Remembering my 17th birthday

[Sedwick]

Half my life ago tonight I was enjoying my freshly unwrapped first Windows (3.11) computer--a 100 MHz Pentium w 32 MB of RAM and 1.2 GB hard drive. I had saved up $4000 from paper route and McDonald's pay to get it, and the satisfaction culminated that night. It also ran DOS 6.22 and my best friend and our brothers marveled at how Doom whipped through its installation off the quad-speed CD-ROM, and were blown away by Descent's oh-so-smooth true 3-D graphics. That was my first encounter with the game, and I knew I'd be spending a good deal of time with it. My friend let me keep the installation disks, since the game wasn't worth playing on his PS/2 at 1 FPS. One of my all-time favorite summers followed, a typical night featuring a few hours' play with the lights off and the windows open, and 15 months later I'd start studying for my Computer Engineering degree. Life's been pretty good to me...

Feel free to share your Descent "first time" stories below!

[Tunnelcat]

I can't remember the first computer I played Descent 1 on, but I think it was a Zeos (didn't impress me enough to remember the specs). But Descent 1 got me hooked. The next computer I bought in 1996, which was a HP 7170 Pavilion with a 166 MHz Pentium, 48MB of memory (that I bumped up later), a 2G hard drive and a 17 inch monitor, all loaded with that crap of an OS, Windows 95 and the first nightmare incarnation of DirectX that showed up with the first service upgrade. That computer I used for D2 when it came out later that summer. But D2 really shined in Glide when I bought and managed to install a Voodoo accelerated graphics card. WOW! Accelerated graphics changed my world and I've been playing Descent 2 on and off on way better machines since, now thanks to the upgrading of Descent by Diedel and Zico, even though that old computer is long gone!

[Krom]

First played D1 shareware in early 1995 on a Pentium 90 MHz with 16 MB of ram, a 17" CRT, and a sound blaster ISA card, pretty sure it was DOS on a few hundred megabyte hard drive. It was my brothers PC which we had while he was on break from college, also it was somewhat of a welcome distraction from cleaning up the mess that was left from our garage burning to the ground and almost taking the house with it on January 5th of that year.

[Top Gun]

I first stumbled across Descent thanks to a neighbor (who sadly passed away a few years ago); his dad was in IT and had a basement's worth of PCs, so we would play on LAN. I wound up asking for the game for some birthday or Christmas, and by a stroke of luck, my parents picked up the Definitive Collection, along with my now-beloved MS Sidewinder 3D Pro. Our computer at the time was a blazing-fast Gateway 2000, with a staggering 166 MHz Pentium processor, 16 MB of RAM, and all of 2 GB of memory. (D2's "crazy" install option really was back then.) I always had issues with the original Descent, since I didn't know much of anything about native DOS applications, but I played the hell out of D2. Because we didn't have an Internet connection, it wasn't until years later that I played the game online; it was always on the LAN at my neighbor's house. The same neighbor alerted me to D3's existence when he bought it, too.

[CDN_Merlin]

I played D1 demo on my first PC.

486dx-2 66mhz
8 megs ram
512k video
340 megs HD
DOS 6.22 and Win 3.1
14" CRT
Logitech joystick with no twist.

My ex bought me MW2 with the 3d pro and never looked back

[Isaac]

My brother and I were at my uncle's house who just got, what I think was, a new Acer computer. Only using the number pad to play, we fought over the controls till finally we divided up the keyboard into sections, so that we both flew the ship at once. It did not go well for various reasons.

[Canuck]

The first machine was a 486 SX 50, 1 meg ram, no cache memory, 256K video, no sound, 420 MB HD, DOS 6.22. I had to write a batch file to force as much into upper memory as I could to get Descent to run, and shrink the video down all the way just to get somewhat smooth game play. Hence the game prompted me to start upgrading, and I started by getting some cache ram I stripped from a broken motherboard that was given to me. Next was upgrading to 8 MB Ram, a 1 MB VESA video, and installing a soundblaster card followed by a joystick. Every version of Descent that followed had me upgrading my systems. At one point I had an AMD K6 2 233 with 96 MB ram and a Voodoo 2 card that I was able to run Descent 2 on a Ram Drive. That system actually played Descent 2 smooth as silk and loaded the game in literally a blink of an eye.

[Foil]

My first Descent experience was the shareware version, on a 386-SX at 16MHz (yes, 16). Framerate was choppy (like 5fps), until I figured out that I could use the "-" button to shrink the screen and get smoother play. I was hooked from the get-go, and when I later upgraded to a 486-DX at 40MHz, it felt like buttery-smooth heaven.

[Sirius]

If I remember rightly, I first played it (shareware version) sometime in 1996, probably late 96, on a 486 DX4/120, I think 16 MB of RAM. No graphics accelerator card, that came along later. Did have a SW 3D Pro a that point (though that was gone by late 1998, never used one since).

While I don't remember exactly when I started playing D1 shareware, the other dates do come a bit more easily. First game I played the full version of was actually D2; that would have been June 13 (a Friday, hence how I recall) 1997. Started playing online a few months later, I think August 30 - I remember because the first time I saw the IPX game listing on Kali was the day of Princess Diana's car crash, and there were a few references to it in the game titles.

[Pumo]

Oh, this brings me so good memories...

I started playing D1 Shareware back on March 1996 with my all new IBM Aptiva computer (that my parents bought to me on January of that same year).

It was a 486 DX4 100MHz, with 8MB RAM, 540MB HDD, MWave Soundcard and it came with MS-DOS, Windows 3.11 and OS/2 to choose from.

The shareware version of D1 came in a bundled Cyberia CD (another great game from Interplay) and my older brother installed it.
I started to play it and got hooked since the very few first seconds of gameplay, and man, I LOVED the music (played through OPL2 FM synth).

Been a loyal fan of Descent since then. I got full D1 Anniversary Edition and D2 later on 1997, and finally D3 much later (2002).

[Alter-Fox]

But you started the initial idea for Pumo Mines before you got D3, right?

I think I was a little too hooked on Descent the first time I played it. I got D1 from a neighbor who gave it to us so my dad could test our new CD drive -- I was, like, six. Instant hookage (good thing there was no blood ). In 1999 I found D3 in a book order from school (why they were selling it to elementary schoolkids when it was rated Teen I still don't know) and I gobbled it up... except it ran like a slideshow, which made some parts near-impossible to complete.

Then I kind of forgot about it for a few years until Xaihyv (who up till this point had never really been into it) asked what had happened to it, and said something about actually wanting to play it. So I ended up looking around which led me to discovering D2 -- and it instantly became my favourite out of the three. Then I got D3 again for christmas that year -- as well as getting Mercenary for the first time, and I started to play LAN, and then online in 2008.

[Pumo]

But you started the initial idea for Pumo Mines before you got D3, right?...

Yeap. I got the idea of Pumo Mines on late 1999, after the release date of D3.
It was a mission called 'Mineral Valley II' partially inspired by the first screenshots I could see of D3 on the net.