I'd heard the stories of John Romero yelling his own sound effects while playtesting in-development games without any sound of their own, but I never thought I'd hear them as the *actual* SFX in the finished game. That's silly, and great.
Something not really touched on, is that the games that id developed for Softdisk were done for a subscription service (actually two subscription services) called Gamer's Edge and Big Blue Disk. That's the reason for the pace, and on these subscription disk releases, the games were expected to be bite-size nibbles of games, hence the very limited scope of the games with a focus on pumping out large numbers of levels (using tile-based editors and re-using assets/engines) rather than expansive concepts.
"I want to make something lighter and fluffier than my 20 minute high minded Errant Signals" One year later "Here's a 45 minute video about Quake and Duke Nukem" In all seriousness I love this series and it makes my day every time a new one is uploaded. Keep it up!
And each of the following CoD videos has been longer than the previous. I'd like to think this experience gave Christopher a better understanding of how scope creep affects video game development.
...it's fascinating how immediately "Gauntlet clone, but with a first person camera instead" felt like Doom in a way none of the predecessors you talked about did.
A lot of people who make RUclips videos about retro FPS games start with Wolf3d or Doom. I think that it is a really cool choice to talk about the games that came before it, in addition to after it since I don't generally see videos on them, and it also helps us to understand where all of the classics came from. Great video!
Carmack seeing a demo of another game and saying "yeah, I can do that... but better!" sounds exactly as something I imagine Carmack would say lol. What a beast.
@@tsartomato No, you're both wrong. If you're not playing an FPS where you are a hideous, disgusting worm-like creature, you're not playing a God Emperor of Doom.
Funny you should describe Catacomb 3-D as the birth of abstract FPS level design. The sequel trilogy Softdisk made actually goes the opposite direction, and attempts more repesentational spaces like those later seen in the Build engine games (The Aqueduct in Abyss being a highlight, as well as The Dark Forest in Armageddon). There is also a direct relation to those later games, as Greg Malone and others went on to work for 3D Realms (while others worked on Blake Stone; Mike Maynard is ironically the only Gamer's Edge alumni currently at id, despite being from the second team). The trilogy actually also makes little tweaks that make the whole thing more playable and engaging (marking destructible walls for one), even if the combat is still a bit repetitive. Absolutely worth a look.
Wow, I had no idea that Commander Keen was using music from Catacomb 3D. That might play into the speed of development that year! Also, minor correction: The first _three_ Commander Keen games were released in December 1990, not just the first one. Keen Dreams, and the entire second trilogy (as well as the loner sixth game) were 1991 as you stated. It's one of the facts that even in retrospect is pretty incredible, because at the time it felt like forever between them (likely because they weren't immediately available everywhere back then). I'm fairly certain it was at least a year or three before we even knew about the sequels or had access to them in my circle. It all depends on how quickly they'd make it into the shareware catalogs, the BBSes, and the local computer show vendors.
Apparently it was the other way around! Romero liked the song so much made for Keen (and it was short enough to fit) that he used it in Catacomb 3D as well: vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Too_Hot_to_Handle It's a catchy tune. Just hearing it in this video leaves it stuck in my head (but it helps I've known it since my youth). It was always appropriately ominous in Command Keen 4's eerier levels.
I enjoy how this a complimentary video to the mammoth historical documentary that Ahoy has done on creation of wolfenstein, doom, and quake. I love your mechanical breakdown and can’t wait to see where the series goes.
I'm sorry Errant Signal, I've Sinned. It's been about a year since the last time I've watched this channel. Please forgive me... There's SO MUCH GREAT CONTENT on RUclips these days... But I'll make up for that by binge-watching a couple of ES videos...
Nice to see someone talking about Ultima Underworld. I feel like it's oddly under-discussed, considering how incredibly important it was to the evolution of 3D games, not to mention basically being the ancient ancestor of the entire first-person immersive CRPG subgenre. And what's really impressive is that it still holds up pretty well, at least once one gets used to the "in the days before WASD" controls. The core design was solid, and had a lot of features we still see today. Even an automap! And my god, that engine was just insanely ahead of its time. It had non-orthogonal fully texture-mapped true 3D polygonal environments governed by a realistic physics system (plus some rudimentary lightsourcing) *on a goddamn 386.* How did they even?!
@@zeikjt Yeah, that was due to them using fixed-point math rather than floating-point for all the polygon calculations. Basically, the weak processors of the time couldn't handle a lot of decimal places, so polygon vertex calculations would always get rounded to the nearest whole number to keep the math easy. Which made for a lot of weird glitches in the rendering. (For that matter, 386s couldn't handle floating-point at all, unless they had a separate math coprocessor, and even some lower-end 486s lacked support.)
@@jasonblalock4429 They definitely had to work with what they had! Made for some iconic visuals and especially audio. I remember what a wild west of audio cards it was back in the DOS/Win3.1 days. I was always stressed when booting a game and presented with audio settings... I was too young and ignorant to really know what I had haha
I found Catacomb 3D to be a lot more enjoyable with the CatacombGL source port, you just hold down fire to rapid fire and the charge attack will still charge as usual so you just release fire when the charge blast is ready, instead of choosing between charge blast and giving yourself carpal tunnel or a sore finger at the least. You can also increase the turning speed as well as play in higher resolution, and there are a few other optional quality of life, visual, sound and control improvements, you won't get in dosbox. The source port also runs Catacomb Abyss.
We had the sequel Catacomb Abyss on our PC when I was a kid. I remember not liking it compared to Wolf3d because the enemies used to spawn out of the ground and I couldn't get past the first level because I didn't realize you needed to destroy the walls to advance. Hadn't even thought about it again until this video and now I know why the walls needed to be cleared.
John Carcmack, literal rocket scientist, saying he can out nerd someone else and do what they did, faster and better is exactly the kind of stuff that helped make Id what it is.
Super excited for this series. This is peak Errant Signal IMO; talking about a series and how mechanics changed over time, like the Tony Hawk video. I'm sure it may be out of your wheelhouse (err, if anything's *in* your wheelhouse, it's early FPS games), but I'd love to see a similar thorough retrospective on the history of rhythm games.
I really like the premise of this series. I wish it could continue on with different genres. Having a list of the defining games for each type would make an excellent buyer's guide for someone like me that wants to try different types of games and doesn't mind old graphics.
So nearly the first PC game I owned when my parents bought a 486 (a straight legit IBM PS/2 at that) back in '91/'92 was the 1992 followup to this game: Catacomb Abyss. This series is absolutely going to be a microcosm of my teen years and I so look forward to it.
I remember playing Catacomb 3D as a kid. I really liked it, even though I'm pretty sure I played it after Wolfenstien. I seem to remember there was a time freeze spell that you got later in the game that I throught was the most brilliant thing ever at the time. Big boss just come out? Freeze time and fill the screen with a billion bullets all frozen in time, waiting to rain death on him. Unfreeze time, and laugh maniacally. It's possible I may be thinking of another title by this name, though. Not sure.
Awesome series idea! It's interesting to see how the first FPSs were mutations of other established genres, and its cool to see how the genre of the first Catacomb game influenced Catacomb 3D and the overall id style. I know it's a tall task, but I'd love to see your thoughts on the evolution of FPS games all the way through the present day.
This game was part of ID software's breakup contract with Softdisk from when they left to found the company and publish Commander Keen with Apogee. They were required to publish so many games with Gamers edge and most of the titles ended up being rehashed older IP they already published with the company like catacomb and Dangerous Dave. Commander Keen in Keen Dreams was made to fill a slot. So was Hovertank 3D, Apogee liked the tech so much they made a deal to produce the final game for ID's contract for them so they could publish Wolf 3D.
Great stuff. Amazing how you can see the seeds of Wolf 3D and Doom here, even if it was a vastly underwhelming title. Looking forward to the rest of this series!
Comment for the all powerful algorithm But also, this is a really cool idea, and I think suits your style of analysis really well. I'm looking forward to future entries.
Great idea for a series. I enjoyed Ahoy's 'trilogy' on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, and this seems like it'll do a good job of filling in the gaps. Can't wait for the next one!
The thing you mention about the speed at which games were produced at that time really reminds me of the speed at which music was made in the 50s and 60s. Every artist and band of note was releasing two or three albums per year, going from the studio to touring and back at a breakneck pace, and almost nothing topped the charts for more than about three or four weeks in a row. It makes me wonder how many mediums of art have had a period like that early in their development, where the industry is big enough for there to be a substantial amount of people making and supporting it, yet primitive enough that you can absolutely bang out something that'll sell in a month, maybe two, with the right equipment. I'd love to see this series continue.
Film in the 20s and 30s, TV in the 40s and 50s, album music in the 50s and 60s, games in the 70s to 90s. Most major mediums, except for literature, start like that.
@@Volvagia1927 One could easily extrapolate this model to less traditional mediums, too. IIRC blog posts in the late 00s and Lets Plays circa 2012 were booming in much the same way.
One of my favourite games that's built around First Person Aiming (though not really Shooting, in the classical sense) is Tiny & Big in Grandpa's Leftovers. If you haven't played that, give it a look, it probably costs very little and is a fantastic game.
Dat sprite-work for the Big Red Demon Thing (11:17) looks crackin' though. Almost like the predecessor to the Baron of Hell/Later iterations of the Hell Knight.
It definitely has a DooM64 look to it, easily could pass for an imp or Baron from that game. Also looks like a pinky Demon from regular DooM if it was "normal size", if you imagine this one being a dwarf version.
To be perfectly frank I’ll take any kind of Errant Signal content, so keep the videos coming! Thanks for focusing on game design, mechanics and philosophy!
Dude, Ultima Underworld has a giant Pac-Man maze in Level 5, with you running around to collect pellets. I get what you meant, but UU was very playful with its level design.
I've actually remember playing catacombs 3D. It was part of my Demo CD. I think it came with the CDROM drive. Back then, CDROM drive was an expensive luxury hardware lol
MidiMaze is literally the very first crack at what we would classify as a true first person shooter. It's in first person, you shoot projectiles, you have full real-time movement, and it even had multiplayer where the goal is to blast your opponents. It's the first of its kind. Everything else, while first person, is not an FPS as we would define it. Some of them aren't even really FPS, they're just still images drawn with a false perspective.
3:53 I will die a happy man knowing that somewhere in time, a grown man created sound effects for a DOS game by going, "Bwoooooooomphhhh" into an old beige-colored microphone.
You mentioned the turn speed being abysmal but holding Shift for "Sprint" increases all of your movement speed, including turn speed. It is a bit unwieldy but makes getting surrounded a lot less dangerous. I actually finished this game just last year as I'm working on streaming every FPS game and plan on doing.....well, this -- a retrospective of the genre from it's very beginning. The funny thing is that I also ended up starting with Hovertank 3D after trying some older stuff like Bethesda's Terminator and Battlezone, among others. Also, are you planning on covering the Catacombs Adventure Trilogy by Softdisk? I'm guessing not since you're moving right along to Wolf3D but they did some really interesting things that I think are worth covering.
@@TheMoviePlanet Probably not. My aim currently is to play games released from 1990-2006(ish) but even that is looking at ~500 titles according to my spreadsheet. But I still want to try :)
Damn I feel old. Battlezone and '83 Star Wars are like the oldest arcade games I remember playing that required a special cabinet instead of just a joystick and a couple of buttons.
I do like that, at time of writing, this is the *only* recent video on RUclips related to Catacomb 3-D. However, I wish you'd started with the actual children and worked backwards - even the obvious ones such as Strife, Project Warlock, Doom 2016. I think the algorithm would favor your for it and, frankly, "Rise of the FPS" has been done before - though I do the "why Catacomb 3-D wasn't mega successful" rather than just pointing at it as a precursor.
Marathon in particular gets virtually no recognition anymore. I blame it partly on Bungie's decision to open-source it rather than give it an official rerelease on GOG or the like, so unless you're the kind of ubernerd who compiles all your apps from the source code, you're better off not bothering.
I'm actually looking forward to this. Like a retrospective of the past 30 years of FPS seems like something that should have a lot of ups and downs; especially when we get to the "chest high wall, cover-based, 50 shades of gray" era of FPS.
@@blarg2429 you joke, but being tortured in first person is something i've experienced multiple times in FPS games, it's not exactly there for tittiliation, but still. I've been tied up and nearly lobotomized.
@@MrSnaztastic Fair enough. Though I'd say that the shock value of it is a kind of titillation if you stretch the definition of the word just a little.
Catacomb 3D was loads of fun when I was a kid and had beaten the stuffing out of WOLF and DOOM; I remember finding it on a demo disk called House of Games II...
I thought it was a fun little game that didn't overstay it's welcome. I actually purchased the Catacombs bundle on GOG just to play this game. Fun Fact: The repetitive music used throughout gameplay was also used in Keen 4 during the story scroll in the demo loop and in a few levels.
i think i played the sequel to catacomb 3-D (as a shareware-distributed game that was pretty much complete from what i could tell, maybe to sell the other two after it or something); it was slightly better about some of these things, like the text bar giving hints for secrets and stuff, and i don't remember there being a charge attack some really unnerving things with enemies coming out of the walls and floor too; bit of a horror vibe on those levels still essentially the same kind of game, though
I'd heard the stories of John Romero yelling his own sound effects while playtesting in-development games without any sound of their own, but I never thought I'd hear them as the *actual* SFX in the finished game. That's silly, and great.
The most permanent solutions to a problem are usually the temporary solutions that are expected to be replaced.
Something not really touched on, is that the games that id developed for Softdisk were done for a subscription service (actually two subscription services) called Gamer's Edge and Big Blue Disk. That's the reason for the pace, and on these subscription disk releases, the games were expected to be bite-size nibbles of games, hence the very limited scope of the games with a focus on pumping out large numbers of levels (using tile-based editors and re-using assets/engines) rather than expansive concepts.
That explains the recycling of the commander keen music for the game.
So episode 1 and 2 of Children of Doom are Fathers of Doom.
Big Daddy Doom
Doom loves its two dads
Children of Doom was okay, better than Doom Messiah, not as good as God Emperor of Doom
What's episode 3, Doom Messiah?
@@kakizakichannel
The second one.
"I want to make something lighter and fluffier than my 20 minute high minded Errant Signals"
One year later
"Here's a 45 minute video about Quake and Duke Nukem"
In all seriousness I love this series and it makes my day every time a new one is uploaded. Keep it up!
And each of the following CoD videos has been longer than the previous.
I'd like to think this experience gave Christopher a better understanding of how scope creep affects video game development.
...it's fascinating how immediately "Gauntlet clone, but with a first person camera instead" felt like Doom in a way none of the predecessors you talked about did.
A lot of people who make RUclips videos about retro FPS games start with Wolf3d or Doom. I think that it is a really cool choice to talk about the games that came before it, in addition to after it since I don't generally see videos on them, and it also helps us to understand where all of the classics came from. Great video!
Carmack seeing a demo of another game and saying "yeah, I can do that... but better!" sounds exactly as something I imagine Carmack would say lol. What a beast.
holy shit the logo of the original Catacomb game is absolutely MAJESTIC
Looking forward to the sequel series God Emperor of DOOM and Heretics of DOOM.
That would be Doom 2016(/Eternal?) and TPSs.
@@RonanLeroyLK that would be quake 1 and everything after quake 1
The ammo must flow.
@@tsartomato No, you're both wrong. If you're not playing an FPS where you are a hideous, disgusting worm-like creature, you're not playing a God Emperor of Doom.
Oh, god, not Heretics!
"children of doom" is a metal title
Damn right!
ruclips.net/video/2A3Dlkhv4ME/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/2n6LJ5iQ_Sk/видео.html
@@MosoKaiser Absolutely!
ruclips.net/video/3zUNcqzM5l0/видео.html
Love that this “side project” has been going for 3 years now and videos have reached over an hour long.
Funny you should describe Catacomb 3-D as the birth of abstract FPS level design. The sequel trilogy Softdisk made actually goes the opposite direction, and attempts more repesentational spaces like those later seen in the Build engine games (The Aqueduct in Abyss being a highlight, as well as The Dark Forest in Armageddon). There is also a direct relation to those later games, as Greg Malone and others went on to work for 3D Realms (while others worked on Blake Stone; Mike Maynard is ironically the only Gamer's Edge alumni currently at id, despite being from the second team). The trilogy actually also makes little tweaks that make the whole thing more playable and engaging (marking destructible walls for one), even if the combat is still a bit repetitive. Absolutely worth a look.
I'm here from Innuendo Studios because he recommended your content, so I'm checking you out to marathon your content.
Wow, I had no idea that Commander Keen was using music from Catacomb 3D. That might play into the speed of development that year!
Also, minor correction: The first _three_ Commander Keen games were released in December 1990, not just the first one. Keen Dreams, and the entire second trilogy (as well as the loner sixth game) were 1991 as you stated. It's one of the facts that even in retrospect is pretty incredible, because at the time it felt like forever between them (likely because they weren't immediately available everywhere back then). I'm fairly certain it was at least a year or three before we even knew about the sequels or had access to them in my circle. It all depends on how quickly they'd make it into the shareware catalogs, the BBSes, and the local computer show vendors.
Apparently it was the other way around! Romero liked the song so much made for Keen (and it was short enough to fit) that he used it in Catacomb 3D as well: vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Too_Hot_to_Handle
It's a catchy tune. Just hearing it in this video leaves it stuck in my head (but it helps I've known it since my youth). It was always appropriately ominous in Command Keen 4's eerier levels.
I enjoy how this a complimentary video to the mammoth historical documentary that Ahoy has done on creation of wolfenstein, doom, and quake. I love your mechanical breakdown and can’t wait to see where the series goes.
I'm sorry Errant Signal, I've Sinned.
It's been about a year since the last time I've watched this channel.
Please forgive me... There's SO MUCH GREAT CONTENT on RUclips these days...
But I'll make up for that by binge-watching a couple of ES videos...
Nice to see someone talking about Ultima Underworld. I feel like it's oddly under-discussed, considering how incredibly important it was to the evolution of 3D games, not to mention basically being the ancient ancestor of the entire first-person immersive CRPG subgenre. And what's really impressive is that it still holds up pretty well, at least once one gets used to the "in the days before WASD" controls. The core design was solid, and had a lot of features we still see today. Even an automap!
And my god, that engine was just insanely ahead of its time. It had non-orthogonal fully texture-mapped true 3D polygonal environments governed by a realistic physics system (plus some rudimentary lightsourcing) *on a goddamn 386.* How did they even?!
I sometimes miss the days of textures warping as you moved around and especially as you got right up close to the polys.
@@zeikjt Yeah, that was due to them using fixed-point math rather than floating-point for all the polygon calculations. Basically, the weak processors of the time couldn't handle a lot of decimal places, so polygon vertex calculations would always get rounded to the nearest whole number to keep the math easy. Which made for a lot of weird glitches in the rendering.
(For that matter, 386s couldn't handle floating-point at all, unless they had a separate math coprocessor, and even some lower-end 486s lacked support.)
@@jasonblalock4429 They definitely had to work with what they had! Made for some iconic visuals and especially audio. I remember what a wild west of audio cards it was back in the DOS/Win3.1 days. I was always stressed when booting a game and presented with audio settings... I was too young and ignorant to really know what I had haha
I found Catacomb 3D to be a lot more enjoyable with the CatacombGL source port, you just hold down fire to rapid fire and the charge attack will still charge as usual so you just release fire when the charge blast is ready, instead of choosing between charge blast and giving yourself carpal tunnel or a sore finger at the least. You can also increase the turning speed as well as play in higher resolution, and there are a few other optional quality of life, visual, sound and control improvements, you won't get in dosbox. The source port also runs Catacomb Abyss.
We had the sequel Catacomb Abyss on our PC when I was a kid. I remember not liking it compared to Wolf3d because the enemies used to spawn out of the ground and I couldn't get past the first level because I didn't realize you needed to destroy the walls to advance. Hadn't even thought about it again until this video and now I know why the walls needed to be cleared.
John Carcmack, literal rocket scientist, saying he can out nerd someone else and do what they did, faster and better is exactly the kind of stuff that helped make Id what it is.
Super excited for this series. This is peak Errant Signal IMO; talking about a series and how mechanics changed over time, like the Tony Hawk video.
I'm sure it may be out of your wheelhouse (err, if anything's *in* your wheelhouse, it's early FPS games), but I'd love to see a similar thorough retrospective on the history of rhythm games.
Really like the new format man-- gives you the chance to grace us with your insights on a wide range of games-- looking forward to the next one!
I really like the premise of this series.
I wish it could continue on with different genres.
Having a list of the defining games for each type would make an excellent buyer's guide for someone like me that wants to try different types of games and doesn't mind old graphics.
So nearly the first PC game I owned when my parents bought a 486 (a straight legit IBM PS/2 at that) back in '91/'92 was the 1992 followup to this game: Catacomb Abyss. This series is absolutely going to be a microcosm of my teen years and I so look forward to it.
I’d kill to see a video series like this but for immersive sims
I remember playing Catacomb 3D as a kid. I really liked it, even though I'm pretty sure I played it after Wolfenstien. I seem to remember there was a time freeze spell that you got later in the game that I throught was the most brilliant thing ever at the time. Big boss just come out? Freeze time and fill the screen with a billion bullets all frozen in time, waiting to rain death on him. Unfreeze time, and laugh maniacally. It's possible I may be thinking of another title by this name, though. Not sure.
Great work... good combination of mechanics analysis, themes (although there are often few themes in FPSs of that era) and history.
Awesome series idea! It's interesting to see how the first FPSs were mutations of other established genres, and its cool to see how the genre of the first Catacomb game influenced Catacomb 3D and the overall id style. I know it's a tall task, but I'd love to see your thoughts on the evolution of FPS games all the way through the present day.
And the first Return to Castle Wolfenstien had just like Catacomb, inspired their Wolfenstien 3d title.
>easier to write and easier to research
Oh 2020 errant signal, how naive you were
Love this! I've never even heard of these games--and that development pace is unreal! Thanks for being a historian for us. :)
This game was part of ID software's breakup contract with Softdisk from when they left to found the company and publish Commander Keen with Apogee. They were required to publish so many games with Gamers edge and most of the titles ended up being rehashed older IP they already published with the company like catacomb and Dangerous Dave. Commander Keen in Keen Dreams was made to fill a slot. So was Hovertank 3D, Apogee liked the tech so much they made a deal to produce the final game for ID's contract for them so they could publish Wolf 3D.
I just love hearing you talk, it could be about anything
"I can do that. but faster" IS THE MOST BAD ASS NERD LINE EVER holy shit Carmack is a G
Great stuff. Amazing how you can see the seeds of Wolf 3D and Doom here, even if it was a vastly underwhelming title. Looking forward to the rest of this series!
What we're not gonna talk about Maze War, which not only was a first person shooter from the early 70s it also had online multiplayer
I never thought this game again in my life, much less as an analysis piece. Thanks Franklin
can't edit with MyTube, but - I think this one is the very first PC videogame I played in my life, hence the comment.
I'm stoked for this, the histry of id is one of my favorite topics in the industry.
Excited for the series! Thank you for taking on this!
I like this series. I hope you get to the Marathon series. Such great games that most people overlook.
I'm super excited to see this series as it goes forward.
Comment for the all powerful algorithm
But also, this is a really cool idea, and I think suits your style of analysis really well. I'm looking forward to future entries.
Great idea for a series. I enjoyed Ahoy's 'trilogy' on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, and this seems like it'll do a good job of filling in the gaps. Can't wait for the next one!
Thank you dearly for this flashback! I was 16 in 1991 and remember gaming the heck out of my Amiga 500 ... really great times!
Dungeon Master (FTL Games) anyone?!
"You are *BRICK SLEDGE.*
...yeah, that's, a name"
lmao
Reminds me of MST3K. "Roll Fizzlebeef! Slab Bulkhead! Big McLargehuge! Bob Johnson .... oh wait. "
@@NailBombed We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese!
This is the best shit to watch when bored. You're so.... good!!
The thing you mention about the speed at which games were produced at that time really reminds me of the speed at which music was made in the 50s and 60s. Every artist and band of note was releasing two or three albums per year, going from the studio to touring and back at a breakneck pace, and almost nothing topped the charts for more than about three or four weeks in a row. It makes me wonder how many mediums of art have had a period like that early in their development, where the industry is big enough for there to be a substantial amount of people making and supporting it, yet primitive enough that you can absolutely bang out something that'll sell in a month, maybe two, with the right equipment. I'd love to see this series continue.
Film in the 20s and 30s, TV in the 40s and 50s, album music in the 50s and 60s, games in the 70s to 90s. Most major mediums, except for literature, start like that.
@@Volvagia1927 One could easily extrapolate this model to less traditional mediums, too. IIRC blog posts in the late 00s and Lets Plays circa 2012 were booming in much the same way.
Brick Sledge absolutely sounds like a David Ryder name.
David Ryder sounds like a David Ryder name
One of my favourite games that's built around First Person Aiming (though not really Shooting, in the classical sense) is Tiny & Big in Grandpa's Leftovers. If you haven't played that, give it a look, it probably costs very little and is a fantastic game.
Dat sprite-work for the Big Red Demon Thing (11:17) looks crackin' though. Almost like the predecessor to the Baron of Hell/Later iterations of the Hell Knight.
It definitely has a DooM64 look to it, easily could pass for an imp or Baron from that game. Also looks like a pinky Demon from regular DooM if it was "normal size", if you imagine this one being a dwarf version.
That series is a great idea. Thanks for making it.
Intriguing series! Thanks for making it!
To be perfectly frank I’ll take any kind of Errant Signal content, so keep the videos coming! Thanks for focusing on game design, mechanics and philosophy!
Looking forward to more of this series!
Dude, Ultima Underworld has a giant Pac-Man maze in Level 5, with you running around to collect pellets. I get what you meant, but UU was very playful with its level design.
Good first episode, really want to see all 29 more!
i'm loving this chris, keep it up.
Wasn't Brick Sledge the name of Reb Brown's character in Space Mutiny...?
Slab Hardcheese!
Fridge Largemeat!
@@YourGoodTwin Bob Johnson! ........ oh wait. :/
That cutoff "OH SHI-" before the player dies in Hovertank is peak modern internet humor... in 1991
Very into this! I look forward to seeing more
I've actually remember playing catacombs 3D. It was part of my Demo CD. I think it came with the CDROM drive. Back then, CDROM drive was an expensive luxury hardware lol
I really loved Catacombs 3-D when I played it the other year. Although it really does suffer from being a ting of its time.
"lighter, fluffier and easier to research"
Four years later...
already excited for the ultrakill video
GREAT first episode. Subscribing now!
Very cool video! I like this series. I'm also an FPS fan so this is right up my alley.
Thulsa Doom's followers appreciate the shout out.
MidiMaze is literally the very first crack at what we would classify as a true first person shooter. It's in first person, you shoot projectiles, you have full real-time movement, and it even had multiplayer where the goal is to blast your opponents. It's the first of its kind. Everything else, while first person, is not an FPS as we would define it. Some of them aren't even really FPS, they're just still images drawn with a false perspective.
Love this already! Keep'em coming!
Great format. I want more of that, please :)
"the music here is..."
i'm sorry, did you mean to say "an absolute bop"
Hovertank seems like a game that your friend would make for you for Easter to confuse you.
Are confusing Easter games a longstanding tradition down your way?
3:53
I will die a happy man knowing that somewhere in time, a grown man created sound effects for a DOS game by going, "Bwoooooooomphhhh" into an old beige-colored microphone.
I had that microphone
I'm playing through the original Doom now. Cool video on its influences!!
This was one of the best games I have ever played.
An obscure FPS to check out is ZPC which has a strong graphics style and was made with the Marathon 2 engine.
Aww! The ID games are my fav! But Ultima Underworld certainly is a looker lol.
You mentioned the turn speed being abysmal but holding Shift for "Sprint" increases all of your movement speed, including turn speed. It is a bit unwieldy but makes getting surrounded a lot less dangerous. I actually finished this game just last year as I'm working on streaming every FPS game and plan on doing.....well, this -- a retrospective of the genre from it's very beginning. The funny thing is that I also ended up starting with Hovertank 3D after trying some older stuff like Bethesda's Terminator and Battlezone, among others.
Also, are you planning on covering the Catacombs Adventure Trilogy by Softdisk? I'm guessing not since you're moving right along to Wolf3D but they did some really interesting things that I think are worth covering.
@@TheMoviePlanet Probably not. My aim currently is to play games released from 1990-2006(ish) but even that is looking at ~500 titles according to my spreadsheet. But I still want to try :)
Damn I feel old. Battlezone and '83 Star Wars are like the oldest arcade games I remember playing that required a special cabinet instead of just a joystick and a couple of buttons.
I do like that, at time of writing, this is the *only* recent video on RUclips related to Catacomb 3-D.
However, I wish you'd started with the actual children and worked backwards - even the obvious ones such as Strife, Project Warlock, Doom 2016. I think the algorithm would favor your for it and, frankly, "Rise of the FPS" has been done before - though I do the "why Catacomb 3-D wasn't mega successful" rather than just pointing at it as a precursor.
Good stuff as always!
I needed to hear about these games at least once, thank you!
I'm watching every review of Catacomb 3D 'cause the graffics and monsters look beautiful to me.
damn Dangerous Dave unlocked some deep memories
You talking about his no one works this fast in th3 game industry anymore has me worried about what crunch was going on in the 90s...
10:48: Hey now, that's a solid main menu theme.
I had no idea about any of the previous id software games before wolfenstein. Very interesting!
Hoping to see some videos about classic Bungie titles -- Pathways into Darkness and the Marathon trilogy
Marathon in particular gets virtually no recognition anymore. I blame it partly on Bungie's decision to open-source it rather than give it an official rerelease on GOG or the like, so unless you're the kind of ubernerd who compiles all your apps from the source code, you're better off not bothering.
This was great.
excited about this series
It is pretty bold to promise the game talked about in the next video one video in advance.
Id Software guys were geniuses working at breakneck speeds
I'm actually looking forward to this. Like a retrospective of the past 30 years of FPS seems like something that should have a lot of ups and downs; especially when we get to the "chest high wall, cover-based, 50 shades of gray" era of FPS.
_"50 shades of gray" era of FPS._
Ah yes, I remember the famous COD level where you have to let a rich weirdo do BDSM to you to progress.
@@blarg2429 you joke, but being tortured in first person is something i've experienced multiple times in FPS games, it's not exactly there for tittiliation, but still. I've been tied up and nearly lobotomized.
@@MrSnaztastic Fair enough. Though I'd say that the shock value of it is a kind of titillation if you stretch the definition of the word just a little.
I was gonna scold you for skipping over Midi Maze... But there you were, giving it a shout out... I was a fool to ever doubt you.
Nice Frank Herbert refence.
Catacomb 3D was loads of fun when I was a kid and had beaten the stuffing out of WOLF and DOOM; I remember finding it on a demo disk called House of Games II...
I thought it was a fun little game that didn't overstay it's welcome. I actually purchased the Catacombs bundle on GOG just to play this game. Fun Fact: The repetitive music used throughout gameplay was also used in Keen 4 during the story scroll in the demo loop and in a few levels.
Pretty sure that music is just taken straight from a commander keen 4 level.
Yup. It was that lazy. You need to bear in mind these games were pumped out by contract for Softdisk.
Fun idea for a series, and this first episode was good.
i think i played the sequel to catacomb 3-D (as a shareware-distributed game that was pretty much complete from what i could tell, maybe to sell the other two after it or something); it was slightly better about some of these things, like the text bar giving hints for secrets and stuff, and i don't remember there being a charge attack
some really unnerving things with enemies coming out of the walls and floor too; bit of a horror vibe on those levels
still essentially the same kind of game, though
the music is actually quite reminiscent of pc-88 titles of not that long before catacombs 3-d