5 ms·

The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of Doom

90 points by doppp 6y ago

ekianjo 6y ago
> But be that as it may, the 3D revolution ushered in by DOOM was here to stay. People would just have to get used to the visual crudity for the time being, and trust that eventually things would start to look better again. What? Doom looked already fantastic when it came out, much better than hordes of 3D games that games before it. (Check out Midwinter just a few years before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU) And we did not have to wait for long for 3D games to get even better - Comanche in 1992 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y) and Quake 1 in 1996. A drastic evolution in a very, very short time, even before GPU videocards became mainstream.
- setpatchaddress 6y ago
  You don't have to agree, but you're quoting out of context. Here's the lead-in: > Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this nice
  - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
    Doom, Mario, and Megaman all work extremely well within their limitations. The art is able to unambiguously present a world with atmosphere and it's clear what needs to be done. There's very little confusing iconography or hard to interpret sprites, everything is clear. They're probably the best examples in the history of the medium of great design. Capcom and Nintendo are still making 2D Megaman/Mario games with the old graphic design and there are new retro FPS games coming out every year. SuperHot actually looks worse than Doom in most aspects other than the resolution and particles. Sierra/LucasArts games, while beautifully drawn, suffered from unclear walking paths, confusing verbs, frustratingly slow interactivity, and nonsense puzzles. From an industrial design perspective, they were a mess. Out of this World and Prince of Persia are probably the most prominent example of games that excelled in the two dimensions of graphics and usability, while Myst is probably the most extreme example of form over function in games that were successful.
    - the_af 6y ago
      I strongly agree with most of your post (I think Out of this World and Prince of Persia both look and play well even today) but I think you're overstating the visuals of DOOM vs SuperHot. If you look for clips of DOOM (so as to bypass the rose tinted glasses of the mind's eye) and compare it to SuperHot, DOOM looks worse in every aspect except maybe that it's more colorful. DOOM is pixelated, has worse looking environments, and overall looks way worse -- though of course it looked great to me when it was released! SuperHot looks great in an abstracted, decolorized sort of way.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    I think this is pure nostalgia. The only people I've heard describe more than a handful of old games as "beautiful" have been those old enough to have experienced them before newer games came along. The original article doesn't seem to have examples of what the author considers beautiful, but let's talk about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, a Lucasarts game from 1992 (since this is one I played in the early 90s). The art is ... fine. It has a lot of constraints (low resolution, not a ton of colors available in its palette) and it's well executed within those constraints, but it's not beautiful. I also played Myst around the same time. I didn't then, and still don't, see any way in which the 2d pixel art was "more beautiful." The cross-genre comparisons to shooters are also unfair. Compare something like Madden 95 on SNES to Madden 64 on N64. They both have jagged edges and visual crudity; the "pixel art" nature of the former does it no favors.
    - eps 6y ago
      Don't know why your comment is in gray, but I think you are 100% correct. "Beautiful" in games is inherently relative to the context. Space Quest 1 was so damn gorgeous compared to what I've seen before it, I still love it to this day in all its 4-color glory. Does it look beautiful to random strangers who don't know what CGA was? Heck, no.
      - the_af 6y ago
        Beauty is always relative to the context, even outside videogames. That's why I disagree with the parent post you're replying to. Indy and the Fate of Atlantis is beautiful to me. Space Quest also is. The other day I saw a comment on YouTube mentioning that the EGA (16 color) version of The Curse of Monkey Island looks better than the VGA (256 color) version, and I agree! Beauty to me is mastery of the art form within its limitations. The limitations often make better art (the quintessential example to me is how the original Star Wars looks better, for example in its minimalistic depiction of a barren Tatooine, than the remixes or the prequels; once George Lucas was free of technical and budget limitations, his "boundless" imagination turned out to be disappointing). I even think some games look better in pixelated monochrome glory. Is it because I am an old fart? Maybe. But I'm not wrong, either.
TonyTapper 6y ago
Slightly offtopic: Can we please get rid of blog themes that omit the year from the post date? "19 Jun"... of which year? Especially with older blog posts or unmaintained blogs it's frustrating that you essentially have to look into the HTML code (or URL if you're lucky).
- iso1631 6y ago
  The URL puts it as 2020, and the bottom of the post says "Posted by Jimmy Maher on June 19, 2020"
  - TonyTapper 6y ago
    Sure, but why have a pretty date at the top and then make it incomplete? I don't want to scroll down to figure out if a blog post is recent, or look at the URL. This theme (or a variation) is used on many blogs, and not all of them use pretty URLs with a year in them.
    - saberdancer 6y ago
      My bank does this! The assumption is that when there is no year, it is the current year. They are trying to be smart with dates and I don't like it. Funny thing is that when they developed this feature, they made a bug so if you scroll down to the year before, the years appear, but now dates from the current year are wrong as they appended the year before. That's what you get for trying to be a smartass.
swivelmaster 6y ago
The author of this article seems to believe that 2D graphics cannot be re-used in a game and/or is unaware of the use of tiles, palette-swapping, and other techniques used to make production of 2D games more efficient. Very strange.
- yumaikas 6y ago
  Yes, 2D assets can be reused, once you have a 3D asset, it can be used with a lot more spectacle. Of nothing else, when you're animating a change of visual angle, it's a whole lot more convincing and easier (animate some positions) vs the 2D alternative of having to animate or rotoscoped each of the pixels and frames for that gun motion. And spectacle was one of the biggest sellers of games.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Indeed curious. Bungie’s Marathon series of FPSs of the same era also did palette swapping for the sprite-based NPCs.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The author is an extremely comprehensive game historian who is probably into the hundreds of thousands of words at this point, so they almost certainly are aware of it and you'll find it mentioned in another article.
  - swivelmaster 6y ago
    Perhaps, but summarizing the advantages of 3D over 2D by saying that "you can't copy a table, you have to make EACH ONE BY HAND!" is a gross misrepresentation of the differences and limitations of 2D. It only takes one or two sentences to explain this more accurately, and I think we should all prefer that over saying something that is about 90% wrong but slightly shorter. I also cringed when the article said that we couldn't really know why the Columbine kids went on a murder spree when other people who played Doom didn't. That is a totally ridiculous thing to say; We know exactly why, and it's because one of them was a bonafide psychopath and the other was clinically depressed. Again, something explainable in a sentence that was misrepresented in the article. Historians should be more concerned with accuracy than word count.
Majromax 6y ago
> The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of interactive movies, given what intensely problematic endeavors they so clearly were, but rather that the latest games’ vision proved to be so circumscribed in terms of fiction, theme, and mechanics alike. [...] A shocking percentage of the new games being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres: the first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game. Citation needed? This feels like fuzzy language used to protect an unverifiable claim. What is a "shocking percentage?" Looking at (say) Wikipedia's list of notable games from 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games) I see a reasonable mix of genres. In fact, "shooter" games (searching the page for the number of uses of 'shoot') seem to share the top spot (21 results) with "role-playing" and "sports" games, the latter genre being neglected entirely in the article. (Noting that some games are listed as multiple genres) From the article's earlier longing for the simpler time of gorgeous, hand-crafted 2D art, I wonder if the author simply misses classic-style adventure games. In response to that idea, however, I point out the Old Man Murray article (https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) on the death of adventure games: in brief Murray argues that the genre became so wrapped up in its own puzzle conventions that it became impenetrable to new players.
- zerocrates 6y ago
  This blog focuses more on computer gaming than console gaming, which tilts the balance more toward those genres. There is a bit of a tendency to overlook sports games in most "gaming" discussion, I'd say, despite their significant popularity, but they've also never been as much of a force on the PC as on consoles or arcade. If you read the blog, you'll also note that that the author makes no secret of his fondness for graphical and text adventures, and the blog has covered both extensively, including their declines. Interestingly, particularly since you brought up 1998, the Old Man Murray article you linked to was written by Erik Wolpaw, a well-known game writer who later worked with Double Fine (founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts fame, the designer of 1998's Grim Fandango, basically the swan song of the LucasArts adventures) and Valve, purveyor of 1998's acclaimed FPS Half-Life.
  - 6y ago
unilynx 6y ago
Is this safe (no spoilers) to read if I'm still in the first chapters of "Masters of Doom' ?
- umvi 6y ago
  The Shareware Scene articles are like an abridged version of that book. So no, it's not safe.
  - ido 6y ago
    To offer a counterpoint - do you really need spoiler protection for a history book? I read MoD years ago (when it just got published) and enjoyed both it and Jimmy's works. I don't think reading this series of articles will detract from the enjoyment of the book.
- msturbersofd 6y ago
  Masters of Doom is the shortest authistic kind of book, if you think Masters of Doom is "long" then you've never picked up a book man. I redad 12x masters of doom per "day" where day might mean 21 hours 30 hours per stretch I don' tfollow normal hours. Thank f for not having a schedule I can do quality productive shit all "day". 24 hour day is a retarded concept. It will limit you substantially.
UNESCOsentinel 6y ago
It's great that filfre's wife makes all the money. I appreciate these blog series. He can just chill and write, apparently, and it's just as good as a book. Thank your wife dude, unless the f spittoon gathers enough donations. your site is top 40 at least, if not 9 or something. filfre.net is really good. Keep it up dude. <3 We all wait for the next filfre post. Top 9 in the world is really great. We all appreciate it. It's a treasure trove with automatic renewal. Can't explain how good your site is. UNESCO should get on their case. Or donate. Don't let this site die. <3

90 points by doppp 6y ago

> But be that as it may, the 3D revolution ushered in by DOOM was here to stay. People would just have to get used to the visual crudity for the time being, and trust that eventually things would start to look better again. What? Doom looked already fantastic when it came out, much better than hordes of 3D games that games before it. (Check out Midwinter just a few years before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU) And we did not have to wait for long for 3D games to get even better - Comanche in 1992 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y) and Quake 1 in 1996. A drastic evolution in a very, very short time, even before GPU videocards became mainstream.

setpatchaddress 6y ago
You don't have to agree, but you're quoting out of context. Here's the lead-in: > Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this nice
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  Doom, Mario, and Megaman all work extremely well within their limitations. The art is able to unambiguously present a world with atmosphere and it's clear what needs to be done. There's very little confusing iconography or hard to interpret sprites, everything is clear. They're probably the best examples in the history of the medium of great design. Capcom and Nintendo are still making 2D Megaman/Mario games with the old graphic design and there are new retro FPS games coming out every year. SuperHot actually looks worse than Doom in most aspects other than the resolution and particles. Sierra/LucasArts games, while beautifully drawn, suffered from unclear walking paths, confusing verbs, frustratingly slow interactivity, and nonsense puzzles. From an industrial design perspective, they were a mess. Out of this World and Prince of Persia are probably the most prominent example of games that excelled in the two dimensions of graphics and usability, while Myst is probably the most extreme example of form over function in games that were successful.
  - the_af 6y ago
    I strongly agree with most of your post (I think Out of this World and Prince of Persia both look and play well even today) but I think you're overstating the visuals of DOOM vs SuperHot. If you look for clips of DOOM (so as to bypass the rose tinted glasses of the mind's eye) and compare it to SuperHot, DOOM looks worse in every aspect except maybe that it's more colorful. DOOM is pixelated, has worse looking environments, and overall looks way worse -- though of course it looked great to me when it was released! SuperHot looks great in an abstracted, decolorized sort of way.
- majormajor 6y ago
  I think this is pure nostalgia. The only people I've heard describe more than a handful of old games as "beautiful" have been those old enough to have experienced them before newer games came along. The original article doesn't seem to have examples of what the author considers beautiful, but let's talk about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, a Lucasarts game from 1992 (since this is one I played in the early 90s). The art is ... fine. It has a lot of constraints (low resolution, not a ton of colors available in its palette) and it's well executed within those constraints, but it's not beautiful. I also played Myst around the same time. I didn't then, and still don't, see any way in which the 2d pixel art was "more beautiful." The cross-genre comparisons to shooters are also unfair. Compare something like Madden 95 on SNES to Madden 64 on N64. They both have jagged edges and visual crudity; the "pixel art" nature of the former does it no favors.
  - eps 6y ago
    Don't know why your comment is in gray, but I think you are 100% correct. "Beautiful" in games is inherently relative to the context. Space Quest 1 was so damn gorgeous compared to what I've seen before it, I still love it to this day in all its 4-color glory. Does it look beautiful to random strangers who don't know what CGA was? Heck, no.
    - the_af 6y ago
      Beauty is always relative to the context, even outside videogames. That's why I disagree with the parent post you're replying to. Indy and the Fate of Atlantis is beautiful to me. Space Quest also is. The other day I saw a comment on YouTube mentioning that the EGA (16 color) version of The Curse of Monkey Island looks better than the VGA (256 color) version, and I agree! Beauty to me is mastery of the art form within its limitations. The limitations often make better art (the quintessential example to me is how the original Star Wars looks better, for example in its minimalistic depiction of a barren Tatooine, than the remixes or the prequels; once George Lucas was free of technical and budget limitations, his "boundless" imagination turned out to be disappointing). I even think some games look better in pixelated monochrome glory. Is it because I am an old fart? Maybe. But I'm not wrong, either.

TonyTapper 6y ago

Slightly offtopic: Can we please get rid of blog themes that omit the year from the post date? "19 Jun"... of which year? Especially with older blog posts or unmaintained blogs it's frustrating that you essentially have to look into the HTML code (or URL if you're lucky).

iso1631 6y ago
The URL puts it as 2020, and the bottom of the post says "Posted by Jimmy Maher on June 19, 2020"
- TonyTapper 6y ago
  Sure, but why have a pretty date at the top and then make it incomplete? I don't want to scroll down to figure out if a blog post is recent, or look at the URL. This theme (or a variation) is used on many blogs, and not all of them use pretty URLs with a year in them.
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    My bank does this! The assumption is that when there is no year, it is the current year. They are trying to be smart with dates and I don't like it. Funny thing is that when they developed this feature, they made a bug so if you scroll down to the year before, the years appear, but now dates from the current year are wrong as they appended the year before. That's what you get for trying to be a smartass.

swivelmaster 6y ago

The author of this article seems to believe that 2D graphics cannot be re-used in a game and/or is unaware of the use of tiles, palette-swapping, and other techniques used to make production of 2D games more efficient. Very strange.

yumaikas 6y ago
Yes, 2D assets can be reused, once you have a 3D asset, it can be used with a lot more spectacle. Of nothing else, when you're animating a change of visual angle, it's a whole lot more convincing and easier (animate some positions) vs the 2D alternative of having to animate or rotoscoped each of the pixels and frames for that gun motion. And spectacle was one of the biggest sellers of games.
ben_w 6y ago
Indeed curious. Bungie’s Marathon series of FPSs of the same era also did palette swapping for the sprite-based NPCs.
pjc50 6y ago
The author is an extremely comprehensive game historian who is probably into the hundreds of thousands of words at this point, so they almost certainly are aware of it and you'll find it mentioned in another article.
- swivelmaster 6y ago
  Perhaps, but summarizing the advantages of 3D over 2D by saying that "you can't copy a table, you have to make EACH ONE BY HAND!" is a gross misrepresentation of the differences and limitations of 2D. It only takes one or two sentences to explain this more accurately, and I think we should all prefer that over saying something that is about 90% wrong but slightly shorter. I also cringed when the article said that we couldn't really know why the Columbine kids went on a murder spree when other people who played Doom didn't. That is a totally ridiculous thing to say; We know exactly why, and it's because one of them was a bonafide psychopath and the other was clinically depressed. Again, something explainable in a sentence that was misrepresented in the article. Historians should be more concerned with accuracy than word count.

Majromax 6y ago

> The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of interactive movies, given what intensely problematic endeavors they so clearly were, but rather that the latest games’ vision proved to be so circumscribed in terms of fiction, theme, and mechanics alike. [...] A shocking percentage of the new games being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres: the first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game. Citation needed? This feels like fuzzy language used to protect an unverifiable claim. What is a "shocking percentage?" Looking at (say) Wikipedia's list of notable games from 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games) I see a reasonable mix of genres. In fact, "shooter" games (searching the page for the number of uses of 'shoot') seem to share the top spot (21 results) with "role-playing" and "sports" games, the latter genre being neglected entirely in the article. (Noting that some games are listed as multiple genres) From the article's earlier longing for the simpler time of gorgeous, hand-crafted 2D art, I wonder if the author simply misses classic-style adventure games. In response to that idea, however, I point out the Old Man Murray article (https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) on the death of adventure games: in brief Murray argues that the genre became so wrapped up in its own puzzle conventions that it became impenetrable to new players.

zerocrates 6y ago
This blog focuses more on computer gaming than console gaming, which tilts the balance more toward those genres. There is a bit of a tendency to overlook sports games in most "gaming" discussion, I'd say, despite their significant popularity, but they've also never been as much of a force on the PC as on consoles or arcade. If you read the blog, you'll also note that that the author makes no secret of his fondness for graphical and text adventures, and the blog has covered both extensively, including their declines. Interestingly, particularly since you brought up 1998, the Old Man Murray article you linked to was written by Erik Wolpaw, a well-known game writer who later worked with Double Fine (founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts fame, the designer of 1998's Grim Fandango, basically the swan song of the LucasArts adventures) and Valve, purveyor of 1998's acclaimed FPS Half-Life.
- 6y ago

unilynx 6y ago

Is this safe (no spoilers) to read if I'm still in the first chapters of "Masters of Doom' ?

umvi 6y ago
The Shareware Scene articles are like an abridged version of that book. So no, it's not safe.
- ido 6y ago
  To offer a counterpoint - do you really need spoiler protection for a history book? I read MoD years ago (when it just got published) and enjoyed both it and Jimmy's works. I don't think reading this series of articles will detract from the enjoyment of the book.
msturbersofd 6y ago
Masters of Doom is the shortest authistic kind of book, if you think Masters of Doom is "long" then you've never picked up a book man. I redad 12x masters of doom per "day" where day might mean 21 hours 30 hours per stretch I don' tfollow normal hours. Thank f for not having a schedule I can do quality productive shit all "day". 24 hour day is a retarded concept. It will limit you substantially.

UNESCOsentinel 6y ago

It's great that filfre's wife makes all the money. I appreciate these blog series. He can just chill and write, apparently, and it's just as good as a book. Thank your wife dude, unless the f spittoon gathers enough donations. your site is top 40 at least, if not 9 or something. filfre.net is really good. Keep it up dude. <3 We all wait for the next filfre post. Top 9 in the world is really great. We all appreciate it. It's a treasure trove with automatic renewal. Can't explain how good your site is. UNESCO should get on their case. Or donate. Don't let this site die. <3