
The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of Doom - doppp
https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-5-narratives-of-doom/
======
ekianjo
> But be that as it may, the 3D revolution ushered in by DOOM was here to
> stay. People would just have to get used to the visual crudity for the time
> being, and trust that eventually things would start to look better again.

What? Doom looked already fantastic when it came out, much better than hordes
of 3D games that games before it. (Check out Midwinter just a few years
before:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU))

And we did not have to wait for long for 3D games to get even better -
Comanche in 1992
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y))
and Quake 1 in 1996. A drastic evolution in a very, very short time, even
before GPU videocards became mainstream.

~~~
setpatchaddress
You don't have to agree, but you're quoting out of context. Here's the lead-
in:

> Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a
> generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A
> freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making
> immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games
> coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely
> beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of
> dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before
> 3D games would look anywhere near this nice

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Doom, Mario, and Megaman all work extremely well within their limitations. The
art is able to unambiguously present a world with atmosphere and it's clear
what needs to be done. There's very little confusing iconography or hard to
interpret sprites, everything is clear.

They're probably the best examples in the history of the medium of great
design. Capcom and Nintendo are still making 2D Megaman/Mario games with the
old graphic design and there are new retro FPS games coming out every year.
SuperHot actually looks worse than Doom in most aspects other than the
resolution and particles.

Sierra/LucasArts games, while beautifully drawn, suffered from unclear walking
paths, confusing verbs, frustratingly slow interactivity, and nonsense
puzzles. From an industrial design perspective, they were a mess.

Out of this World and Prince of Persia are probably the most prominent example
of games that excelled in the two dimensions of graphics and usability, while
Myst is probably the most extreme example of form over function in games that
were successful.

~~~
the_af
I strongly agree with most of your post (I think Out of this World and Prince
of Persia both look and play well even today) but I think you're overstating
the visuals of DOOM vs SuperHot. If you look for clips of DOOM (so as to
bypass the rose tinted glasses of the mind's eye) and compare it to SuperHot,
DOOM looks worse in every aspect except maybe that it's more colorful. DOOM is
pixelated, has worse looking environments, and overall looks way worse \--
though of course it looked great to me when it was released! SuperHot looks
great in an abstracted, decolorized sort of way.

------
Majromax
> The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of interactive movies,
> given what intensely problematic endeavors they so clearly were, but rather
> that the latest games’ vision proved to be so circumscribed in terms of
> fiction, theme, and mechanics alike. [...] A shocking percentage of the new
> games being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres: the
> first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game.

Citation needed? This feels like fuzzy language used to protect an
unverifiable claim. What is a "shocking percentage?"

Looking at (say) Wikipedia's list of notable games from 1998
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games))
I see a reasonable mix of genres. In fact, "shooter" games (searching the page
for the number of uses of 'shoot') seem to share the top spot (21 results)
with "role-playing" and "sports" games, the latter genre being neglected
entirely in the article. (Noting that some games are listed as multiple
genres)

From the article's earlier longing for the simpler time of gorgeous, hand-
crafted 2D art, I wonder if the author simply misses classic-style adventure
games. In response to that idea, however, I point out the Old Man Murray
article
([https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html](https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html))
on the death of adventure games: in brief Murray argues that the genre became
so wrapped up in its own puzzle conventions that it became impenetrable to new
players.

~~~
zerocrates
This blog focuses more on computer gaming than console gaming, which tilts the
balance more toward those genres. There _is_ a bit of a tendency to overlook
sports games in most "gaming" discussion, I'd say, despite their significant
popularity, but they've also never been as much of a force on the PC as on
consoles or arcade.

If you read the blog, you'll also note that that the author makes no secret of
his fondness for graphical and text adventures, and the blog has covered both
extensively, including their declines.

Interestingly, particularly since you brought up 1998, the Old Man Murray
article you linked to was written by Erik Wolpaw, a well-known game writer who
later worked with Double Fine (founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts fame, the
designer of 1998's Grim Fandango, basically the swan song of the LucasArts
adventures) and Valve, purveyor of 1998's acclaimed FPS Half-Life.

~~~
Majromax
> This blog focuses more on computer gaming than console gaming,

That's true, but on the other hand the article quotes a Sierra executive as
saying:

> “What we think of today as a computer or a videogame system,” wrote Ken
> Williams of Sierra that year, “will someday assume a much broader role in
> our homes. I foresee a day when there is one home-entertainment device which
> combines the functions of a CD-audio player, VCR, videogame system, and
> computer.”

... which exactly describes a console. Not quite the consoles of the late 90s,
but 2000's Playstation 2 was price-competitive with stand-alone DVD players.
It feels selective to lament the path of the game-industry as a whole while
defining that industry to exclude the systems that look like the supposedly-
unfulfilled prediction above.

Perhaps this is just a problem of context, since I'm coming to this series of
articles in medias res through with this 'part 5' link.

> There is a bit of a tendency to overlook sports games in most "gaming"
> discussion, I'd say, despite their significant popularity, but they've also
> never been as much of a force on the PC as on consoles or arcade.

Honestly, I think if we're going to name overlooked genres, the elephant in
the room is the hidden-object genre. These games aren't often included on
_lists of games_, but as I understand it they're quite popular and profitable,
especially on mobile platforms.

------
UNESCOsentinel
It's great that filfre's wife makes all the money. I appreciate these blog
series. He can just chill and write, apparently, and it's just as good as a
book. Thank your wife dude, unless the f spittoon gathers enough donations.
your site is top 40 at least, if not 9 or something. filfre.net is really
good. Keep it up dude. <3 We all wait for the next filfre post. Top 9 in the
world is really great. We all appreciate it. It's a treasure trove with
automatic renewal. Can't explain how good your site is. UNESCO should get on
their case. Or donate. Don't let this site die. <3

------
swivelmaster
The author of this article seems to believe that 2D graphics cannot be re-used
in a game and/or is unaware of the use of tiles, palette-swapping, and other
techniques used to make production of 2D games more efficient. Very strange.

~~~
pjc50
The author is an extremely comprehensive game historian who is probably into
the hundreds of thousands of words at this point, so they almost certainly are
aware of it and you'll find it mentioned in another article.

~~~
swivelmaster
Perhaps, but summarizing the advantages of 3D over 2D by saying that "you
can't copy a table, you have to make EACH ONE BY HAND!" is a gross
misrepresentation of the differences and limitations of 2D.

It only takes one or two sentences to explain this more accurately, and I
think we should all prefer that over saying something that is about 90% wrong
but slightly shorter.

I also cringed when the article said that we couldn't really know why the
Columbine kids went on a murder spree when other people who played Doom
didn't. That is a totally ridiculous thing to say; We know exactly why, and
it's because one of them was a bonafide psychopath and the other was
clinically depressed. Again, something explainable in a sentence that was
misrepresented in the article.

Historians should be more concerned with accuracy than word count.

------
unilynx
Is this safe (no spoilers) to read if I'm still in the first chapters of
"Masters of Doom' ?

~~~
umvi
The Shareware Scene articles are like an abridged version of that book. So no,
it's not safe.

~~~
ido
To offer a counterpoint - do you really need spoiler protection for a history
book? I read MoD years ago (when it just got published) and enjoyed both it
and Jimmy's works. I don't think reading this series of articles will detract
from the enjoyment of the book.

------
TonyTapper
Slightly offtopic: Can we please get rid of blog themes that omit the year
from the post date? "19 Jun"... of which year? Especially with older blog
posts or unmaintained blogs it's frustrating that you essentially have to look
into the HTML code (or URL if you're lucky).

~~~
iso1631
The URL puts it as 2020, and the bottom of the post says "Posted by Jimmy
Maher on June 19, 2020"

~~~
TonyTapper
Sure, but why have a pretty date at the top and then make it incomplete? I
don't want to scroll down to figure out if a blog post is recent, or look at
the URL. This theme (or a variation) is used on many blogs, and not all of
them use pretty URLs with a year in them.

~~~
saberdancer
My bank does this! The assumption is that when there is no year, it is the
current year. They are trying to be smart with dates and I don't like it.

Funny thing is that when they developed this feature, they made a bug so if
you scroll down to the year before, the years appear, but now dates from the
current year are wrong as they appended the year before. That's what you get
for trying to be a smartass.

