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Comment by elsonrodriguez | Hacker News Reader

I feel that I lucked out. My area code had a dialup BBS with 40 lines, on which they ran software to tunnel IPX.

On the client side you ran SIRDOOM, which then shelled out to Doom once the connection was setup.

Best part: it was all free.

I never got the background on why they did it, and why they never charged a dime. Maybe they had aspirations to be the next DWANGO?

Who knows... but I spent many a night fragging till I dropped.

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Wow, that sounds great! I used to play on DWANGO a lot as an early teen (13 or 14, back in 1994-95). Somehow I convinced the DWANGO staff to make me a moderator on the San Francisco servers... it came with responsibility to keep chat relatively civil but it also meant free Doom 2 on their service which was incredible at the time.

I ended up talking to Romero directly back then because he would make random (?) visits to various DWANGO servers. I remember him specifically being generous with his time chatting with me and others. So if you ever see this Romero, thank you!

John used to talk to me on the game's last level as well, but he was hidden behind a wall and I could not understand perfectly what he said.

I try to tell people this exact same story whenever the opportunity presents itself. It might be the first thing I've noticed similar to a "When I was your age story", except movie theaters were not 25 cents... We had multiplayer online shooters in the mid-90s.

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