Fun fact: back in the day, Apogee distributors had what they called a “Shoot-em-up Collection” that I wanted Dad to get me. Immediately he got angry and said “I’m not buying you shooter games.” And I had to go like no, Dad, it’s stuff like Terminal Velocity and Raptor, and I THINK it also had Biohazard, which is what I really wanted. He was like “oh”. Still didn’t get it. Within a couple years we were playing Doom deathmatches AdHoc over a telephone line.
@@txcrix9236 Fury 3 might be my all time favorite pc game honestly... i still remember playing the demo when i was a child it came on a windows 98 cd haha
@@atifarshad7624 It definitely is better than Quake 1 (Tech Demo and nothing more, considering the advances the build engine FPS' made, Quake being on the same design level as Doom was in 1994 was lame) and Quake 2 (which is probably the most overrated FPS ever)
@@ShadowAngel606 Quake 1? I can definitely understand that. The dark blocky graphics aged kinda poorly, the enemies look stupid with their pre-rendered sprites and most levels can be boring. But Quake 2 sure as hell ain't overrated, it's still great fun today.
It's an interesting inversion on the genre - Instead of one ball being passed back and forth, you have an inventory of different varieties of one-time-use balls you can send out. And instead of trying get the ball past your enemy, the goal is to have as many as possible come into contact with them (while avoiding the balls they send out). It's a novel take on a genre that was in danger of going stale
I wish I could have been there to see John Carmack hear about texture mapping for the first time (probably one of, if not the most important technical leaps in 3D game design), only to pause for a few moments to ponder this concept and then say: "I can do that" And then do it on a scale that is still astonishing to this day.
I've had those "ah, ha!" moments... wish I had half of Carmack's drive and ability to bring them to fruition.
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I don't think he heard about texture mapping for the first time then, it was already a thing in computer graphics for a long time. Rather it was probably the first time he heard someone say they are going to do it on commodity hardware in real time (in a game). Compare to how ray tracing has been around for over half a century in computer graphics, but is only now becoming feasible to do in games in real time.
@ The Demoscene has been doing real-time raytracing since 1995. Transgression 2 by MFX from 1996 being a good early example. Heaven 7 by Exceed from 2000 ups the capabilities. Still Sucking Nature by Federation Against Nature from 2003 looks better than games of the era and showcases environments that wouldn't be out of place in one with system requirements of just a Pentium II with 128MB of memory. Well, okay, it _has_ fallen out of favour in recent years, due to ray-marching of signed distance fields catching on, as it's a hell of a lot easier to make organic stuff with it than raytracing or rasterised polygons.
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@@Roxor128 Yes. The demoscene does cool stuff, but it's also not quite the same as what you can achieve in a playable game.
IIRC Carmack was inspired by news that Ultima Underworld was going to have texture mapping, which led him to realize that he could do it much more efficiently, albeit in a limited way.
Doom doesn't require you to kill enemies aside from boss fights (which we could say, they count as 'special levels'). It's just about getting from point A to point B, maybe looking for a couple of keys. It's a walking simulator, with obstacles. An interactive walking simulator, if you might.
@@YayaFeiLong Funny you mention it, I was going to write it as "Wheelchair simulator, but in Mars/Hell", since, because you can't jump, the idea of Doomguy being on a wheelchair has been a running gag ("running" gag, lmao) for decades.
Its crazy that TF2's production looked like that Holy crap the article is from 1999 and the expected release was SUMMER. It took over 7 years to release from that point!
@@burnthompson286 I'm not certain but I assume the article was about TF Classic, which may have been called TF2 before release. TFC released April '97 and would've been the sequel to the original Quake mod.
@@jacobspadt2567 In the bottom left it says that TF2 is scheduled to release just before Quake 3, which was released (and announced I think?) in 1999! And also it definitely looks like early TF2's more realistic theming.
I gotta say, when I first saw the title of this vid, I immediately thought "dungeon crawler". To me it seems like Doom gameplay focuses equally on shooting and movement, especially navigating the often maze-like levels. Evidenced by the fact that you dont strictly need to kill every monster to advance to the next level. Thanks for the great vid as always!
Even the score at the end of the level is decided by the number of enemies killed, power ups used and secrets discovered. Each level was really a unique dungeon to explore
Dungeon crawler is a pretty solid one, actually. I would have called it a first-person action game, but this feels like a natural description for the time. It certainly seems like a more sincere attempt at defining Doom's genre than to call it an action RPG.
I think people often put too much emphasis on how much combat made up Doom. It was big yes but like you said the exploration was just as much. I genuinely can't object to calling Doom a dungeon crawler.
Levels with dense enemy placement definitely become "first person shmups" or "first person bullet hell" as you weave between projectiles. But recall that Sandy Peterson designed levels with D&D consciously in his mind. Which he mentions in almost every interview he's given.
In Italy we simply referred to every game with a lot of shooting involved as "sparatutto", literally "shooteverything" being there fps, side scrolling shooters or whatever. i don't remember when the thing stopped, but i'm pretty sure it lasted at least well into psx era
FPS is a modern classification, though, so you're applying that label retroactively. I haven't watched, but I imagine the video will be about what genre it was considered back then.
@@LyaksandraB Genre names are always retroactively applied to games, as a genre only exists when there are multiple games that have similarities. You can't have a genre with just one game in it. So in the beginning Doom was just Doom, but as the genre started to exist it fell into the newly created FPS genere.
we still use the term rogue like and rogue lite - and no we even have a game calling itself Souls-lite, so... but anyway, Souls like is not a genre, its a sub genre of 3rd person action game OR perhaps of aRPG.
After more than a decade since release people still can't even clearly define what a "souls-like" is. It's a fake genre. I can define other genres easily "Roguelike" has permadeath and procgen. "Metroidvania" has a semi-open world with new areas unlocked through permanent powerups But no one can give a solid definition of "souls-like" which doesn't get broken by fromsoft's own games.
I remember way back, before Quake, I used to call what we now call FPS, shoot-em-ups. Anytime I searched that genre, I got top-down shooters. Never understood this. Back at this time, the term 'corridor shooter' was what we call Doom-like games. FPS feels like it took hold around the time Half-Life came out.
Yup. All I wanted in the mid 90's were FPS games. "Shooter" was about all I knew to try to find them. All I got were top down and 12 year old me saw those as old hat.
IIRC, shoot em ups are often called shmups now for reasons I don't really get. And corridor shooters came along more recently than FPS because there wasn't a need for the term until there started to be arena shooters that had a bunch of large areas doing the bullet hell equivalent from shoot em ups.
Carmack was kinda crazy with it. Like, he just hears some term from Romero and casually goes with it. "Texture mapping? ...yeah, I can do that." Gigachad behavior
Knowing what I know about him, he was probably already investigating texture mapping and thought it was cool and came up with a novel way of doing it that was 40% more efficient, so he went ahead and whipped up a demo on Friday from 6:00 PM until 3 the next morning.
I'm on the hospital treating what I believe and hope is a minor infection, and seeing this pop up on my recommendations brightened my day immensely. Also, I loved the use of the "Suspense" theme, it was a highlight on the previous Doom video, and didn't disappoint here either. Finally, "Doom is an action RPG". This is the evilest thing I've ever seen in a while, I loved it!
I played the original games after the 2016 revival, and all I could think was, "People really do not talk enough about how much dungeon crawler DNA is in these games."
Absolutely, just like Diablo 1 was originally going to be a turn based Rogue like. Dungeons and Dragons and Rogue contributed a lot to both of these foundational titles. Also, if you want it to feel even more like a dungeon crawler, load to each level with cheats or intentionally die and respawn; you'll start each level just liley you started the first, with a pistol and fifty rounds of ammo. Then each level becomes a puzzle, as you try to rebuild your arsenal and defeat or avoid enemies without the benefit of previous levels' surplus supplies.
@@madjackmadjackaka pistol start; iirc they made every level with that in mind too. Hmm... So what you're saying is Doom... is a puzzle game. Brilliant!
To me Doom is fundamentally a dungeon crawler with guns (that is also an FPS in that it has a first person camera and focuses on shooting); the dungeon crawler aspect is something that seems missing in newer FPS games I've played (replaced by over-complicated controls to support more actions than needed) -- which is why I loved Doom and Hexen, but don't really like modern FPS, and the first "real" game I made was a Doom clone at its core a billed as a "dungeon crawler with guns." I like first person dungeon crawlers, not shooters per se.
What you have me wondering, now, is if someone could make a dynamic dungeon crawler using the Doom Engine. Now, I'll admit I've been playing a lot of Deep Rock Galactic and that game has been on my mind a lot, and a lot of what that game is doing is what I'd like to see, just maybe for the dungeon crawler genre instead of the space dwarven fantasy genre.
only works if nobody questions Gauntlet as an RPG, when it's mostly based on mazes & shooting, truely inspired by RPGs, like Druaga, but Doom is evidently molded from catacomb 3D evidently molded after catacomb, which is drawn frow gauntlet, but gauntlet has more to do with shooting in mazes than dungeon master is
@Arnathor4582 Doom is an Action Roguelike. Not to be confused with the Doom roguelike "D**m, the Roguelike" aka "DRL" and "DoomRL", it's spiritual successor "Jupiter Hell", or the roguelike Doom mod "Doom Infinite".
Carmack is the father of modern gaming. His work on the quake engine, that instead of selling he open sourced, inspired every modern engine to this day. There is still code from the quake engine in unity, source and even unreal engine to this very day. He redefined gaming so many times and never did it for profit, but for his prolific love of games and game development.
Well, it wasn't open-source from the very beginning, and he's doing quite well financially, but you have a great point. He had a "higher calling" in a way.
In addition to what you two said, people absolutely call Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne "Soulsborne" games. (Even if I don't because they're just action RPGs)
@@LonelySpaceDetective Tbh I dislike calling games ARPG because it means too many things these days. Feels like anything is an ARPG. Soulsborne actually is a lot more specific.
@@WhiteZet1 Diablo (1996) is an ARPG in the purest sense, that was born as a D&D-style campaign that originally was going to be turn-based, but during development they found it doing 20 turns-per-second in the background gave it a responsive real-time gameplay with an addictive gameplay loop. This spawned a franchise that's now 28 years old with competitors in the Torchlight series and Path of Exile, both of which were worked on by ex-Blizzard North devs that made the original Diablo, Diablo II (2000) & Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (2001), that left the company during the development hell of Diablo III (2012).
@@AkumaNoKuroi Yeah but some ppl call Bloodborne/Dark Souls games ARPG. As well as the DMC series. And Dragon Age Inquisition. It's lost all meaning in my eyes, as helpful as calling your game an rpg.
Talk about a blast from the past. I'm in my 40's now, and this reminded me that very early on, people would use 'FPS' to mean "First-Person Shoot-'em-up". We even (briefly) said 'TDS' for "Top-Down Shoot-'em-up". Thanks Ahoy, for the memories ;)
I think a lot of this depends on how into gaming mags people were because it wasn't until a few years later than the internet became common enough to shape the way that the terms are used in any significant way.
In France we called them 'Doom like' and it took longer for FPS to 'win' (and the fact it's not translated like STR for RTS is a good indicator of that).
Just wanted to take a second to recognize the effort you put into the visual style of this episode with the very 90's styled backgrounds and stickers and whatnot. Love seeing creators mix it up and get creative with the window-dressing :)
The reference to 64 Magazine at 1:56 calling doom a “First person shoot’em up” was referring to Doom 64 from 1997, after the genre title was already defined
the whole first half and the related part in the second half are all just a time capsule of how video game journalism has always been the lowest form of journalism. they were trying to fill pages and paid by the word, and long after saying "first sight" twice before calling Descent a DOOM clone they were still hyping the next thing as Halo killers.
I would add to the Action RPG signs that, while the setting is futuristic, the enemies are demons, the domain of fantasy for the most part. I also would add that, in germany, when the genre emerged we called them "Ego-Shooters". I haven't followed german gaming press in over a decade, so it'd be interesting to see if/when that term died
@@DanArnets1492 A fact that went over most German mainstream medias heads in the early 2000s when they were all in hysteria over "killer games". They claimed the "ego" in "ego shooter" stood for the egoistical power fantasy of killing other people, one that FPS games are allegedly teaching people.
@@n3rdy11 Remember when Doom and Mortal Kombat were seemingly public enemy nr. 1? The good old days of kids getting into serious trouble for making quake maps of their schools. The hysteria was real. And the BPJS were my mortal enemies.
I thought Shadowcaster was a game I made up in a dream back in the 90s, because I remember playing it at a friend's place (His was the only computer that would play it) and enjoying it thoroughly. I was not sure if that memory was real... Literally nobody I know had heard about it, let alone played it.
I think we're going through a similar situation right now with "souls-like" I wonder if the genre will gain a name of its own or will follow the path of Rogue.
I think there's a fair chance "Soulslike" will stick with "soulsborne" being the broad term for Fromsoft games in that category. though who knows, maybe "soulsborne" will stick across the board like metroidvania did
For me those are "brutal action RPGs" · They're really violent and hard · There's not much time to think when things are going down · There's plenty of role-playing as you can choose classes and such
Soulslike is a confusing genre. The main innovation and characteristic present in all of the Sousborne-ring games is the introduction of multiplayer elements to what would be otherwise a singleplayer game, such as invasions and messages, however games like Noby Noby Boy and Death Stranding also feature these mechanics and are not referred to as soulslike. The other descriptor for Dark Souls is the merger of action RPG and Metroidvania. At what point to genres turn from game descriptor to marketing gimmick?
given roguelike stuck and metroidvania stuck id put money on soulslike sticking too, especially since with soulslikes I feel like if you stray too much from the souls influence you've just made an action rpg
What I love about this conclusion is that the influence is seen not just in the mechanics, but also in the environments and the enemies themselves. It's practically painted all over the walls...at least, it is after Doomguy is finished making paste out of everybody.
I don’t know if it’s a conscious choice or a limitation of those early 3D engines, but it’s interesting how all the early FPSs are essentially dungeon crawls with guns.
I would dare say that this issue also plagues the Dark Souls trilogy. What defines Dark Souls, and what is a "Souls-like"? High difficulty with high rewards? Berserk inspired visuals? Dodge-rolling? Intricate story telling? Character creation? I know there are videos debunking this, but I still feel that the issue persists. It would seem that as games were compared to Doom as Doom-clones, so to shall other games be compared to a vastly more popular game that preceeded it in it's genre(s).
Soulslikes are pretty much uniformly defined by weighty combat with a stamina system, checkpoints you have to explicitly activate, monsters that can kill you as quickly as you can kill them, and typically very hostile location design with either traps or malicious (read: mean) enemy placement. Also very common is a general dour moodiness to the world that's either in its waning days, darkest days, or in days attempting to rebuild. Not always (Slay the Minotaur is weird) but common.
@@ThePageofCups Also very common is losing all or most of a particular resource (that usually functions as money) whenever you die, which is how games like Hollow Knight get considered to be vaguely soulslike themselves. (The atmosphere also helps.)
All genre classifications are inherently imperfect, but I think rather than dividing shooting games into first-person and third-person, a more useful standard is the nature of the gameplay mechanics and narrative. Doom is predominantly an Action Shooter. Mass Effect is a Roleplaying Shooter. You can have Stealth Shooters, Adventure Shooters, Casual, Puzzle, and so forth. A game like Deus Ex would fit well into multiple categories.
What's really interesting is the lack of description of Doom as a horror shooter. While very fast paced once you start always running, there is a consistent theme of hell, demons, and dread. The skill ceiling was unknown at the time, and speedrun history will show that
in reality it doesnt matter at all and arguing about it is pointless because the only reason the classifications exist is to give people some guidance on whether its a type of game that would appeal to them
I'd probably go with something along the lines of "corridor shooter" as opposed to "arena shooter" because you're not locked into rooms with tons of monsters with relatively few in between. There are definitely rooms with a large number of enemies, but you're not typically locked in with them the way you would with a arena shooter.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade That, and corridor shooter is more along the lines of how Gauntlet plays as well. Though Doom's faster paced, more like an arena shooter like Smash TV. Or well, it could be if it bothered to force players to deal with small hordes instead of letting them retreat everywhere. Yeah the only real flaw is calling Gauntlet an RPG. You don't deal with stat management in any western sense and your only role play in that game is who you pick at the start. There's no meaningful character or stat progression. What's funny is there IS such a progression in Doom- in the weapons you pick up along the way.
What Doom is missing as an RPG is character skill abstracted away from player skill; you can't put more points into "don't miss with shotgun". Character skill as an abstraction is what makes a RPG; you can play as a skilled swordsman or wise wizard without having to know the difference between Ox Guard and Plow Guard or being able to recite the seven metals.
It's possible to do a very minimal amount of role-playing in Doom. You can "roleplay" as a Barbarian by deciding to go through it melee only, or as a pacifist by killing only when necessary, but yeah - you're absolutely correct from a modern understanding of the genres and the idea of character abstraction.
So essentially, an FPS is a 3D action RPG without the character skills? I'm sure there are quite a few FPSes that just changed their genre to 3D action RPG...
i love seeing what people call a thing before it becomes truly coined like, before "conlang" was coined, people sometimes called them "fantasy languages", "planned lanuage" and "ideal language" to name a few i am exceptionally curious what the new name is going to be for the "souls like" genre, cuz i know we wont stick we that considering we have the ability to name it whatever we want
The roguelike term is older than millions of people playing games now, I don't think it can change without it becoming too descriptive. I also think soulslike will stick around because we don't have the Strife of dark souls yet, every game is still closely following fromsoft's formula.
yeah, reminded me of the labeling of new music genres. Like, what did people call Black Sabbath before the term "heavy metal" was coined? Psychedelic rock? Hard rock? Overdriven-guitar-based technical blues?
0:33 the shot pierced through the zombie hitting the barrel behind it, which exploded gibbing the other zombie beside the barrel in a very satisfying manner... that's some of Doom's magic
It’s actually interesting to analyse that if you consider the difference of gameplay in Doom 1993 and Doom 2016, it mostly boils down to added RPG elements.
Also the original doom is darker and not rip and tear I'm a bad ass. You actually get your ass kicked in it. Even though you guys have turned it into that.
Action RPG that defined a genre, spawned clones, inspired developers, and became the main point of comparison for games no matter how loosely they resembled it? Was Doom the Dark Souls of the 90s?
Yes, Darks Souls was inspired by Demon Souls, that was inspired by King's Field, that was inspired by Ultima Underworld, that was inspired by Ultima, that was inspired by Akalabeth, that was inspired by Oubliette, that was inspired by DND (not to be mixed with dnd), Doom is the Dark Souls of 90's, same lineage.
Well, the id Software gang were indeed playing a lot of DnD while developing Doom, and even the inspiration of the Cacodemons came from the cover of a DnD book... :D
I am immediately reminded of a single panel from Penny Arcade's June 11th, 2001 comic (which capped a series of 4 strips starting June 4th, decrying the state of gaming at the time). "This is more of a mid-to-late 80s platformer, with... Yes, I believe there's a hint of sim." "Yes, sim. Quite right. Garcon! More genres!"
I love the angle of this video. Understanding the evolving general consensus of the time and the failed or forgotten ones really paints a picture of where things were at. This is an excellent way to convey history and the feeling of living through it. I don't think things are covered in this way nearly enough. Brilliant work.
Check out Jeremy Parish's channel for about 10 years worth of content of looking at games in the context of their own time. He focuses mostly on 80s consoles, but in his search to "understand" the NES and Game Boy he has gone through many other more obscure (mostly Japanese) consoles over the years. If you're interested in game history that focuses on understanding games from a consumer perspective, he can't be beat.
Come to think of it, EVERY game is some sort of an RPG: - HalfLife? - you take on the role of Gordon Freeman - Quake? - you are now a Ranger - Railroad Tycoon II? - you are now the Fat Controller...
Its something I noticed in the behaviour of certain players. Taking on the ROLE of the character you inhabit. Its most noticable when you see people playing and kinda going "along" with the script. I distinctly remember watching a friend play HL2 and when he was in a conversation with Kleiner in the chapter 'Red Letter Day', he'd actually nod his head to one of Kleiner's questions. I asked him about this and he plainly told me "Well, he's my friend and he just asked me a question. It'd be rude not to answer" Its a rather fascinating part of player psychology and immersion
honestly why I think the RPG label is a bad descriptor, it can technically be applied to all games, but it got applied to games like elder scrolls and ultima, or jrpgs like dragonquest and final fantasy, I imagine because of dnd role playing connotations, though I could be wrong about that when applied to the jrpg side, either way, it's really not that good at conveying what the game will be like if you don't know what games it applies to already, which kind of defeats the purpose of a descriptor
Surprisingly, I've actually always thought that, but instead of RPG I'd use the term Dungeon-Crawler, since I think that's a more appropriate genre that applies to the games you label as RPGs in the video, and was also a very common label that was used at the time. Doom definitely shares a LOT of DNA with those games, so I do think a more "academically correct" way of referring to Doom genre-wise in 1993 would've been "Action Dungeon-Crawler".
Yeah, sure, but that's the endpoint of collective consensus. Surely there were more labels along the way, and we should put special consideration on the ones the devs thought up. I mean, they made the damn thing.
@@LyaksandraB you don't need collective consensus to have been blown away by what doom was and what it offered in 93. I didn't need anyone to tell me this was something else entirely
@@nuberifficthe set up for die hard can’t happen without the Christmas party and coming to CA from NY for the holidays. Plus the large amount of Christmas music, and they say Christmas more than home alone. If die hard just takes place during Christmas than the same applies to home alone
Per the DOOM (SNES) Manual, Page 07: "The game play for DOOM™ is quite simple. This is not a cumbersome role-playing game, but an action-oriented slugathon! Also, you don't need super-human reflexes to win - using your wits is IMPORTANT. To escape DOOM™, you need both brains AND the killer instinct."
Kinda reminds me of how in the 2000's, every keyboard phone was a "Sidekick" and every smartphone was a "Blackberry Clone", and in the late 2000's to early 2010's, every all-touchscreen smartphone was an "iPhone clone", and every tablet was an "iPad".
This Unihertz Titan and older Key 2 pales to the functionality of the Sidekick. I still miss it and these keyboard phones are great for IT work to not lug a laptop around.
So then I suppose MIDI Maze / Faceball would be the first "pure" FPS without any RPG elements. That said, I've never been sold on the idea that Gauntlet is an RPG. It's more a fantasy-themed shmup in a maze. And there's precedent for that, Konami's Tutankham. But Gauntlet's complete lack of character-building - beyond putting in quarters to add food - is why I'd hesitate to call it an RPG. (And same for Doom.) If you say I'm "role-playing" as an Elf in Gauntlet, then you might as well also say I'm role-playing as a Vic Viper in Gradius. Hell, Gradius actually has more character-building than Gauntlet, through its upgrade system. So therefore, Gradius is also an RPG. 😁
I've heard some call old FPS games are called Boomer Shooters, but I like calling them Wolfendooms, similar to the genre "Metroidvania" (I dunno, it sounds cool to me)
Boomer shooters should be called quakers by that logic, as they have more in common with quake (fast move speed, quirky physics, movement tech, etc) than doom
Boomer shooter is an utterly dumb name. Carmack, Romero et al were not boomers, and neither were nearly all of the people playing them, even back then.
I always get so excited when I see a new Ahoy video. Amazing voice, highly educational, and captivating scripts have had me coming back for many years and will for as long as they are uploaded.
At 5:35 one can see what TF2 was initially sketched to be before being completely redesigned to what we know and love it as, a nice glimpse into history and a reminder how creative genius often comes during the process.
It's very nice to see the pivot towards a steady(ish) stream of starter content in addition to the masterfully produced documentaries I pay for. Thanks for amazing content, as always!
I guess the idea of Doom being called an RPG makes Doomguy originally being a blank slate kinda funny. I wonder what it'd be like if Doom ever had a character creator or even made Doomguy purely armored, like way before 2016 came up with the Doomslayer.
Except real documentaries are taken up mostly by talking head interviews with progressing "revelations and reactions" as well as the documenter talking in person about their opinion. A lot more fluff for entertainment purposes. Ahoy is far more streamlined and artistically stylised.
@@cattysplatYou're looking at real cash-grab documentaries. I'm talking moreso "love letter" documentaries like the ones NoClip make about video games, or bigger Video Essays like Liam Triforce makes, or heck, I remember this one that Redbull made very recently for CS:GO. I LOVE those kinds of interviews where u just let the subject of the interview build the narrative for you.
"Computer Gaming World described it as an action game with a first-person 3d environment." So basically, just a roundabout way of saying "first person shooter" before we had that name for it.
yeah i like how in all the examples cited, it's clear we were always pointed in the direction of the name "fps" and just slowly got nudged into it over time.
I like the evolution of "3d first person perspective shoot em up" into "first person shooter/fps". We know it's 3d, we know what it means with being in first person, and we know that we have to shoot things
- "What genre is Doom?" - "The genre is Doom, obviously!" - "But didn't you just make up Doom?" - "Yes." - "So how do we know what genre it is?" - "The genre is Doom, obviously!" - "But didn't you just make up Doom?" ...
It feels weird to read that title then stop to give the question some thought prior to watching the video, and as soon as I start watching it I feel as though Ahoy sort of starts filling out the blanks of what I may have had in mind or perceived of the question and it's oddly satisfying to watch unfold.
I feel an RPG requires player stat based progression to actually count as an RPG. However, “role-playing game” is such a non-specific term and you can basically call any game a “role-playing game.” However, I have never seen any stat-based progression game not get called an RPG, and any game without it usually just gets labelled an adventure series (ex: the Zelda games)
@@diydylana3151 Idk, ruthlessly genociding innocent civilians who can't fight back or defend themselves with your own two feet and large cranium is a special kind of brutal. Uh...I mean..those are totally just bricks and not people turned into bricks..
The first actual FPS (at least the first I know of) is Midi Maze, released in 1987 on the Atari ST and later ported to other platforms under a different name (Powerball 2000)
I've always joked about how everything is a role-playing game, and used Half-Life as a good example. And now it turns out, thanks to this video, that I have a source I can reference to say "see, Half-Life is an RPG!"
This kind of deep analysis should wake every artist and enthusiast to not be too confined. Try all sorts of genre mashups to make cohesive and fun game experiences.
Good to hear we stopped using “Doom Clone” to describe every game with a first person perspective and a gun! Now we can call it better things, such as a “souls-like”. /s
But then what genre was a Metroid? (yes, it was a 2D platformer game, but it may cause similar discussion as Doom. Same with Rogue and Rogue-likes. Same with Dark Souls. And prolly many more.)
I am so happy, that Ahoy is back!!! Nr1 favourite chanel ever. Ps I remember so much arguing woth friends that what is doom clone and what not. One who did not live through the days will never understand. Will never know what Doom did with our lives. To me another similar thing was only Dave Grush and Bob Lazar.
Kind of surprised light gun/ rail shooter games never came up. Seems like a much more apt comparison than shoot-em-ups, at least from the perspective angle.
Clearly Doom is a benchmark test for household appliances
Real
And portable appliances, such as phones, PDAs, calculators and pregnancy testers.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a couch somewhere that can run doom
Not just electronics, they've even played it on bacteria
Not that far from the truth.
Some mad lad programmed a very basic form of Doom on low-powered graphing calculators as a hobby/joke.
"Doom is an action RPG" is a phrase that deals 2d6 psychic damage
Becouse is true.
technically true for the old Java mobile "ports".
@@germtm. Man i remember playingg the DooM RPG on my flip phone in middle school
I wonder if it haves 16 times the detail
If you want a good Doom RPG, DoomRL (Doom Roguelike) is a good start
Fun fact: back in the day, Apogee distributors had what they called a “Shoot-em-up Collection” that I wanted Dad to get me. Immediately he got angry and said “I’m not buying you shooter games.” And I had to go like no, Dad, it’s stuff like Terminal Velocity and Raptor, and I THINK it also had Biohazard, which is what I really wanted. He was like “oh”. Still didn’t get it. Within a couple years we were playing Doom deathmatches AdHoc over a telephone line.
Oh man... Terminal Velocity and Raptor were awesome.
@@Yotarian TV was my jam, I loved that music, Fury3 was sick too
Raptor is on Steam these days! I love that game still.
@@ocha-timeI loved Fury 3! New Kroy and it's soundtrack will always be my favorite.
@@txcrix9236 Fury 3 might be my all time favorite pc game honestly... i still remember playing the demo when i was a child it came on a windows 98 cd haha
"I will be taking no questions."
Now that's a power move.
It's how a troll runs away before anyone points out Gauntlet isn't any kind of RPG.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633Ahoy woke up and decided to use his skills for mild evil. I respect that.
Chad
If you want to ask him about it, wait until the next video. We're back in the play by mail era with Ahoy
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 >ahoy >troll
lol
"Daikatana was a Quake killer."
Now comes the part where we throw our heads back and laugh.
Daikatana was a Daikatana killer
Daikatana got pretty good with the latest fan patches.
@@SosumiInctrue. It did become decent, but still nowhere near Quake killer.
@@atifarshad7624 It definitely is better than Quake 1 (Tech Demo and nothing more, considering the advances the build engine FPS' made, Quake being on the same design level as Doom was in 1994 was lame) and Quake 2 (which is probably the most overrated FPS ever)
@@ShadowAngel606 Quake 1? I can definitely understand that. The dark blocky graphics aged kinda poorly, the enemies look stupid with their pre-rendered sprites and most levels can be boring. But Quake 2 sure as hell ain't overrated, it's still great fun today.
3:03 "But there's a bit of a problem in describing broad categories of games with the name of another."
Dark Souls: 👀
SoulsBourne, anybody? XD
rogue too
Action RPG. Or it would be, if it were released in the 80s.
roguelike still being a genre name to this day (even spawned its own spinoff genre: roguelite)
metroidvanias:
I'm so glad that you didn't find an angle to categorize it as a Pong clone.
Missed opportunity. Now he's going to have to re-make the entire video from scratch.
It's an interesting inversion on the genre - Instead of one ball being passed back and forth, you have an inventory of different varieties of one-time-use balls you can send out. And instead of trying get the ball past your enemy, the goal is to have as many as possible come into contact with them (while avoiding the balls they send out). It's a novel take on a genre that was in danger of going stale
It is pong just the baddies are really bad at catching the ball, admittedly it is a very fast and painful ball :)
@@coriander_sunI like how they still managed to capture the original spirit of pong despite the inversion!
Pong killer!
I wish I could have been there to see John Carmack hear about texture mapping for the first time (probably one of, if not the most important technical leaps in 3D game design), only to pause for a few moments to ponder this concept and then say:
"I can do that"
And then do it on a scale that is still astonishing to this day.
I've had those "ah, ha!" moments... wish I had half of Carmack's drive and ability to bring them to fruition.
I don't think he heard about texture mapping for the first time then, it was already a thing in computer graphics for a long time. Rather it was probably the first time he heard someone say they are going to do it on commodity hardware in real time (in a game).
Compare to how ray tracing has been around for over half a century in computer graphics, but is only now becoming feasible to do in games in real time.
@ The Demoscene has been doing real-time raytracing since 1995. Transgression 2 by MFX from 1996 being a good early example. Heaven 7 by Exceed from 2000 ups the capabilities. Still Sucking Nature by Federation Against Nature from 2003 looks better than games of the era and showcases environments that wouldn't be out of place in one with system requirements of just a Pentium II with 128MB of memory.
Well, okay, it _has_ fallen out of favour in recent years, due to ray-marching of signed distance fields catching on, as it's a hell of a lot easier to make organic stuff with it than raytracing or rasterised polygons.
@@Roxor128 Yes. The demoscene does cool stuff, but it's also not quite the same as what you can achieve in a playable game.
IIRC Carmack was inspired by news that Ultima Underworld was going to have texture mapping, which led him to realize that he could do it much more efficiently, albeit in a limited way.
Doom doesn't require you to kill enemies aside from boss fights (which we could say, they count as 'special levels'). It's just about getting from point A to point B, maybe looking for a couple of keys.
It's a walking simulator, with obstacles. An interactive walking simulator, if you might.
So it was a failed attempt at inspiring physical fitness.
Well, more of a running-full-tilt simulator, really
@@YayaFeiLong Funny you mention it, I was going to write it as "Wheelchair simulator, but in Mars/Hell", since, because you can't jump, the idea of Doomguy being on a wheelchair has been a running gag ("running" gag, lmao) for decades.
it's a racing game
@@Burn_Angel I second this motion.
5:34 "Co-op's for girls? Not according to Team Fortress 2"
That is _certainly_ a headline.
Of all the headlines that came out that year, that is certainly one of them
Its crazy that TF2's production looked like that
Holy crap the article is from 1999 and the expected release was SUMMER. It took over 7 years to release from that point!
@@burnthompson286 I'm not certain but I assume the article was about TF Classic, which may have been called TF2 before release. TFC released April '97 and would've been the sequel to the original Quake mod.
@@jacobspadt2567 In the bottom left it says that TF2 is scheduled to release just before Quake 3, which was released (and announced I think?) in 1999! And also it definitely looks like early TF2's more realistic theming.
every TF2 player coming out as trans 20 years later:
I gotta say, when I first saw the title of this vid, I immediately thought "dungeon crawler". To me it seems like Doom gameplay focuses equally on shooting and movement, especially navigating the often maze-like levels. Evidenced by the fact that you dont strictly need to kill every monster to advance to the next level. Thanks for the great vid as always!
Even the score at the end of the level is decided by the number of enemies killed, power ups used and secrets discovered. Each level was really a unique dungeon to explore
Dungeon crawler is a pretty solid one, actually. I would have called it a first-person action game, but this feels like a natural description for the time. It certainly seems like a more sincere attempt at defining Doom's genre than to call it an action RPG.
I think people often put too much emphasis on how much combat made up Doom. It was big yes but like you said the exploration was just as much. I genuinely can't object to calling Doom a dungeon crawler.
Levels with dense enemy placement definitely become "first person shmups" or "first person bullet hell" as you weave between projectiles.
But recall that Sandy Peterson designed levels with D&D consciously in his mind. Which he mentions in almost every interview he's given.
In Italy we simply referred to every game with a lot of shooting involved as "sparatutto", literally "shooteverything" being there fps, side scrolling shooters or whatever. i don't remember when the thing stopped, but i'm pretty sure it lasted at least well into psx era
I like that term. I think I will use it
First I was like "Thats a stupid question. It's an FPS"
But then I noticed is an Ahoy video. And I became really intrigued.
Like the first video game
FPS is a modern classification, though, so you're applying that label retroactively. I haven't watched, but I imagine the video will be about what genre it was considered back then.
I wasn't ready for Doom to be classified under that genre.
Love your videos when they come off as a riddle to your viewers.
The video even opened with the exact same question lmao
@@LyaksandraB Genre names are always retroactively applied to games, as a genre only exists when there are multiple games that have similarities. You can't have a genre with just one game in it. So in the beginning Doom was just Doom, but as the genre started to exist it fell into the newly created FPS genere.
DOOM is an adventure game in which pointing and clicking elements on the screen is a key game mechanic.
A point-and-click adventure, if you will.
It makes more sense than his nonsense about arcade quarter munchers being RPGs because keys, smart bombs, and health packs dressed up in fantasy gear.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 why are you so passionate about his statement? Are you personally offended that gauntlet is obviously an rpg?
@@HeltonYan I don't think Gauntlet is "obviously" an RPG in any way, to be fair 😅
TF2 sniper main here, I will defend that point with you
*ba-dum-tss*
@@RutabagaSwe shhh i'm trying to piss off the other guy there
The phrase DOOM clone reminds me of the term souls-like. A game so successful that it inspired an entire new genre.
we still use the term rogue like and rogue lite - and no we even have a game calling itself Souls-lite, so... but anyway, Souls like is not a genre, its a sub genre of 3rd person action game OR perhaps of aRPG.
After more than a decade since release people still can't even clearly define what a "souls-like" is. It's a fake genre.
I can define other genres easily
"Roguelike" has permadeath and procgen.
"Metroidvania" has a semi-open world with new areas unlocked through permanent powerups
But no one can give a solid definition of "souls-like" which doesn't get broken by fromsoft's own games.
Souls-like, rogue-like, DOOM clone, quake killer, GTA clone…
We should just start calling everything a “____ clone” or “____-like”
@@xBINARYGODx We also still use the term Metroidvania.
@@wintersong2266 The best thing is these all have one thing in common:
They're action rpgs
I remember way back, before Quake, I used to call what we now call FPS, shoot-em-ups. Anytime I searched that genre, I got top-down shooters. Never understood this. Back at this time, the term 'corridor shooter' was what we call Doom-like games. FPS feels like it took hold around the time Half-Life came out.
Yup. All I wanted in the mid 90's were FPS games. "Shooter" was about all I knew to try to find them. All I got were top down and 12 year old me saw those as old hat.
And then Half-Life came out and ruined the genre.
i remember too when all these games were just called "shoot-em-ups"... we're old now. lol
IIRC, shoot em ups are often called shmups now for reasons I don't really get. And corridor shooters came along more recently than FPS because there wasn't a need for the term until there started to be arena shooters that had a bunch of large areas doing the bullet hell equivalent from shoot em ups.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade it's partly because you can't get a Teen rating for your video game if you have the words "shoot em" in your marketing.
Carmack was kinda crazy with it. Like, he just hears some term from Romero and casually goes with it.
"Texture mapping? ...yeah, I can do that." Gigachad behavior
I have high respect for Carmack. Guy can talk about anything for an hour and I just watch in awe. Interesting how efficient he is.
Carmack is as good, as Romero was proud.
You needed both of them to make Doom/Quake
Carmack the Code God
Knowing what I know about him, he was probably already investigating texture mapping and thought it was cool and came up with a novel way of doing it that was 40% more efficient, so he went ahead and whipped up a demo on Friday from 6:00 PM until 3 the next morning.
Benevolent hyper-intelligent architect of the post-singularity simulation we all live in, John Carmack was beast
I'm on the hospital treating what I believe and hope is a minor infection, and seeing this pop up on my recommendations brightened my day immensely.
Also, I loved the use of the "Suspense" theme, it was a highlight on the previous Doom video, and didn't disappoint here either.
Finally, "Doom is an action RPG". This is the evilest thing I've ever seen in a while, I loved it!
Get well soon
I played the original games after the 2016 revival, and all I could think was, "People really do not talk enough about how much dungeon crawler DNA is in these games."
Absolutely, just like Diablo 1 was originally going to be a turn based Rogue like. Dungeons and Dragons and Rogue contributed a lot to both of these foundational titles.
Also, if you want it to feel even more like a dungeon crawler, load to each level with cheats or intentionally die and respawn; you'll start each level just liley you started the first, with a pistol and fifty rounds of ammo. Then each level becomes a puzzle, as you try to rebuild your arsenal and defeat or avoid enemies without the benefit of previous levels' surplus supplies.
@@madjackmadjackaka pistol start; iirc they made every level with that in mind too.
Hmm... So what you're saying is Doom... is a puzzle game. Brilliant!
To me Doom is fundamentally a dungeon crawler with guns (that is also an FPS in that it has a first person camera and focuses on shooting); the dungeon crawler aspect is something that seems missing in newer FPS games I've played (replaced by over-complicated controls to support more actions than needed) -- which is why I loved Doom and Hexen, but don't really like modern FPS, and the first "real" game I made was a Doom clone at its core a billed as a "dungeon crawler with guns." I like first person dungeon crawlers, not shooters per se.
@@BlackJar72 Yeah, absolutely.
Have you tried Kings Field or Lunacid?
What you have me wondering, now, is if someone could make a dynamic dungeon crawler using the Doom Engine. Now, I'll admit I've been playing a lot of Deep Rock Galactic and that game has been on my mind a lot, and a lot of what that game is doing is what I'd like to see, just maybe for the dungeon crawler genre instead of the space dwarven fantasy genre.
"Thank you, I will be taking _no_ questions."
Perfection.
Ahoy's voice is getting more and more gritty with every upload, not a complaint, just an observation. Also the 90's inspired editing is top notch!
Ahoy is like the favorite uncle. You barely get to see him but you are always thinking about Him. When he shows up unexpectedly, you get excited!
I like how your pfp is of firefighters and EMTs but not cops
@@Pangloss6413as it should be
only works if nobody questions Gauntlet as an RPG, when it's mostly based on mazes & shooting, truely inspired by RPGs, like Druaga, but Doom is evidently molded from catacomb 3D evidently molded after catacomb, which is drawn frow gauntlet, but gauntlet has more to do with shooting in mazes than dungeon master is
I agree. Gauntlet is NOT an RPG. It has some RPG-like elements, but it's primarily an overhead shooter.
This is what I came to say even knowing the video is tongue in cheek.
@Arnathor4582 Doom is an Action Roguelike. Not to be confused with the Doom roguelike "D**m, the Roguelike" aka "DRL" and "DoomRL", it's spiritual successor "Jupiter Hell", or the roguelike Doom mod "Doom Infinite".
Your logic is actually extremely sound and this is really good presentation. Bravo! More straightforward than I expected, thank you.
WAKE UP BABE AHOY'S UPLOADING AGAIN
new kino just dropped
Kino @@user-03-gsa3
WE UP WE WATCHIN WE SITTING DOWN
@@user-03-gsa3 Tsoi lives!
So true 😂
Carmack is the father of modern gaming. His work on the quake engine, that instead of selling he open sourced, inspired every modern engine to this day. There is still code from the quake engine in unity, source and even unreal engine to this very day. He redefined gaming so many times and never did it for profit, but for his prolific love of games and game development.
Even Call of Duty is based on the Quake engine. Ever wondered why you go a little faster when you're pressed up against a wall in CoD? Quake code.
Well, it wasn't open-source from the very beginning, and he's doing quite well financially, but you have a great point. He had a "higher calling" in a way.
3:10 - Just realized we do indeed call rogue a roguelike. Also would be interesting to see Ahoy cover the topic of roguelikes/roguelites.
Just like we have a whole genre of games named after their similarities to the pivotal games Medroid & Castlevania - MetroidVanias! XD
In addition to what you two said, people absolutely call Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne "Soulsborne" games.
(Even if I don't because they're just action RPGs)
@@LonelySpaceDetective Tbh I dislike calling games ARPG because it means too many things these days. Feels like anything is an ARPG. Soulsborne actually is a lot more specific.
@@WhiteZet1 Diablo (1996) is an ARPG in the purest sense, that was born as a D&D-style campaign that originally was going to be turn-based, but during development they found it doing 20 turns-per-second in the background gave it a responsive real-time gameplay with an addictive gameplay loop.
This spawned a franchise that's now 28 years old with competitors in the Torchlight series and Path of Exile, both of which were worked on by ex-Blizzard North devs that made the original Diablo, Diablo II (2000) & Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (2001), that left the company during the development hell of Diablo III (2012).
@@AkumaNoKuroi Yeah but some ppl call Bloodborne/Dark Souls games ARPG. As well as the DMC series. And Dragon Age Inquisition. It's lost all meaning in my eyes, as helpful as calling your game an rpg.
Talk about a blast from the past. I'm in my 40's now, and this reminded me that very early on, people would use 'FPS' to mean "First-Person Shoot-'em-up". We even (briefly) said 'TDS' for "Top-Down Shoot-'em-up".
Thanks Ahoy, for the memories ;)
If you're playing a "Top-Down Shoot-em-up" shouldn't you close your eyes when killing something?
@@gentuxable yes, you have to wear your safety squints.
I think a lot of this depends on how into gaming mags people were because it wasn't until a few years later than the internet became common enough to shape the way that the terms are used in any significant way.
In France we called them 'Doom like' and it took longer for FPS to 'win' (and the fact it's not translated like STR for RTS is a good indicator of that).
We should honor the origins of the genre and start calling them "Wolfendooms"
@@adynat0n You're definitely going to get the furry community's attention with that one.
@@adynat0n Ahh, that follows the idea of "Soulslikes", or rather "Soulsbornes"
@@HappyBeezerStudios And Metroidvanias
@@adynat0n oh right. Metroid and Symphony of the night.
Just wanted to take a second to recognize the effort you put into the visual style of this episode with the very 90's styled backgrounds and stickers and whatnot. Love seeing creators mix it up and get creative with the window-dressing :)
The reference to 64 Magazine at 1:56 calling doom a “First person shoot’em up” was referring to Doom 64 from 1997, after the genre title was already defined
the whole first half and the related part in the second half are all just a time capsule of how video game journalism has always been the lowest form of journalism. they were trying to fill pages and paid by the word, and long after saying "first sight" twice before calling Descent a DOOM clone they were still hyping the next thing as Halo killers.
Should be a stickied comment honestly, Ahoy made an oopsie.
I would add to the Action RPG signs that, while the setting is futuristic, the enemies are demons, the domain of fantasy for the most part.
I also would add that, in germany, when the genre emerged we called them "Ego-Shooters". I haven't followed german gaming press in over a decade, so it'd be interesting to see if/when that term died
"Ego" just comes from the fact that it's on first-person, nothing else really
@@DanArnets1492 A fact that went over most German mainstream medias heads in the early 2000s when they were all in hysteria over "killer games".
They claimed the "ego" in "ego shooter" stood for the egoistical power fantasy of killing other people, one that FPS games are allegedly teaching people.
@@n3rdy11 Remember when Doom and Mortal Kombat were seemingly public enemy nr. 1? The good old days of kids getting into serious trouble for making quake maps of their schools. The hysteria was real. And the BPJS were my mortal enemies.
It's always a breath of fresh air when Ahoy returns to us. His breaks are always JUST long enough that I start to wonder if he's coming back.
I thought Shadowcaster was a game I made up in a dream back in the 90s, because I remember playing it at a friend's place (His was the only computer that would play it) and enjoying it thoroughly. I was not sure if that memory was real... Literally nobody I know had heard about it, let alone played it.
It's also one of the few Origin games from that era that, iirc, was never rereleased and isn't even on GOG.
@@jasonblalock4429Any idea why not?
I think we're going through a similar situation right now with "souls-like" I wonder if the genre will gain a name of its own or will follow the path of Rogue.
I think there's a fair chance "Soulslike" will stick with "soulsborne" being the broad term for Fromsoft games in that category. though who knows, maybe "soulsborne" will stick across the board like metroidvania did
For me those are "brutal action RPGs"
· They're really violent and hard
· There's not much time to think when things are going down
· There's plenty of role-playing as you can choose classes and such
Soulslike is a confusing genre. The main innovation and characteristic present in all of the Sousborne-ring games is the introduction of multiplayer elements to what would be otherwise a singleplayer game, such as invasions and messages, however games like Noby Noby Boy and Death Stranding also feature these mechanics and are not referred to as soulslike. The other descriptor for Dark Souls is the merger of action RPG and Metroidvania. At what point to genres turn from game descriptor to marketing gimmick?
Dark souls is definitely an ARPG, with heavy influence from action adventure games like Legend of Zelda, and Legacy of Kain.
given roguelike stuck and metroidvania stuck id put money on soulslike sticking too, especially since with soulslikes I feel like if you stray too much from the souls influence you've just made an action rpg
Glad to see Ahoy not taking a billion year hiatus again, I can’t handle the wait
What I love about this conclusion is that the influence is seen not just in the mechanics, but also in the environments and the enemies themselves. It's practically painted all over the walls...at least, it is after Doomguy is finished making paste out of everybody.
I don’t know if it’s a conscious choice or a limitation of those early 3D engines, but it’s interesting how all the early FPSs are essentially dungeon crawls with guns.
I would dare say that this issue also plagues the Dark Souls trilogy. What defines Dark Souls, and what is a "Souls-like"? High difficulty with high rewards? Berserk inspired visuals? Dodge-rolling? Intricate story telling? Character creation?
I know there are videos debunking this, but I still feel that the issue persists. It would seem that as games were compared to Doom as Doom-clones, so to shall other games be compared to a vastly more popular game that preceeded it in it's genre(s).
Consequences, everything being part of the world and permament save. Yep, that's all.
I like Yahtzee's term for it, which is a "recursive RPG"
Ah, but are Souls-like really like Dark Souls, or are they really Souldborne-like?
Soulslikes are pretty much uniformly defined by weighty combat with a stamina system, checkpoints you have to explicitly activate, monsters that can kill you as quickly as you can kill them, and typically very hostile location design with either traps or malicious (read: mean) enemy placement. Also very common is a general dour moodiness to the world that's either in its waning days, darkest days, or in days attempting to rebuild. Not always (Slay the Minotaur is weird) but common.
@@ThePageofCups Also very common is losing all or most of a particular resource (that usually functions as money) whenever you die, which is how games like Hollow Knight get considered to be vaguely soulslike themselves. (The atmosphere also helps.)
All genre classifications are inherently imperfect, but I think rather than dividing shooting games into first-person and third-person, a more useful standard is the nature of the gameplay mechanics and narrative.
Doom is predominantly an Action Shooter. Mass Effect is a Roleplaying Shooter. You can have Stealth Shooters, Adventure Shooters, Casual, Puzzle, and so forth.
A game like Deus Ex would fit well into multiple categories.
There’s also an overlap with “immersive sims” with games in the lineage like Dishonored, BioShock, Deus Ex, etc.
What's really interesting is the lack of description of Doom as a horror shooter. While very fast paced once you start always running, there is a consistent theme of hell, demons, and dread. The skill ceiling was unknown at the time, and speedrun history will show that
in reality it doesnt matter at all and arguing about it is pointless because the only reason the classifications exist is to give people some guidance on whether its a type of game that would appeal to them
I'd probably go with something along the lines of "corridor shooter" as opposed to "arena shooter" because you're not locked into rooms with tons of monsters with relatively few in between. There are definitely rooms with a large number of enemies, but you're not typically locked in with them the way you would with a arena shooter.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade That, and corridor shooter is more along the lines of how Gauntlet plays as well. Though Doom's faster paced, more like an arena shooter like Smash TV. Or well, it could be if it bothered to force players to deal with small hordes instead of letting them retreat everywhere.
Yeah the only real flaw is calling Gauntlet an RPG. You don't deal with stat management in any western sense and your only role play in that game is who you pick at the start. There's no meaningful character or stat progression. What's funny is there IS such a progression in Doom- in the weapons you pick up along the way.
What Doom is missing as an RPG is character skill abstracted away from player skill; you can't put more points into "don't miss with shotgun". Character skill as an abstraction is what makes a RPG; you can play as a skilled swordsman or wise wizard without having to know the difference between Ox Guard and Plow Guard or being able to recite the seven metals.
Witcher.
It's possible to do a very minimal amount of role-playing in Doom.
You can "roleplay" as a Barbarian by deciding to go through it melee only, or as a pacifist by killing only when necessary, but yeah - you're absolutely correct from a modern understanding of the genres and the idea of character abstraction.
@@ReverendTed Not all role plaing is based of what you want to do. Is about what you can do.
So essentially, an FPS is a 3D action RPG without the character skills? I'm sure there are quite a few FPSes that just changed their genre to 3D action RPG...
@@celeron55 Genre don't exists.
i love seeing what people call a thing before it becomes truly coined
like, before "conlang" was coined, people sometimes called them "fantasy languages", "planned lanuage" and "ideal language" to name a few
i am exceptionally curious what the new name is going to be for the "souls like" genre, cuz i know we wont stick we that considering we have the ability to name it whatever we want
At this stage, there are so many "Souls-likes" that the term may well stick around, similar to roguelike and rogue-lite.
The roguelike term is older than millions of people playing games now, I don't think it can change without it becoming too descriptive.
I also think soulslike will stick around because we don't have the Strife of dark souls yet, every game is still closely following fromsoft's formula.
yeah, reminded me of the labeling of new music genres. Like, what did people call Black Sabbath before the term "heavy metal" was coined? Psychedelic rock? Hard rock? Overdriven-guitar-based technical blues?
@@applehack97 To a lot of those bands that laid the foundation for metal, they would just say they're playing rock and roll
@@applehack97 hard rock, dark rock, yeah. But generally just rock unless pushed to specify
0:33 the shot pierced through the zombie hitting the barrel behind it, which exploded gibbing the other zombie beside the barrel in a very satisfying manner... that's some of Doom's magic
It’s actually interesting to analyse that if you consider the difference of gameplay in Doom 1993 and Doom 2016, it mostly boils down to added RPG elements.
and made by completely different people.
And closer to Quake gameplay.
Also the original doom is darker and not rip and tear I'm a bad ass. You actually get your ass kicked in it. Even though you guys have turned it into that.
@@itzhexen0and I thought I needed to get laid
@@itzhexen0sounds like a skill issue
So good to see you back and with doom content. So good.
13:10 I mean in episode 195 of Scott the Woz, Scott has a breakdown once he realizes all games are technically RPGs
triangle square circle upsidedown triangle is such a clever abstraction of AHOY
I am so overjoyed that you included the bibliography in the video description!!!
Action RPG that defined a genre, spawned clones, inspired developers, and became the main point of comparison for games no matter how loosely they resembled it? Was Doom the Dark Souls of the 90s?
Yes, Darks Souls was inspired by Demon Souls, that was inspired by King's Field, that was inspired by Ultima Underworld, that was inspired by Ultima, that was inspired by Akalabeth, that was inspired by Oubliette, that was inspired by DND (not to be mixed with dnd), Doom is the Dark Souls of 90's, same lineage.
@@diogofelix8626 not exactly what I meant, but that's an interesting factoid!
Well, the id Software gang were indeed playing a lot of DnD while developing Doom, and even the inspiration of the Cacodemons came from the cover of a DnD book... :D
Also the premis of doom having demons invade earth from hell comes from on of IDs dnd campaigns
ooooh yeah. 3rd edition of Spelljammer right?
The original idea for Quake was pretty much turning their DnD campaign into a videogame IIRC, before crunch forced them to turn Quake into what it is.
The source code reads a lot like how DnD battles are played out.
I am immediately reminded of a single panel from Penny Arcade's June 11th, 2001 comic (which capped a series of 4 strips starting June 4th, decrying the state of gaming at the time).
"This is more of a mid-to-late 80s platformer, with... Yes, I believe there's a hint of sim."
"Yes, sim. Quite right. Garcon! More genres!"
"Garcon means boy"
description of doom as "lightning fast" is 100% accruate - especially when you watch speedruns
definetly a shooter
I love the angle of this video. Understanding the evolving general consensus of the time and the failed or forgotten ones really paints a picture of where things were at. This is an excellent way to convey history and the feeling of living through it. I don't think things are covered in this way nearly enough. Brilliant work.
Check out Jeremy Parish's channel for about 10 years worth of content of looking at games in the context of their own time. He focuses mostly on 80s consoles, but in his search to "understand" the NES and Game Boy he has gone through many other more obscure (mostly Japanese) consoles over the years. If you're interested in game history that focuses on understanding games from a consumer perspective, he can't be beat.
@@ValkyrieTiara Thanks for the tip! I’ll check it out.
Come to think of it, EVERY game is some sort of an RPG:
- HalfLife? - you take on the role of Gordon Freeman
- Quake? - you are now a Ranger
- Railroad Tycoon II? - you are now the Fat Controller...
Its something I noticed in the behaviour of certain players. Taking on the ROLE of the character you inhabit.
Its most noticable when you see people playing and kinda going "along" with the script. I distinctly remember watching a friend play HL2 and when he was in a conversation with Kleiner in the chapter 'Red Letter Day', he'd actually nod his head to one of Kleiner's questions. I asked him about this and he plainly told me "Well, he's my friend and he just asked me a question. It'd be rude not to answer"
Its a rather fascinating part of player psychology and immersion
Convinced my friend, who only plays football manager games, that he was actually playing an RPG.
honestly why I think the RPG label is a bad descriptor, it can technically be applied to all games, but it got applied to games like elder scrolls and ultima, or jrpgs like dragonquest and final fantasy, I imagine because of dnd role playing connotations, though I could be wrong about that when applied to the jrpg side, either way, it's really not that good at conveying what the game will be like if you don't know what games it applies to already, which kind of defeats the purpose of a descriptor
Does that mean GTA is an RPG ?
@@versace6609 yeah sure why not
Surprisingly, I've actually always thought that, but instead of RPG I'd use the term Dungeon-Crawler, since I think that's a more appropriate genre that applies to the games you label as RPGs in the video, and was also a very common label that was used at the time. Doom definitely shares a LOT of DNA with those games, so I do think a more "academically correct" way of referring to Doom genre-wise in 1993 would've been "Action Dungeon-Crawler".
Doom. The genre is Doom.
If not, then why's the other game is called "Doom Clones"?
My first thought too haha
Yeah, sure, but that's the endpoint of collective consensus. Surely there were more labels along the way, and we should put special consideration on the ones the devs thought up. I mean, they made the damn thing.
@@LyaksandraB you don't need collective consensus to have been blown away by what doom was and what it offered in 93. I didn't need anyone to tell me this was something else entirely
@@LyaksandraBwell said, memes be memes but there's time for philosophising too.
Apart from @machinatingminotaur6285 he simply felt it in his bones
It's just like Die Hard. It's a Christmas story about a man trying to get back with his ex wife.
It's not a Christmas story, it just happens at Christmas
Die Hard is a Metroidvania. A man unlocks more parts of the tower by gathering more powerful weaponrym
@@RyuakiraX But is a metroivania with a Xmas setting!
Christmasvania.
@@nuberifficthe set up for die hard can’t happen without the Christmas party and coming to CA from NY for the holidays. Plus the large amount of Christmas music, and they say Christmas more than home alone. If die hard just takes place during Christmas than the same applies to home alone
If you boil it down to the essentials it's a hallmark movie
Per the DOOM (SNES) Manual, Page 07:
"The game play for DOOM™ is quite simple. This is not a cumbersome role-playing game, but an action-oriented slugathon! Also, you don't need super-human reflexes to win - using your wits is IMPORTANT. To escape DOOM™, you need both brains AND the killer instinct."
That's in the original PC manual as well.
Ahoy is a blessing every time he posts. Only LEMMiNO gets me more excited for documentary-style content, and that's a high bar.
Throw in David Firth and you have my 3 favourite YT channels 👌
@@purebaldness
I've not heard of them. What's their style of content?
@@DrakoWulf It's the creator of 'Salad Fingers' and many, many other works. It's an animation channel and not documentaries, to be fair.
@@purebaldness
Ah, a Newgrounds classic.
@@DrakoWulf LEMMiNO uploads a video one day after Ahoy lol
Kinda reminds me of how in the 2000's, every keyboard phone was a "Sidekick" and every smartphone was a "Blackberry Clone", and in the late 2000's to early 2010's, every all-touchscreen smartphone was an "iPhone clone", and every tablet was an "iPad".
Laptop was a "portable computer". Talking to people online was for "weirdos." You didn't browse or search the internet, you surfed.
This Unihertz Titan and older Key 2 pales to the functionality of the Sidekick. I still miss it and these keyboard phones are great for IT work to not lug a laptop around.
Didn't help seemingly every parent said you were playing Mario on your Nintendo... Even if you were on an XBOX 360 playing Halo
@@armorhide406You poor thing. How ever did you survive such neglect?
reminds me of at the time how people called the thing after the brand
So then I suppose MIDI Maze / Faceball would be the first "pure" FPS without any RPG elements.
That said, I've never been sold on the idea that Gauntlet is an RPG. It's more a fantasy-themed shmup in a maze. And there's precedent for that, Konami's Tutankham. But Gauntlet's complete lack of character-building - beyond putting in quarters to add food - is why I'd hesitate to call it an RPG. (And same for Doom.) If you say I'm "role-playing" as an Elf in Gauntlet, then you might as well also say I'm role-playing as a Vic Viper in Gradius. Hell, Gradius actually has more character-building than Gauntlet, through its upgrade system.
So therefore, Gradius is also an RPG. 😁
Doom: a game that would become it's own genre
Dude, i was thinking and commented the same thing!
Souls-like
Whats Doom? Its Doom.
I've heard some call old FPS games are called Boomer Shooters, but I like calling them Wolfendooms, similar to the genre "Metroidvania" (I dunno, it sounds cool to me)
Boomer shooters should be called quakers by that logic, as they have more in common with quake (fast move speed, quirky physics, movement tech, etc) than doom
Boomer shooter is an utterly dumb name. Carmack, Romero et al were not boomers, and neither were nearly all of the people playing them, even back then.
@@davidemelia6296nowadays, boomer is used as a term describing anyone of age so the name stuck
Can I interest anyone in a Xooter?
@@gibberishdump1610 they are not in a baby boom, most won't even have families, dumb ironic name
I always get so excited when I see a new Ahoy video. Amazing voice, highly educational, and captivating scripts have had me coming back for many years and will for as long as they are uploaded.
At 5:35 one can see what TF2 was initially sketched to be before being completely redesigned to what we know and love it as, a nice glimpse into history and a reminder how creative genius often comes during the process.
It's very nice to see the pivot towards a steady(ish) stream of starter content in addition to the masterfully produced documentaries I pay for. Thanks for amazing content, as always!
Documentaries you pay for? Does he have more documentaries locked behind a pay wall somewhere?
@@minecraftsteve2504 he might be a Patreon supporter
@@minecraftsteve2504 No, but Patrons get videos ~ 3 days earlier
How much do you pay? Would you consider yourself a pay pig?
Been away from the internet for about two months and when I come back there is two new Ahoy videos, what a treat.
Seeing Doom as an action RPG makes me rethink the gameplay experience of it. Always love how thought-provoking your videos are.
Doom is a dungeon crawler
Immediately connected my bluetooth for this one. So good to see ya again, Ahoy!
I guess the idea of Doom being called an RPG makes Doomguy originally being a blank slate kinda funny.
I wonder what it'd be like if Doom ever had a character creator or even made Doomguy purely armored, like way before 2016 came up with the Doomslayer.
- *Ahoy shows up*
- *States that Doom is a Action RPG*
- *Leaves with an explanation*
EDIT: edited due to popular demand
Gauntlet is an RPG?
A game with no permanent growth, and built on quarter munching sadism?
What a waste of everyone's time.
Ah I see that you watched the video
Bruh there's a whole 13 minutes serving an explanation, you can't miss it
@@brotherbrother2137 He was talking about himself. He left without listening to the explanation.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 RPG didn't mean what it means now, it means ROLE playing game, not level up simulator. You're playing a ROLE.
You should be earning millions making Hollywood documentaries. No hyperbole. You're fucking amazing mate.
Please know what you’re saying…
Except real documentaries are taken up mostly by talking head interviews with progressing "revelations and reactions" as well as the documenter talking in person about their opinion. A lot more fluff for entertainment purposes. Ahoy is far more streamlined and artistically stylised.
ewww hollywood
huge downgrade
@@cattysplatYou're looking at real cash-grab documentaries.
I'm talking moreso "love letter" documentaries like the ones NoClip make about video games, or bigger Video Essays like Liam Triforce makes, or heck, I remember this one that Redbull made very recently for CS:GO. I LOVE those kinds of interviews where u just let the subject of the interview build the narrative for you.
“Hollywood documentaries” ?!
Doom is a game in which roaming hallways and eliminating dangerous enemies is a key gameplay mechanic. Clearly, it is a Pac-Man-like.
"Computer Gaming World described it as an action game with a first-person 3d environment."
So basically, just a roundabout way of saying "first person shooter" before we had that name for it.
yeah i like how in all the examples cited, it's clear we were always pointed in the direction of the name "fps" and just slowly got nudged into it over time.
I like the evolution of "3d first person perspective shoot em up" into "first person shooter/fps". We know it's 3d, we know what it means with being in first person, and we know that we have to shoot things
only in a reality where action is synonymous with firearms.
@@TheJacklikesvideos Squares are still rectangles. Shooting is still action.
I don't know, naming the genre the game itself created sounds paradoxical
Like with Dark Souls and GTA.
Oh, what do you mean, *roguelikes*? How boring!
- "What genre is Doom?"
- "The genre is Doom, obviously!"
- "But didn't you just make up Doom?"
- "Yes."
- "So how do we know what genre it is?"
- "The genre is Doom, obviously!"
- "But didn't you just make up Doom?"
...
@@ikagura and total war
Sound reasonable to me. I mean Doom is Doom, you don't need a genre to label tetris or pong.
Surprise appearance by Charlie Brooker at 5:23, always forget he used to be a games journalist.
Loved this, always happy to see quality talk about the first Doom
It feels weird to read that title then stop to give the question some thought prior to watching the video, and as soon as I start watching it I feel as though Ahoy sort of starts filling out the blanks of what I may have had in mind or perceived of the question and it's oddly satisfying to watch unfold.
I feel an RPG requires player stat based progression to actually count as an RPG. However, “role-playing game” is such a non-specific term and you can basically call any game a “role-playing game.” However, I have never seen any stat-based progression game not get called an RPG, and any game without it usually just gets labelled an adventure series (ex: the Zelda games)
Well strictly speaking stat progression and equipment are present in and would make Minecraft an RPG.
@@BBP-OMO To be honest I haven’t played Minecraft in years and have no response to that. There was not EXP in the survival mode last time I played 💀
Ahoy dropping a video is like witnessing a shooting star and eclipse at the same time
It is in the "your enemies *WILL* die" genre
Super mario?
@@diydylana3151 Yes, the pink deamon!
@@diydylana3151 Idk, ruthlessly genociding innocent civilians who can't fight back or defend themselves with your own two feet and large cranium is a special kind of brutal. Uh...I mean..those are totally just bricks and not people turned into bricks..
4:34 Ironically, it seems that John Romero left id software feeling that Quake indeed being a doom clone was the true disrespect.
The first actual FPS (at least the first I know of) is Midi Maze, released in 1987 on the Atari ST and later ported to other platforms under a different name (Powerball 2000)
Oh, I think I played an online clone of that in the early 2000s.
Faceball. Powerball is a lottery game.
Today turned out to be a good day. AHOY posted.
You are right. And Diablo is a fantasy 2D shooter. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
Always good to hear from you.
RETURN OF THE KING
Hail to the king baby.
3 days ago?
@@ikagurayou mean months?
@@leaky4230 WJ is referring to the comment being 3 days old when the video came out 20 minutes ago.
@@ikagura Must be members' perks
There is no Ahoy like genre. There's just Ahoy's videos. Honestly nothing has topped your Polybius video
What a power move! "I will be taking no questions" and leaves the comments enabled.
I've always joked about how everything is a role-playing game, and used Half-Life as a good example. And now it turns out, thanks to this video, that I have a source I can reference to say "see, Half-Life is an RPG!"
This kind of deep analysis should wake every artist and enthusiast to not be too confined. Try all sorts of genre mashups to make cohesive and fun game experiences.
Doom is clearly one of the games ever made.
In the same way that FPS replaced the term 'Doomclone', I'm very interested to see if there's ever a replacement for the term ''Soulslike.
There is still no replacement for the term Roguelike after the decades of Rogue clones
Amazing video. I love these deep-dives into the taxonomy of gaming.
Good to hear we stopped using “Doom Clone” to describe every game with a first person perspective and a gun! Now we can call it better things, such as a “souls-like”. /s
With automapping, health drops, a variety of weapons, armours, powers and an emphasis on exploration, you might even consider Doom as a Metroidvania?
But then what genre was a Metroid? (yes, it was a 2D platformer game, but it may cause similar discussion as Doom. Same with Rogue and Rogue-likes. Same with Dark Souls. And prolly many more.)
I was gonna write that Doom lacks powerups that aid traversal...but rad suit is a thing. Doom is a Metroidvania.
It's separated into levels rather than being a single big world. Now Metal Gear 1-2 and Solid 1-3, those are Metroidvanias.
I am so happy, that Ahoy is back!!! Nr1 favourite chanel ever. Ps I remember so much arguing woth friends that what is doom clone and what not. One who did not live through the days will never understand. Will never know what Doom did with our lives. To me another similar thing was only Dave Grush and Bob Lazar.
5:27 = Charlie Brooker! Used to be on the PC Gamer Editing team.
Saw that straight away too! Legend of a man, gaming was where he started!
Ahoy, matey!
Kind of surprised light gun/ rail shooter games never came up. Seems like a much more apt comparison than shoot-em-ups, at least from the perspective angle.
Aw man didn't mention Chex Quest, the Chex Cereal Doom Clone
I was actually kinda surprised Chex Quest didn't get any mention, shit was fun for a .wad file you literally got out of a cereal box for free.
also no Super 3D Noah's Ark
That's not a clone so much as it is straight-up a mod
Chex Quest isn't a Doom clone, it's just Doom