I've been fooling around with #Doom on the #MiyooMiniPlus recently... partly because it's cool that I can, but also because Doom is, somehow, still an amazing game. It feels, forgive the pun, eternal.
It's easy to forget just how seismic Doom felt in 93. It appeared from nowhere, when everyone was talking about #SNES or #Megadrive or #Amiga... and somehow made PCs a thing!
Feeling perfect out of the gate, it made other platforms chase that elusive beast - the worthy Doom-clone. Few came close.
@davetansley dunno about come from nowhere, Wolfenstein was quite popular.
I’d agree that Doom was and still is a big leap from Wolfenstein though, even now I play Doom and especially Brutal Doom from time to time, and anything I can install Doom on, I do.
@philheppenstall Popular among PC gamers at the time, sure, but before Doom, I don't remember even knowing any PC gamers.
After Doom, it suddenly felt like half the people I knew had somehow acquired a 486DX33 and were banging on about Monkey Island and sound cards and it was all PC from then on.
This may have just been my particular friend group, or my personal experience, sure.
I hate to be contrarian, but I have to say that my memory of the era is quite different... titles like Wing Commander and Civilization already had people longing for PCs in '90-91, and then in '92, mind-blowing titles like Ultima Underworld, Strike Commander*, and Alone in the Dark cemented the PC as the premium mode of video gaming.
That said, Doom was absolutely celebrated and caused many ripples... but so did System Shock when it released not long afterward! In hindsight, the deathmatch and mapping communities ensured Doom its now-famous longevity. It wasn't immediately apparent at the time, and Doom 2 was given a rather lukewarm reception (from memory, XCOM was the darling must-have game of that year.)
as a side-note, Monkey Island 2 came out in 1991, and was old hat in 1993... Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max were the LucasArt tour-de-forces at that time.
*edit: Strike Commander was actually April '93. I fact-checked myself too late ;)
But what Doom did, in my view, was kill off the already dying non-PC computer gaming market. With Commodore's troubles, this would have happened anyway, but the Amiga's demise was hastened by its sudden inability to produce a "Doom-clone".
It also elevated the PC in the mind of console gamers as a viable first-choice gaming platform, and pulled many back to "computer" gaming.
@davetansley@dabbling_duck@philheppenstall I dunno about that. I meant there was Hexan on Amiga.
i switched from Amiga to PC in 95, but it wasn't Doom that did it for me (never really had much of an interest in FPS. Quake was ok, half life killed an afternoon) but it was Adventure games, they were all coming out for PC only (CD rom drive is why) Starting with ST:A Final Unity (which I bought with my PC).
Doom is iconic to some people, sure, but its very 'meh' to others.
@ktetch@dabbling_duck@philheppenstall Yeah, definitely. There were lots of reasons that people went from Amiga to PC, but I would argue that specifically Doom was a big one for a lot of folks.
As you say, Amiga did get Hexen, but not till 1999. Oddly, it also got an actual source port of Doom in 1997, and also a reasonably competent commercial port of Quake in 1998. But it was too late by then, and they required far more power than stock Amigas had. For the real die-hards only I recall.
@davetansley@dabbling_duck@philheppenstall i just had to check a, dn yeah, hexen was 99. Weird, there was one for the Amiga in the early/mid 90s. Minds a blank, because i gave my amiga to my cousin to replace his cpc464 (also meant i got my tv back in my room) so stopped caring about amiga games then.
@ktetch@dabbling_duck@philheppenstall There were a few commercial Doom-like games around the mid-90s... the most popular ones were Alien Breed 3d (and its sequel) and Gloom. Both were pretty good, I seem to recall, but not as polished or complete as Doom. They also ran pretty bad on stock A1200s.
It also seemed wild back then that, despite pushing perspective-correct textures at an outrageous speed, Doom could be obtained "free" (in shareware form) - and of course later games like Descent and Duke3D followed that model as well. I can imagine it could be hard from the outside watching PC players freely obtain titles that couldn't even be had for money on insert-other-system-of-choice...
@ktetch@dabbling_duck@philheppenstall Again, I agree with this. But I would still argue that the subset of people for whom Doom appealed was large enough to make a significant difference.
I'd also add that, pre-Doom, the group of people who called themselves "FPS fans" would be small, precisely because FPS games were an emerging genre that Doom solidified. There were FPS games pre-Doom (Wolf, Driller(?)) but doom established the genre.
Also, at the risk of sounding cheeky... if pretty much everyone who owned an Amiga really did pirate their games, then that wouldn't exactly have contributed to the longevity of the system either ;)
@dabbling_duck@davetansley@philheppenstall there were still plenty of sales, but also just so many games.
What did it for Amiga (and STs) and gave it to PC was technology moving on. Amiga were like consoles being single spec. And no easy upgrade paths. Hdds and cdroms weren't common and hard to add on to Amiga. Less so with pcs. Also the Playstation in 95/6 took a lot of the game market with its paradigm shift in technology.
If I understand Dave's case, I think the fact of technology moving on is what he's referring to - not necessarily the merits of Doom as a game, but Doom as a technological provocation that suggested to outsiders that, even if Doom wasn't your thing, it seemed inevitable now that something else might come along that made you feel like you were missing out. In my case, I can imagine that if I had been using an Amiga in those days, I would have absolutely coveted Ultima Underworld and System Shock - games that never came close to seeing a port AFAIK.
I remember back then we became aware of the difference between "chunky" and "planar" graphics. Chunky graphics were why PCs could do Doom, and planar graphics were why Amigas couldn't. And given the "frozen in time" nature of the Amiga platform, it never would (at least not commercially).
So even if you didn't like shooters, there was a feeling that the next technological step was forever out of reach, and it doomed the platform. Pun intended.
We had Sim City and Monkey Island and Wing Commander, but we also had arcade-style games that felt (at the time) comparable to SNES/Megadrive. All of that and it was an "affordable" and easy platform, compared to the DOS autoexec.bat hell of PC gaming :)
@davetansley@dabbling_duck@ktetch Windows 3.0 came out 3 years before Doom did.
Although it still ran on top of DOS at that point it did make PCs a lot more usable to many.
@philheppenstall@dabbling_duck@ktetch For gaming though? I may be wrong, but my impression is that it wasn't until Windows 95 that we started to see games moving away from MS-DOS.
@davetansley@philheppenstall@dabbling_duck A final unity (my first pc game) could do either dos or windows, IN THEORY. but it could only really do DOS, and I had to do my own mouse driver for it, and ripped AST such a hole for that its part of why they stopped selling in the UK. DOS[4GW] based games were somewhat common until around 97ish
To make alternate-timelines even weirder, if the others at id had followed Tom Hall's design document with Carmack's engine, it's possible Doom would have released as a weird adventure-RPG-action hybrid... either alienating or appealing to all kinds of players, depending!
@davetansley@dabbling_duck@philheppenstall the graphics details were not something I ever heard people talk about, not then, and in fact you're the first I've ever heard say that, about the graphical implementations.
It really was (to my experience) the more basic hardware things - CD rom drives, hard drives that were so limited on Amiga and not on pcs. Monkey island 2 was 11 💾 (+1 for save) on Amiga. CD rom games were essential for data size.
@ktetch@dabbling_duck@philheppenstall Yeah, the lack of ubiquitous CD-ROM tech definitely didn't help... not through want of trying though... Commodore tried twice (CDTV and CD32) to establish CDs as a medium, and both were largely unsuccessful.
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