Trendsetters: The 10 Most Significant Games
8/26/2008 6:16 PM | 9 Comments | Page 2 of 10
Steve Kent
Status: Have you figured out the status secret yet?
Doom(id Software, PC and ported to every conceivable platform, 1993)
"
Doom was the perfect storm of all these [game] innovations," says David Kushner, author of the book "Masters of Doom." "Everything came together at once. There was the ability to modify content, the innovative method of distribution. There was the first real deathmatch.
"The list went on and on. You have that many firsts all piling together, that was what set
Doom apart. Nobody had ever seen anything like that."
Doom was not the first game to implement the first-person perspective. Atari popularized the first-person perspective with the 1980 release of
Battlezone. Two years later, Malcolm Evans a created a first-person perspective maze chase in a Wolfenstein-like maze in a game called
3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81.
Doom may not have been the first FPS game, but it excited crowds like nothing before it. At Microsoft, the game caused problems when workers overloaded servers by playing
Doom en masse. Later, when Microsoft held an event to promote Win 95 as a gaming platform, the PR team played a video of
Doom with Bill Gates' face superimposed over the face at the bottom of the screen.
As Kushner points out,
Doom started the deathmatch craze.
Doom's impact on shareware goes without saying.
Doom was not the first game to include a set of development tools, EA's
Pinball Construction Set beat
Doom by a decade; but
Doom made modding so popular that today's PC gamers expect it. Without
Doom and its toolset, there would never have been a
Team Fortress.
And then, of course, there is
Doom's impact on the FPS genre. id Software's little Martian maze made first-person shooters into the most significant genre in PC gaming.
