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| Article - History Repeating |
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History Repeating
by RawShark
The history of 3D shoot 'em ups according to my hard drive
Screenshots of the games mentioned here are shown to the left, in the following order - Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Doom, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Quake2, Hexen2, Jedi Knight, Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Quake3 Arena
With the big announcement that ID Software's next release will be a remake of their Doom series using a brand new (and undoubtedly) better engine, I think it's time to stop and think about the history of these games we love so much. Over the course of 10 years we have seen single-player games of the "3D shot 'em up" genre slowly evolve into the multi-player gaming community that we see now in the form of Quake3 and Unreal Tournament. But now someone has muttered "single-player" again at ID Software in regard to their next product, spawning the question - Do we really want to go back to single-player after all the trouble it took to get us to where we are now? I don't have the answer to this, but the many hard drives inside my PC definitely have an insight into the matter that may aid us - afterall, it has seen many of these types of games over the last while, and one of the HDs even housed Wolfenstein 3D when it was relatively new. I could go back even further to the days of when I played Xybots in the arcade, but that would either be revealing that I am much older than you probably think, or that I am quite insane when it comes to games. I'll begin more recently.
The first PC I owned, a crappy 386 with 4 megs of RAM, was just about able to run this game Wolfenstein 3D that came on the HD when I bought the machine second-hand. As slow and awkward as it was (running the game required expert knowledge of DOS commands!) I was instantly hooked on this type of game, and vowed there and then to fill my computer with as many 3D games as I could lay my grubby hands on. My next purchase was Doom, the now famous title by ID Software, which came on 5 floppy disks and was a nightmare for me to install at the time. I had totally missed the sequel to Wolfenstein that ID made, Spear of Destiny, and didn't acquire it until years later (that game was basically Wolf 3D with some different maps - what a scam!). Doom ran incredibly slow on my machine, I even needed an emergency boot disk to give all available memory over to it!! So, I decided, I would have to wait until I got a newer PC, or, I would have to upgrade this sorry slab of silicone components in order to enjoy my gaming more. So I did.
Over the next few years I would indulge in many, many hours of gaming on my upgraded PC (a Pentium 166 mhz chip with 32 megs of RAM). I experienced more titles from ID (Doom2, Heretic etc) and also Duke Nukem 3D, which was great. Then I heard about Quake - the big sequel to the Doom series that was much more intense. I had to get it, and I did. Wow! This was the most awesome 3D game yet! I was instantly hooked on Quake and all things Quake. This was the first game that I acquired mods for (from cover disks - I was not yet unleashed on the internet). I really enjoyed those days. It didn't seem like long afterwards that Quake2 was released, and it was the coolest Christmas present that I ever received! If I was hooked before, I don't know what I was now. Yet I still had not played online - but that was about to change.
The following summer I was working in a tech support centre, which had an extremely nifty network. It was there that I sought out other 3D gaming fans, and we decided to install a shareware copy of Doom 95 on the network. Every lunch time was now deathmatch time! It was the most fun I'd had in a long time. When I finished working that summer I decided to get online with Quake2 - I had had a taste and wanted more. Unfortunately, my upgraded PC was beginning to feel the strain, and regularly crashed while running Quake2. I had to get a new PC before going online, no question about it. So I got the awesome machine I have now (which I will be paying for forever!!) and rather than moving all my mods and other stuff over using a zip drive or something, I installed my games hard drive from the old PC into the new one. I got an internet account, a 3D graphics card, a shit load more RAM, some mates who loved 3D gaming also, and we unleashed hell onto the Quake2 community. RawShark was born.
I had a brief stint as a clan leader (Beastie Boys Clan - we were crap!) but found that I rathered offline playing with bots most of the time. I was also beginning to explore more games. The Quake2 source code must be the most employed engine ever - so many other games appeared based on it, including Hexen2, Unreal and Half-Life. I'm not sure, but Jedi Knight may also have been based on it. More importantly, it seemed that these games were more successful as multi-player games than ever before - hardly anyone cared about the single-player modes, which weren't great anyway (except Half-Life, the best SP adventure ever!). Something big was about to happen in the gaming community - and then the rumours started about Quake3, it was going to be multiplayer only!
Multi-player has always been the destiny of 3D gaming, because you never know what's going to happen next. I don't know about you guys, but I can only play a single-player game once, and then I've seen it. I don't particularly want to play it again. Any games on my hard drive that are solely SP mode, are there for nostalgia reasons more than anything else. I'll have a blast at 'em now and again, but never the whole mission all over again. Playing online, every game is different, and you're playing real people and winning real victories. It's such a rush. So, I welcomed the idea behind Unreal Tournament and Quake3 Arena - all out multiplayer warfare! I personally think that Quake3 is one of the best games ever made, and one of the best games installed on my machine (it's definitely the most played these days). A risk was taken in not including single-player mode (I don't count the fight the bots, make your way through the tiers thing as single-player mode, more of a practice mode) and it paid off. Quake3 is a major success, and with the advent of very high-speed data transfer, more and more people are online playing these really advanced games.
So why revert back to the single-player mission mode that it took so long to get away from? Maybe ID Software feel their is call for it (I don't hear it) or perhaps they just want to do it for nostalgia reasons - afterall, it was Doom that made them kings of the gaming industry, they might get an awesome kick out of doing it "properly", the way George Lucas did with the Star Wars Special Editions. Hopefully, they will put as much (or even more) effort into the mult-player side of this new release as the single-player, unlike Quake2, which had a very neat SP mode, but required a ridiculous amount of patches to fix up the multi-player side of things (strangely enough, Quake3 seems to be needing just as many patches). I just can't help but feel that this will be step back rather than a step forward, trapping us in a loop that runs from Doom the original to Doom the remake. Surely they could have come up with something totally new to wow us with the same way Quake3 did - I'm hardly going to be surprised if I encounter a Hell Baron in the new Doom game, am I?
I hope I'm wrong, I really do. Maybe I'm just looking for excuses not to purchase the next ID Software release because I've only got 864 megs of space left on my HD, and I want to keep that for Quake3 maps and mods. Now, if the new game came with a free hard drive, I'd rush out and but it instantly! So that's the history of 3D gaming from my end - I hope you enjoyed the read. Questions, comments? You know what to do. Thanks for reading :)
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