Comment by walrus01
10 hours ago
Early 90s DOS games were certainly quite creative. I mentally draw a dividing line between approximately the start of the era when the first Soundblaster became a common thing to find in affordable home x86 PCs, and early CD-ROM based games were also available (1991-1992), and the December 1993 release of DOOM and everything that came after. Very interesting era in the time frame in between there.
Don't I remember doom developing pretty organically from wolfenstein and a few other (what would now be called) first person shooters around that time? The name "hexen" is coming to mind too. I would put that whole era as the start of something new, so different from the strategy games and side-scrollers that preceded it. Those first person games were the first time I thought computer games were actually more fun than the console systems, which didn't really have anything similar.
I think the big difference for me, after playing a lot of Wolfenstein 3D, was two things... The system I had it on didn't have the CPU to run wolf3d in something like a full screen size, it was something like a 386SX/20. By the time DOOM came around I had a much more capable desktop. Secondly, wolfenstein 3d was everything on a flat two dimensional plane of grey floor. There was one size of wall or door tile and everything had the same ceiling height and same wall height.
DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.
Yep, Wolf3D is a fairly simple ray casting system (see if in visible cone, scale with distance) and Doom is Binary space partitioned that could allow complex geometry, something that is still used til this day.
Warcraft II and Doom are both examples of, while not being the first in their genres, defining their genres and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.
> ..and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.
This. After Doom, there were maaany releases where a studio had X out there, and then released [3D version of X]. Or also throw themselves onto the fps genre. Almost to the point of killing innovation.
Don't get me wrong: that, and the 'infinite' storage of CD-ROMs got us many nice games.
But neither did much to sharpen game developer's creativity skills. Many "me too! (meh..)" releases in that era.
Yeah, I remember our high school IT teacher buying a 486sx25 with 8MB and a CDROM ostensibly to explore multimedia in education but mostly to play Myst.
I feel like Mario 64 was another one of those and AAA never really left Doom or Mario 64.