On January 30, 1994 I got some wild hair up my [explicative deleted] and decided to conduct a survey of DOOM players in the Usenet newsgroups alt.game.doom and comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action. I really don't remember what prompted me to do this. But I did. In the end I received 128 responses, which was not too bad at that time.

On March 1, 1994, I posted the final tabulations to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action and alt.games.doom. Below are links to the full survey results (quite long) and the original questionnaire.

A few notes about the survey -

  1. There were no non-DOS ports of DOOM at this time (well, id did develop DOOM on NeXT systems, but they had not released a NeXT version yet).
  2. The first two releases of DOOM, 0.99 and 1.1, had some real show-stopper bugs on some people's systems
  3. I asked people to give me their favorite pet names for the monsters in DOOM, and some gave me names containing variatious "politcally incorrect" words which I have reprinted full and uncensored.
  4. I received responses from the following countries: Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, The United Kingdom and The United States. 
The following are my favorite monster names that people have sent me:
     Former Humans          : Bone Heads
     Former Human Sergeants : "Hey Dickface!"
     Imps                   : Walking Turds
     Demons                 : Mall Walkers
     Specters               : Turbo Pigs
     Cacodemons             : Saw Bait
     Lost Souls             : Dead Heads
     Barons Of Hell         : Horny Guys
     Cyberdemon             : "Oh Shit!"
     Spider Mastermind      : Rush (Limbaugh)
My single favorite survey reply was from dkrowlan ("That's 'Mr. Sir' to you!").

Based on the most popular responses the average DOOM player who answered this survey played DOOM on an Intel 80486DX/33 with 8MB of RAM, a Tseng ET 4000 video card, a Sound Blaster Pro soundcard, using a keyboard for control, did not have access to a LAN to play DOOM, those that did preferred Deathmatch over Cooperative play, did not upgrade their system as a result of DOOM and was not planning on upgrading, was a 19 year-old male, had turned three friends onto DOOM, ordered the full registered version of DOOM and did not have a problem getting their order, chose the shotgun as their favorite weapon and really wanted id to add a flamethrower weapon into DOOM.

The original Usenet survey form I sent out on January 30, 1994.
The Full Survey Report I posted march 01, 1994 (minus the favorite movies and favorite albums sections).