WI: No "Doom"

This had to be the most influential computer game ever produced. I shudder to think how many weeks or even months I wasted on it in the nineties.

It spawned a host of imitators and even today the First Person Shooter dominates the game markets.

Suppose Romero and company never designed it....where would computer gaming have gone?
 

Thande

Donor
Interesting question, I suppose what we have to ask ourselves is whether some other company wouldn't have come up with a similar idea sooner or later. Also, whether the popularity of Doom was solely due to its invention of FPS or also to do with its dark and gritty fantastic setting: would FPSes have become so popular if the first FPS had been more realistic in its setting, more like the majority of today's?
 
Dylan & Clybold's parents have to accept that they raised nut-jobs and the media has to find a different strawman to beat.
 
Wolfensetin 3D would have been more popular to fill the niche. What made Doom so popular wasn't the kind of game it was or the technology (with the exception of Network play), because Wolfenstein 3D had the same thing. What really made it popular was it was one of the first big shareware games. People could play the first three or so levels for free and then got hooked to play the rest.

Torqumada
 
Interesting question, I suppose what we have to ask ourselves is whether some other company wouldn't have come up with a similar idea sooner or later. Also, whether the popularity of Doom was solely due to its invention of FPS or also to do with its dark and gritty fantastic setting: would FPSes have become so popular if the first FPS had been more realistic in its setting, more like the majority of today's?
Well, as Torqumada says, it's probably not to do with the invention of FPS as such (Wolfensteid 3D preceded Doom, after all- shareware and all-), so it might be the setting.
 
Well without Doom, Descent might have become the big title in FPS'. It was a far superior game in terms of graphics and gameplay, however IOTL it never achieved the level of notoriety that doom did.
 
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