[Fnoord]

Not sure if wasd was used by high profile Doom players. You see, there weren't many keybinds. You had ctrl and alt for shoot and strafe (fun thing to do was press del casually on a player's keyboard, like Russian roulette, then be like 'WTF crash?'), and you had the arrow keys for movement. Then you had 4 keys for weapons in Wolf3d and some more in Doom. Swapping those required travel, but IIRC swap wasn't instant. So, no crouch, no jump, no look up or down, not even reload IIRC. Games utilizing wasd were usually multiplayer games. One would sit left, with wasd. One would sit right, with arrow keys.

[drdaeman]

Vanilla Doom had a configuration file where one could redefine key bindings (there was 10 total) to anything player wanted. But, yes, I believe custom configs were uncommon (even mouselook was frowned upon amongst the players I knew[1]) and modern gold standard of WASD+M only became a thing after Descent and Quake 1.

https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Configuration_file#Keyboard

[1]: For a childish reason - being considered not a "true" way of playing. Although maybe that had some rational roots too, because back in the day mices weren't particularly good - bulky with heavy balls and imprecise with lint-hungry rollers and simple low-resolution sensors.

[Narishma]

> even mouselook was frowned upon amongst the players I knew

In Doom and Wolfentein 3D, it was more of a weird mouse look and move thing that wasn't very usable.