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

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.