Back in university, the day DOOM came out, I downloaded it from the official FTP server (actually, from wuarchive.wustl.edu, but don't tell anyone that) while several other friends and college mates waited. Oh, so many floppies ready and waiting to have a certain zipfile to be copied on!
Then came the ordeal of making it run on your system... I had a specially tweaked CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT pair to optimize the memory available for the game.
Then the game started, and it was amazing! I mean, the camera moved up and down as you walked about! And you could shoot at the barrels! And check out the dynamic lighting! (the maze on E1M2 where you get to the chainsaw was astounding).
After much playing, a couple of friends came to my place with their PCs, so we could play a multiplayer game. There were two options: an IPX network (nope) and connect the computers in daisy-chain with serial cables (not USB cables, serial cables). It was amazingly difficult to set it up and sucessfully start the game(*), but during those lapses where the game actually ran, it was amazingly fun!
BTW: I was quite better at DOOM (and knew the maps rather better) than my two friends, so they ended up teaming against me (and guess who kept winning each round).
On Dec. 10, 1993, after months of waiting, DOOM II was released. This was on a Saturday, and I went early morning to the college lab specifically so I could download the game once it was released (this happened at 17:00-ish... and there's quite a reason for the delay). I came home at night, exhausted. So I... just set up the game and went to bed, as I couldn't do anything anything else.
On Dec. 11, there were elections in my country. So I went as early as possible to vote, voted, then came back and set up and played DOOM II all day long. And on Monday Dec. 12, while everyone was talking about politics, I was more worried about killing that freakin' cyberdemon.