8 ms·

I am kind of surprised, at the attention and fond rememberance Doom is still getting, compared to Descent, which though released around 2 years later, appears t

I am kind of surprised, at the attention and fond rememberance Doom is still getting, compared to Descent, which though released around 2 years later, appears to me much more accomplished: levels of tunnels with complex spatial arrangements, the 6dof motion, even had a sterographic 3d mode.

notSupplied 8y ago
Technically yes, Descent was very impressive for its time, but 1) Doom accomplished more technical feats first and 2) Doom had much wider appeal because Descent was too difficult to play. Remember this was the early days and the proper way of controlling an FPS hasn't really been figured out yet. Most players didn't even player Doom on the now standard WASD+MouseAim scheme. Descent's starting control scheme was utterly unintuitive, especially given how you had to contort your left hand around pressing A to accelerate and Z to reverse.
JohnBooty 8y ago
Doom was pure, distilled, adrenaline fueled fun. Fast and stripped down. If Descent was an SUV loaded with feature and cup holders, Doom was a sports car focused on raw performance and driving pleasure. Both impressive but Doom is just a visceral blast in ways that few games can match.
jandrese 8y ago
Descent had that very early 3D where everything is made out of like 8 gourmand shaded polygons and a lot is left up to the imagination. Doom's pixel art just plain looked better even though it was less technically accomplished. Quake 1 suffered from the same problem, it just didn't look as good as the previous generation. Worse, drawing those polygons was a lot to ask of the computers of that era so they generally limited themselves to a small number of enemies at once, you never got swarmed the way you did in Doom sometimes. Also, I personally found myself getting lost and turned around way more often in Descent than I did in Doom. That last part of the mission where you had to fly back to the exit before the reactor exploded was always the hardest part.
- bdamm 8y ago
  So many rehearsals pre-reactor blast... certainly the claim the Doom's play was faster paced is true, but I enjoyed challenge of navigating the 3D space of Descent. Right from the first time I played it I felt committed to mastering 6dof.
  - hyperman1 8y ago
    Descent, compared to Doom, was ugly but way more cerebral.
BurningFrog 8y ago
Descent was technically impressive. Doom scared the hell out of me. It changed my life.
- hyperman1 8y ago
  Doom was the first game that made me phisically lower my head when a rocket flew at me. Wolfenstein never had that effect. I also heard stories of people getting nauseated or even epileptical from Doom. Never from wolfenstein. I think between these two, some barrier in believability was crossed. Part of it was technical, but the art and the darkness of Doom also made a big difference.
- _trampeltier 8y ago
  I tryed Descent a couple of times, but the game never catched me. Doom was and still is unique. Very simple to play, fast and dark. Later I loved to play Terminator Future Shock. The first game with such large and open levels for me. It was 3D and great to play. But it was slower and so the gameplay was very different. To be technical better is just "technical better" and not "all better".
yason 8y ago
I'm not surprised. Descent was cool, technically superior, and it was a game I really would've loved to love. But people loved Doom and so did I. Search for "descent speedrun" on YouTube and then do the same for Doom. The dynamics make a completely different game. Doom's gameplay was better. Regardless of the graphics, Doom was more fun to play. Doom is actually blazing fast: not as for just rendering but for gameplay and player movement. You can zip around the levels at inhuman speeds, and this allows you to handle more enemies, swarms of them, at once. Doom is really a scary shoot'em-up in 2D while Descent was of a completely different nature. The "real" 3D and the "real" 3D controls in Descent made moving around more difficult. Thus, the levels were created differently for Descent and it was also played differently. Unlike Doom you wouldn't have large open spaces to contain dozens or hundreds of enemies. Instead, you would encounter a small handful of enemies at a time. Much of Quake and Doom 3 also suffered from the lack of this as the player speed is more realistic, preventing the fun inhuman maneuvres which could create a lot more fun. Similarly the gameplay, due to moving around in 3D, meant more work at the controls of Descent. Doom is basically a 2D game which allows for faster movement as only having two axis is more easily mastered. Being unrealistically fast enabled a lot more tactics to be used in Doom. Also, most people played Doom keyboard-only back in the 90's which only served to give Doom a lot more edge.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >Doom was more fun to play. Nailed it. I remember thinking about the movement options in Descent and thinking this was the pinnacle of gaming. ... but Doom was more fun. Descent was hard to play, I remember thinking a joystick would fix all my problems of crashing into a wall and having to turn around, it didn’t.
- karmakaze 8y ago
  I fully enjoyed both Doom and Descent. Doom had more heart-stopping boss moments for sure and was great for co-op run through the levels. Descent was more freeing and getting lost and found. Trying to remember your way out after hitting the reactor core was the peak of the thrill. Of the two though, I miss Descent more. We have many 3D fps land fighting games and far fewer 6dof ones. Still waiting for the reboot Descent Underground[0] to get released. Avoiding all the early release stuff to savour the surprise. [0] https://descendentstudios.com/ https://descendentstudios.com/
MikeCapone 8y ago
Descent was great, but it was also much harder to play, and to build levels for, which kind of limited its appeal, IMO. DOOM hit a sweet spot of fast-paced gameplay, really cool ambience (for preteens and teens especially), and lower technical requirements (though I remember Descent's engine being quite well optimized).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cainxinth 8y ago
The achievement that made Doom timeless probably has less to do with graphics than it does with an innovative distribution and marketing model. The Doom demo was a blockbuster. It spread in a manner that we would probably call viral today.
- swivelmaster 8y ago
  No, it’s definitely the graphics and gameplay. The distribution helped, but that wasn’t new - id and Apogee and others had been distributing demo “episodes” of their games going back to Commander Keen at least. Doom was a monumental technical achievement when it came out, and if you want some real perspective on that, check out the game that came out just a few weeks earlier and was considered “cutting edge” at the time: “Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold.”
  - bananaboy 8y ago
    As a point of interest, Blake Stone used the Wolfenstein engine with a bunch of modifications.
Sharlin 8y ago
Two years was an eternity back then. Heck, Quake was released two years after DOOM.
- adventured 8y ago
  It is quite remarkable how fast Carmack moved their engines forward, especially given the pioneering nature of the progress in question. Wolfenstein 3D, May 1992 -> Doom, December 1993 -> Quake 1, June 1996 -> Quake 2, December 1997 In the span of five years, they went from: Wolf: https://i.imgur.com/1gGewDp.png https://i.imgur.com/1gGewDp.png Doom: https://i.imgur.com/6CqvrLg.png https://i.imgur.com/6CqvrLg.png Q1: https://i.imgur.com/6wZg8NG.png https://i.imgur.com/6wZg8NG.png Q2: https://i.imgur.com/4Lxtg4f.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4Lxtg4f.jpg The leap forward between the release dates of Doom and Quake 2 in just four years is particularly impressive.
  - benj111 8y ago
    Not to detract from your point but I seem to recall Doom being playable on PCs of the day. * I remember some years after quake 2 was out (99ish ?) a friend showing off his new computer by actually playing quake 1 with all the bells and whistles turned on. So yes the engines did develop quickly. Much quicker than the PCs of the day in fact. *being school kids, these weren't gaming PCs, these were for 'homework' and 'research'.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      PCs would keep up fine, but only so long as you had a 3D graphics accelerator (3dfx or similar). Since it was something that was only of use in games at the time, many builders omitted it, resulting in a large gap. Still, Q2 was perfectly playable even on below-average PCs at the time of release, if you were willing to stick to the same resolution as Doom (i.e. 320x200).
    - andrewf 8y ago
      I think the hardware was moving forward equally quickly, but there was a more dramatic spread between the low and high end of the installed base. People waited years between upgrades because computers were so expensive. At the same time, Moore's law really was doubling speeds every 18 months. When Wolf3D came out in May 1992, its minimum spec targeted the installed base of 286s, and a 50Mhz 486 was bleeding edge. When Doom was released in Dec 1993, you could buy a Pentium. (And if you kept it till '96, that Pentium could manage Quake at 320x200). I agree there was a bifurcation in the late 90s when 3D hardware acceleration arrived (see the colored lighting and texture filtering in the Q2 screenshot). Quake 1 was getting patched with hardware rendering up until Quake 2's release, likely the bells and whistles your friend showed off :)
gdubs 8y ago
Doom was groundbreaking. It’s less about its technical achievements in the absolute — it’s about how radically different it was than what came before. It’s interesting to read about how the developers broke through previous constraints to create something that seemed impossible at the time.
- FartyMcFarter 8y ago
  Quake absolutely blows my mind: real 3D graphics, moddability with a custom compiler (QuakeC), amazing online play (even on a modem) with Quakeworld. All of this in one game which they developed fairly quickly.
  - cronix 8y ago
    Also had Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) doing the soundtrack/sound effects, which added a new dimension as well. The soundtrack just screams "this game kicks ass." I still dig it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n8iU7abqkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n8iU7abqkQ
    - harveynick 8y ago
      The nail gun in Quake fires “nine inch nails”, which I always thought was a nice touch.
      - cronix 8y ago
        The nailgun ammo crates had "NIͶ" on them as well ;) https://slm-assets1.secondlife.com/assets/8685509/lightbox/NEW-_nails.jpg?1383531233 https://slm-assets1.secondlife.com/assets/8685509/lightbox/N...
  - int_19h 8y ago
    I wonder how many people got into programming because of QuakeC. For me, it came after I was already hooked, but it certainly added a whole new dimension, in a sense that you could now achieve impressive things in one-two evenings of coding that could be shown to others. I remember making the nails bounce off the walls, for example.
cannedslime 8y ago
While descent was a technical marvel, it didn't have the atmosphere of doom and I think the 6DOF movement scheme deterred many from playing it as the levels got confusing.
- devereaux 8y ago
  Confusion and getting lost in a 3d maze was part of the game. In some ways it reminds me of Slime World - mapping the world in your head becomes an important feature. This does not seem to be the case with newer games, as if most players didn't like "finding their way back" to a place they have visited before, and prefer a linear progression instead.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    Yes and no. This does not seem to be the case with newer games, as if most players didn't like "finding their way back" to a place they have visited before, and prefer a linear progression instead. People don't mind the backtracking so much -- the "Metroidvania" genre has never been so popular! Exploration is, generally speaking, fun. It's the tedium of making one's own maps (either mentally, or on paper) that gamers generally don't have a lot of time for these days.
pjc50 8y ago
DOOM was the first. Well, really Wolfenstein was the first, but it was limited to a grid. DOOM was many people's first networked game too. And the level editors were easy enough to use that they created a community. Descent's 6dof control system rather counted against it in the days when people had keyboard, mouse and two axis joysticks. I remember struggling with it a lot, even trying two sticks at one point. DOOM was also more memorable in its black metal aesthetic - the music and gory graphics. The E1M1 theme will stick with me while I can't remember a note of descent.
- JshWright 8y ago
  I never had an issue w/ Descent's controls (IIRC, I had yaw and pitch on the joystick, left/right strafe on A/D, forward/reverse on W/S, roll on Q/E, and strafe up and down (rarely used) on tab and caps). Once joysticks with a twist axis were a thing the twist became roll and up/down moved to Q/E). Multiplayer Descent was _way_ more fun that DOOM, in my opinion (specifically because of the 6dof... you could sneak up on people from any direction).
- cma 8y ago
  Ultima Underworld was released before Wolfenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian_Abyss#/media/File:Ultima_underworld_1_screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian... But Wolfenstein had lower requirements by not supporting the same amount of geometry variation. Hovertank/Catacomb were released even earlier than the two and done with some of the same tech as Wolfenstein I believe.
  - leoc 8y ago
    Ultima Underworld successor System Shock (1) deserves mention here too. Another big step forward, and a couple of years before Quake.
- XorNot 8y ago
  Descent had a huge community in the day (and still has a community). I definitely played way more Descent (8 player multi) then DOOM (back in the days of Kali).
TomVDB 8y ago
I remember running the Doom demo for the first time and being absolutely blown away by it. And then we discovered multi-player mode. I’d haul my 486 box on a train to the next city just to play it, for hours into the night. Descent never did that to me. It was technically fantastic, but didn’t have the atmosphere, or the multi-player. And after playing for a while, it also made me nauseous. ;-)
tibbon 8y ago
I’m mostly shocked that Ultima Underworld isn’t getting more attention. Not as fast paced, but if memory serves me they shipped before Doom, and did some really in depth things for the time considering the hardware and prior titles.
- robterrell 8y ago
  You could argue that Akalabeth was the original FPS!
  - phodo 8y ago
    Indeed. I remember getting Akalabeth and it’s floppy disk in a ziplock plastic bag. Rushed home to play it on my apple //c. I was hooked. Played all the ultimas, including other origin games. In those days, I also played the original wolfenstein on the apple. It had synthesized sound for speech. That same sense of wonder and fun I experienced with these games hit me again when I played wolfenstein 3D, doom, and quake. Some of today’s games like assassin’s creed, Witcher, Zelda on switch give that same mix of emotion and fun.
    - benj111 8y ago
      >wolfenstein on the apple. It had synthesized sound for speech "Hoo ta ta" "Ay eeeeeeeee!" I may not remember what I had for breakfast this morning, I can remember sound effects for a computer game I havent played in 20 years :) Edit: Thought you meant Wolfenstein 3d when you mentioned original Wolfenstein. I cant remember the sound effects for original Wolfenstein.
      - colomon 8y ago
        Guards would scream movie Nazi German snippets at you. "Achtung!" etc. Seems a bit simple now, but almost nothing else like it on the Apple II and C64 when it came out.
  - kragen 8y ago
    No, Maze War was the original FPS. Maze War came out in 1973; Akalabeth didn't come out until 1979.
chrisseaton 8y ago
> appears to me much more accomplished Was it more fun?

notSupplied 8y ago

Technically yes, Descent was very impressive for its time, but 1) Doom accomplished more technical feats first and 2) Doom had much wider appeal because Descent was too difficult to play. Remember this was the early days and the proper way of controlling an FPS hasn't really been figured out yet. Most players didn't even player Doom on the now standard WASD+MouseAim scheme. Descent's starting control scheme was utterly unintuitive, especially given how you had to contort your left hand around pressing A to accelerate and Z to reverse.

JohnBooty 8y ago

Doom was pure, distilled, adrenaline fueled fun. Fast and stripped down. If Descent was an SUV loaded with feature and cup holders, Doom was a sports car focused on raw performance and driving pleasure. Both impressive but Doom is just a visceral blast in ways that few games can match.

jandrese 8y ago

Descent had that very early 3D where everything is made out of like 8 gourmand shaded polygons and a lot is left up to the imagination. Doom's pixel art just plain looked better even though it was less technically accomplished. Quake 1 suffered from the same problem, it just didn't look as good as the previous generation. Worse, drawing those polygons was a lot to ask of the computers of that era so they generally limited themselves to a small number of enemies at once, you never got swarmed the way you did in Doom sometimes. Also, I personally found myself getting lost and turned around way more often in Descent than I did in Doom. That last part of the mission where you had to fly back to the exit before the reactor exploded was always the hardest part.

bdamm 8y ago
So many rehearsals pre-reactor blast... certainly the claim the Doom's play was faster paced is true, but I enjoyed challenge of navigating the 3D space of Descent. Right from the first time I played it I felt committed to mastering 6dof.
- hyperman1 8y ago
  Descent, compared to Doom, was ugly but way more cerebral.

BurningFrog 8y ago

Descent was technically impressive. Doom scared the hell out of me. It changed my life.

hyperman1 8y ago
Doom was the first game that made me phisically lower my head when a rocket flew at me. Wolfenstein never had that effect. I also heard stories of people getting nauseated or even epileptical from Doom. Never from wolfenstein. I think between these two, some barrier in believability was crossed. Part of it was technical, but the art and the darkness of Doom also made a big difference.
_trampeltier 8y ago
I tryed Descent a couple of times, but the game never catched me. Doom was and still is unique. Very simple to play, fast and dark. Later I loved to play Terminator Future Shock. The first game with such large and open levels for me. It was 3D and great to play. But it was slower and so the gameplay was very different. To be technical better is just "technical better" and not "all better".

yason 8y ago

I'm not surprised. Descent was cool, technically superior, and it was a game I really would've loved to love. But people loved Doom and so did I. Search for "descent speedrun" on YouTube and then do the same for Doom. The dynamics make a completely different game. Doom's gameplay was better. Regardless of the graphics, Doom was more fun to play. Doom is actually blazing fast: not as for just rendering but for gameplay and player movement. You can zip around the levels at inhuman speeds, and this allows you to handle more enemies, swarms of them, at once. Doom is really a scary shoot'em-up in 2D while Descent was of a completely different nature. The "real" 3D and the "real" 3D controls in Descent made moving around more difficult. Thus, the levels were created differently for Descent and it was also played differently. Unlike Doom you wouldn't have large open spaces to contain dozens or hundreds of enemies. Instead, you would encounter a small handful of enemies at a time. Much of Quake and Doom 3 also suffered from the lack of this as the player speed is more realistic, preventing the fun inhuman maneuvres which could create a lot more fun. Similarly the gameplay, due to moving around in 3D, meant more work at the controls of Descent. Doom is basically a 2D game which allows for faster movement as only having two axis is more easily mastered. Being unrealistically fast enabled a lot more tactics to be used in Doom. Also, most people played Doom keyboard-only back in the 90's which only served to give Doom a lot more edge.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>Doom was more fun to play. Nailed it. I remember thinking about the movement options in Descent and thinking this was the pinnacle of gaming. ... but Doom was more fun. Descent was hard to play, I remember thinking a joystick would fix all my problems of crashing into a wall and having to turn around, it didn’t.
karmakaze 8y ago
I fully enjoyed both Doom and Descent. Doom had more heart-stopping boss moments for sure and was great for co-op run through the levels. Descent was more freeing and getting lost and found. Trying to remember your way out after hitting the reactor core was the peak of the thrill. Of the two though, I miss Descent more. We have many 3D fps land fighting games and far fewer 6dof ones. Still waiting for the reboot Descent Underground[0] to get released. Avoiding all the early release stuff to savour the surprise. [0] https://descendentstudios.com/ https://descendentstudios.com/

MikeCapone 8y ago

Descent was great, but it was also much harder to play, and to build levels for, which kind of limited its appeal, IMO. DOOM hit a sweet spot of fast-paced gameplay, really cool ambience (for preteens and teens especially), and lower technical requirements (though I remember Descent's engine being quite well optimized).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cainxinth 8y ago

The achievement that made Doom timeless probably has less to do with graphics than it does with an innovative distribution and marketing model. The Doom demo was a blockbuster. It spread in a manner that we would probably call viral today.

swivelmaster 8y ago
No, it’s definitely the graphics and gameplay. The distribution helped, but that wasn’t new - id and Apogee and others had been distributing demo “episodes” of their games going back to Commander Keen at least. Doom was a monumental technical achievement when it came out, and if you want some real perspective on that, check out the game that came out just a few weeks earlier and was considered “cutting edge” at the time: “Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold.”
- bananaboy 8y ago
  As a point of interest, Blake Stone used the Wolfenstein engine with a bunch of modifications.

Sharlin 8y ago

Two years was an eternity back then. Heck, Quake was released two years after DOOM.

adventured 8y ago
It is quite remarkable how fast Carmack moved their engines forward, especially given the pioneering nature of the progress in question. Wolfenstein 3D, May 1992 -> Doom, December 1993 -> Quake 1, June 1996 -> Quake 2, December 1997 In the span of five years, they went from: Wolf: https://i.imgur.com/1gGewDp.png https://i.imgur.com/1gGewDp.png Doom: https://i.imgur.com/6CqvrLg.png https://i.imgur.com/6CqvrLg.png Q1: https://i.imgur.com/6wZg8NG.png https://i.imgur.com/6wZg8NG.png Q2: https://i.imgur.com/4Lxtg4f.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4Lxtg4f.jpg The leap forward between the release dates of Doom and Quake 2 in just four years is particularly impressive.
- benj111 8y ago
  Not to detract from your point but I seem to recall Doom being playable on PCs of the day. * I remember some years after quake 2 was out (99ish ?) a friend showing off his new computer by actually playing quake 1 with all the bells and whistles turned on. So yes the engines did develop quickly. Much quicker than the PCs of the day in fact. *being school kids, these weren't gaming PCs, these were for 'homework' and 'research'.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    PCs would keep up fine, but only so long as you had a 3D graphics accelerator (3dfx or similar). Since it was something that was only of use in games at the time, many builders omitted it, resulting in a large gap. Still, Q2 was perfectly playable even on below-average PCs at the time of release, if you were willing to stick to the same resolution as Doom (i.e. 320x200).
  - andrewf 8y ago
    I think the hardware was moving forward equally quickly, but there was a more dramatic spread between the low and high end of the installed base. People waited years between upgrades because computers were so expensive. At the same time, Moore's law really was doubling speeds every 18 months. When Wolf3D came out in May 1992, its minimum spec targeted the installed base of 286s, and a 50Mhz 486 was bleeding edge. When Doom was released in Dec 1993, you could buy a Pentium. (And if you kept it till '96, that Pentium could manage Quake at 320x200). I agree there was a bifurcation in the late 90s when 3D hardware acceleration arrived (see the colored lighting and texture filtering in the Q2 screenshot). Quake 1 was getting patched with hardware rendering up until Quake 2's release, likely the bells and whistles your friend showed off :)

gdubs 8y ago

Doom was groundbreaking. It’s less about its technical achievements in the absolute — it’s about how radically different it was than what came before. It’s interesting to read about how the developers broke through previous constraints to create something that seemed impossible at the time.

FartyMcFarter 8y ago
Quake absolutely blows my mind: real 3D graphics, moddability with a custom compiler (QuakeC), amazing online play (even on a modem) with Quakeworld. All of this in one game which they developed fairly quickly.
- cronix 8y ago
  Also had Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) doing the soundtrack/sound effects, which added a new dimension as well. The soundtrack just screams "this game kicks ass." I still dig it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n8iU7abqkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n8iU7abqkQ
  - harveynick 8y ago
    The nail gun in Quake fires “nine inch nails”, which I always thought was a nice touch.
    - cronix 8y ago
      The nailgun ammo crates had "NIͶ" on them as well ;) https://slm-assets1.secondlife.com/assets/8685509/lightbox/NEW-_nails.jpg?1383531233 https://slm-assets1.secondlife.com/assets/8685509/lightbox/N...
- int_19h 8y ago
  I wonder how many people got into programming because of QuakeC. For me, it came after I was already hooked, but it certainly added a whole new dimension, in a sense that you could now achieve impressive things in one-two evenings of coding that could be shown to others. I remember making the nails bounce off the walls, for example.

cannedslime 8y ago

While descent was a technical marvel, it didn't have the atmosphere of doom and I think the 6DOF movement scheme deterred many from playing it as the levels got confusing.

devereaux 8y ago
Confusion and getting lost in a 3d maze was part of the game. In some ways it reminds me of Slime World - mapping the world in your head becomes an important feature. This does not seem to be the case with newer games, as if most players didn't like "finding their way back" to a place they have visited before, and prefer a linear progression instead.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  Yes and no. This does not seem to be the case with newer games, as if most players didn't like "finding their way back" to a place they have visited before, and prefer a linear progression instead. People don't mind the backtracking so much -- the "Metroidvania" genre has never been so popular! Exploration is, generally speaking, fun. It's the tedium of making one's own maps (either mentally, or on paper) that gamers generally don't have a lot of time for these days.

pjc50 8y ago

DOOM was the first. Well, really Wolfenstein was the first, but it was limited to a grid. DOOM was many people's first networked game too. And the level editors were easy enough to use that they created a community. Descent's 6dof control system rather counted against it in the days when people had keyboard, mouse and two axis joysticks. I remember struggling with it a lot, even trying two sticks at one point. DOOM was also more memorable in its black metal aesthetic - the music and gory graphics. The E1M1 theme will stick with me while I can't remember a note of descent.

JshWright 8y ago
I never had an issue w/ Descent's controls (IIRC, I had yaw and pitch on the joystick, left/right strafe on A/D, forward/reverse on W/S, roll on Q/E, and strafe up and down (rarely used) on tab and caps). Once joysticks with a twist axis were a thing the twist became roll and up/down moved to Q/E). Multiplayer Descent was _way_ more fun that DOOM, in my opinion (specifically because of the 6dof... you could sneak up on people from any direction).
cma 8y ago
Ultima Underworld was released before Wolfenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian_Abyss#/media/File:Ultima_underworld_1_screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian... But Wolfenstein had lower requirements by not supporting the same amount of geometry variation. Hovertank/Catacomb were released even earlier than the two and done with some of the same tech as Wolfenstein I believe.
- leoc 8y ago
  Ultima Underworld successor System Shock (1) deserves mention here too. Another big step forward, and a couple of years before Quake.
XorNot 8y ago
Descent had a huge community in the day (and still has a community). I definitely played way more Descent (8 player multi) then DOOM (back in the days of Kali).

TomVDB 8y ago

I remember running the Doom demo for the first time and being absolutely blown away by it. And then we discovered multi-player mode. I’d haul my 486 box on a train to the next city just to play it, for hours into the night. Descent never did that to me. It was technically fantastic, but didn’t have the atmosphere, or the multi-player. And after playing for a while, it also made me nauseous. ;-)

tibbon 8y ago

I’m mostly shocked that Ultima Underworld isn’t getting more attention. Not as fast paced, but if memory serves me they shipped before Doom, and did some really in depth things for the time considering the hardware and prior titles.

robterrell 8y ago
You could argue that Akalabeth was the original FPS!
- phodo 8y ago
  Indeed. I remember getting Akalabeth and it’s floppy disk in a ziplock plastic bag. Rushed home to play it on my apple //c. I was hooked. Played all the ultimas, including other origin games. In those days, I also played the original wolfenstein on the apple. It had synthesized sound for speech. That same sense of wonder and fun I experienced with these games hit me again when I played wolfenstein 3D, doom, and quake. Some of today’s games like assassin’s creed, Witcher, Zelda on switch give that same mix of emotion and fun.
  - benj111 8y ago
    >wolfenstein on the apple. It had synthesized sound for speech "Hoo ta ta" "Ay eeeeeeeee!" I may not remember what I had for breakfast this morning, I can remember sound effects for a computer game I havent played in 20 years :) Edit: Thought you meant Wolfenstein 3d when you mentioned original Wolfenstein. I cant remember the sound effects for original Wolfenstein.
    - colomon 8y ago
      Guards would scream movie Nazi German snippets at you. "Achtung!" etc. Seems a bit simple now, but almost nothing else like it on the Apple II and C64 when it came out.
- kragen 8y ago
  No, Maze War was the original FPS. Maze War came out in 1973; Akalabeth didn't come out until 1979.

chrisseaton 8y ago

> appears to me much more accomplished Was it more fun?