doom, but my first play of Doom was well after Windows 95 came out, so having a mouse was more common.
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.