the game that started it all
wolfenstein 3d: am i a joke to you?
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Ha. My wife and I were just talking about that. I though it came out earlier and I was right. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992 and Doom came out in 1993. Still, Doom is the one that gets ported to everything. I'm not sure why Doom.
It's just a better game.
well, doom was true 3d, but more importantly, doom had network game, so people have lot of fond memories from those early lan parties.
but it was really wolfenstein, with its pseudo-3d that squeezed maximum possible from the cpu power of the computers back then and... started it all, including the fame of id soft. id soft was responsible for both - after success of wolfenstein, they created doom (and ultimately quake).
Doom wasn't "real" 3d. You actually only move on a 2D surface, although it's "bended". The first real 3D game was Quake (AFAIK).
Doom was “real” 3D in the sense that it displayed proper 3D environments with textures and all. You could go forward and backwards, left and right, and up and down of stairs/elevators. That’s all 3 dimensions.
The player might have technically been confined to a 2D plane, but I would say it’s 3D graphics.
But games with proper 3D movement came much earlier. One example is Elite from 1984, which allowed space flight with full 6 degrees of freedom.
Another example earlier than Quake worthy a mention is Descent from 1995.
Decent is far more 3D than Quake in that it's play area goes in all directions. However I think it gets overlooked because I think it owes as much to flight sims, and those have been 3D for a very long time.
Maze War: "Am I a joke to you?" (1973)
But Wolf3D was the "3D - FPS" which changed the world, and gaming introducing FPS. Carmack glimpsed Ultima in action at a 1990 expo, and saw a new style of game, influencing him in both Wolf3D and then Doom.
Also, ID's first 3D game, which was not FPS, was Hovertank 3D!!
So all the arguments here revolve around if you are talking "3D" or "FPS". 3D has been around since the 70's, however as far as FPS is concerned WOLF 3D takes the title for that.
Wolfenstein 3D wasn't the first FPS. It did lay the groundwork for Doom to explode into popularity and set the standard for PC FPSs for years to come.
I remember downloading Doom (the shareware edition) from a BBS, launching it and being absolutely mind blown. The graphics and 3d engine were something else entirely. Good times.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
We’ve dug deep to find our top 30 wild ways folks can run Doom, from the best Inception-style game-within-game to the strangest contraptions capable of playing a 30-year-old title.
While Panic’s hand-cranked Playdate console only plays relatively games in black and white, folks on the company’s own dev forums saw the small GameBoy-like device as a challenge to overcome.
While the Flipper Zero proved to be a very controversial piece of tech despite its routine functionality, that didn’t stop the best and brightest from finding ways to plug Doom onto its barebones orange and black screen.
Sure, the enemy imps appear as dark silhouettes while the walls are simple black jail cell bars, but that doesn’t mean the gameplay isn’t the same fun FPS you know and love.
John Deere may be finally coming down off the anti-right-to-repair hill it appeared ready to die on, but that doesn’t mean we can’t mod Doom onto the company’s tractors to prove a point.
Well, to answer the question, it took over 100 pounds of boiled russet potatoes slowly rotting over a week to finally play ID Software’s famed game.
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