How Doom Inspired a New Wave of Retro FPS Games

First, a quick brief on the franchise if you’ve been living in a cave.

iD Software was a Texas-based developer led by a quartet of employees at computer company Softdisk.

They started working together in secret in 1990 after developing then-revolutionary display scrolling techniques that let PCs mimic the stuff the Nintendo Entertainment System was doing.

After whetting the team’s teeth with games like Commander Keen, iD’s John Carmack blasted into the third dimension with 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D, a revolutionary action game that featured the smoothest, fastest movement through 3D space yet seen.

With the skills they developed, iD officially quit Softdisk and released its defining game: Doom.

With Doom, iD nailed the formula for first-person shooter games.

They should be almost effortless to play, with smooth, responsive controls so the player can't blame input error for their failings.

They should be fast-paced and brutal, with the challenge coming in figuring out on the fly how to deal with increasingly challenging combinations of enemies.

Doom 2 followed shortly thereafter, but it would take almost a decade for another full-on sequel.

That game would take inspiration from the then-popular survival horror genre, adding more overt narrative elements and pacing changes to make it feel more “modern.”

Although it sold perfectly well, Doom 3 didn’t feel right to long-time fans, drawing criticism for uninspired design heavy on “monster closets” that saw enemies popping out for repetitive jump scares.

Doom lay dormant for nearly another decade, but 2016’s eponymous reboot shocked the world with a return to fast-paced, grisly form.

Why were people so excited for it? That has a lot to do with what had been happening in the FPS world in its absence.

By the end of the 1990s, first-person shooters were one of the dominant genres in PC gaming, and consoles were starting to get in on the fun too with titles like GoldenEye and Halo. 

Early first-person shooters were strictly skill-based experiences.

“Git gud” was the order of the day—either your mouselook was on point and your circle-strafing was lightning fast, or you’d explode into a bucket of gibs before you re-spawned.

To make the genre more popular and palatable to a wide audience, changes were made.

Halo’s regenerating shield system is one notable example.

Prior to Bungie’s massive hit, health in first-person shooters was a finite resource, only restored by picking up power-ups.

But in Halo, Master Chief could duck out of the line of fire and find a quiet spot to watch his shield fill back up to 100% anytime things got too hairy.

Narrative also started playing more of a role in single-player campaigns.

Most of the storytelling in the early '90s came from the manual, but as the years went by developers started including more and more sequences that took you out of the action to deliver exposition and dialogue. 

Warren Spector’s groundbreaking Deus Ex in 2000 took the structure of a first-person shooter and used it to craft an immersive, physics-based adventure game with myriad solutions to every problem, not just violence.

Games like Half-Life 2 pioneered new techniques for cutscenes, and soon enough they were inescapable.

The genre was now mature, but was maturity what it needed?

Those changes brought FPS games to new heights, but it's debatable whether this was for the better.

In an interview with The Guardian, Doom co-creator John Romero had some interesting thoughts about the complexity of modern first-person shooters.

“I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don’t identify with.

I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun’s design is really deep – that there’s a lot of cool stuff you learn about it.”

That makes a lot of sense in the context of a retro FPS, which typically boast arsenals that you could easily count on your fingers—pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, maybe a few more, and call it a day.

Each of these weapons has advantages and disadvantages that are easy to understand in the whirl of combat.

Compare that to a game like Destiny 2, which takes the Diablo model towards its armaments.

Each gun is a near-unique implement with its own stats that can be modified and upgraded through resource collection and allocation over the course of multiple games.

Conceptually, that gives players more control and customization over how they play, but in reality it turns games into constant grinds for better loot, with menu-driven inventory management a significant part of the experience.

All of these mitigating factors moved away from the sensations that made those early 90s games so iconic.

FPS heads wanted to feel the immediate, skill-based thrills of the games they grew up with, and thankfully a new generation of developers (as well as some old favorites) stepped forwards to make it happen.

Over the last few years, several developers have pared back their FPS projects to replicate the immediate excitement of those pioneering '90s games.

2017’s Strafe leaned in hard to the retro aesthetic with a gleefully over-the-top commercial that could have been plucked from late-night cable.

The essential parts of this first-person shooter were right out of the Doom playbook, casting players as a lone warrior exploring an abandoned spaceship infested with horrific aliens.

But even though the game feel was classic, Strafe folded in a few interesting modern contrivances.

Most notable was the procedurally generated levels, making each playthrough a unique experience.

David Szymanski’s Dusk, which released in 2018, is a brilliantly weird game that chomps down on the retro style and uses it to tell a very dark horror story.

As a treasure hunter who travels to a sealed Pennsylvania town in search of hidden riches, you contend with numerous entities rendered in low-poly, blurry-texture perfection.

It’s wild, energetic and difficult, taking inspiration from Romero’s classic level design philosophy of asymmetrical areas with non-linear paths.

Argentinian studio Saibot is preparing Hellbound for release later this year.

Its title deploys modern-looking graphics, but fuses them to a gleefully dumb story about a “huge-ass motherf***er killing demons in Hell.” The goal is to make a game that runs at a breakneck pace from start to finish, with minimal interactions outside of blowing foes into little chunks.

You’ll notice that these games come from independent studios, for the most part.

That stripped-down design philosophy is attractive to smaller developers simply because of the financial impossibility of competing in the high-end, ultra-realistic AAA space.

The development budget of a game like Battlefield 4 ballooned to $100 million, spread over a massive team.

It’s just not feasible for anybody but a megalith like EA to bankroll a game of that magnitude.

That’s why 2016’s Doom and now Doom Eternal feel so fresh.

They merge the adrenaline-soaked action of these indie titles with high-end production values to create something much like what iD would have done in the '90s, had the technology been in place.

Coupled with the rush of indie studios delivering their own takes on the concept, it’s a golden age for retro FPS games, broadening the genre to appeal to both old hardcore fans and new blood looking for a fresh challenge.

Hell's armies invade Earth on March 20.

To save mankind, make sure your PC meets these system requirements.

First, a quick brief on the franchise if you’ve been living in a cave.

iD Software was a Texas-based developer led by a quartet of employees at computer company Softdisk.

They started working together in secret in 1990 after developing then-revolutionary display scrolling techniques that let PCs mimic the stuff the Nintendo Entertainment System was doing.

After whetting the team’s teeth with games like Commander Keen, iD’s John Carmack blasted into the third dimension with 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D, a revolutionary action game that featured the smoothest, fastest movement through 3D space yet seen.

With the skills they developed, iD officially quit Softdisk and released its defining game: Doom.

With Doom, iD nailed the formula for first-person shooter games.

They should be almost effortless to play, with smooth, responsive controls so the player can't blame input error for their failings.

They should be fast-paced and brutal, with the challenge coming in figuring out on the fly how to deal with increasingly challenging combinations of enemies.

Doom 2 followed shortly thereafter, but it would take almost a decade for another full-on sequel.

That game would take inspiration from the then-popular survival horror genre, adding more overt narrative elements and pacing changes to make it feel more “modern.”

Although it sold perfectly well, Doom 3 didn’t feel right to long-time fans, drawing criticism for uninspired design heavy on “monster closets” that saw enemies popping out for repetitive jump scares.

Doom lay dormant for nearly another decade, but 2016’s eponymous reboot shocked the world with a return to fast-paced, grisly form.

Why were people so excited for it? That has a lot to do with what had been happening in the FPS world in its absence.

By the end of the 1990s, first-person shooters were one of the dominant genres in PC gaming, and consoles were starting to get in on the fun too with titles like GoldenEye and Halo. 

Early first-person shooters were strictly skill-based experiences.

“Git gud” was the order of the day—either your mouselook was on point and your circle-strafing was lightning fast, or you’d explode into a bucket of gibs before you re-spawned.

To make the genre more popular and palatable to a wide audience, changes were made.

Halo’s regenerating shield system is one notable example.

Prior to Bungie’s massive hit, health in first-person shooters was a finite resource, only restored by picking up power-ups.

But in Halo, Master Chief could duck out of the line of fire and find a quiet spot to watch his shield fill back up to 100% anytime things got too hairy.

Narrative also started playing more of a role in single-player campaigns.

Most of the storytelling in the early '90s came from the manual, but as the years went by developers started including more and more sequences that took you out of the action to deliver exposition and dialogue. 

Warren Spector’s groundbreaking Deus Ex in 2000 took the structure of a first-person shooter and used it to craft an immersive, physics-based adventure game with myriad solutions to every problem, not just violence.

Games like Half-Life 2 pioneered new techniques for cutscenes, and soon enough they were inescapable.

The genre was now mature, but was maturity what it needed?

Those changes brought FPS games to new heights, but it's debatable whether this was for the better.

In an interview with The Guardian, Doom co-creator John Romero had some interesting thoughts about the complexity of modern first-person shooters.

“I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don’t identify with.

I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun’s design is really deep – that there’s a lot of cool stuff you learn about it.”

That makes a lot of sense in the context of a retro FPS, which typically boast arsenals that you could easily count on your fingers—pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, maybe a few more, and call it a day.

Each of these weapons has advantages and disadvantages that are easy to understand in the whirl of combat.

Compare that to a game like Destiny 2, which takes the Diablo model towards its armaments.

Each gun is a near-unique implement with its own stats that can be modified and upgraded through resource collection and allocation over the course of multiple games.

Conceptually, that gives players more control and customization over how they play, but in reality it turns games into constant grinds for better loot, with menu-driven inventory management a significant part of the experience.

All of these mitigating factors moved away from the sensations that made those early 90s games so iconic.

FPS heads wanted to feel the immediate, skill-based thrills of the games they grew up with, and thankfully a new generation of developers (as well as some old favorites) stepped forwards to make it happen.

Over the last few years, several developers have pared back their FPS projects to replicate the immediate excitement of those pioneering '90s games.

2017’s Strafe leaned in hard to the retro aesthetic with a gleefully over-the-top commercial that could have been plucked from late-night cable.

The essential parts of this first-person shooter were right out of the Doom playbook, casting players as a lone warrior exploring an abandoned spaceship infested with horrific aliens.

But even though the game feel was classic, Strafe folded in a few interesting modern contrivances.

Most notable was the procedurally generated levels, making each playthrough a unique experience.

David Szymanski’s Dusk, which released in 2018, is a brilliantly weird game that chomps down on the retro style and uses it to tell a very dark horror story.

As a treasure hunter who travels to a sealed Pennsylvania town in search of hidden riches, you contend with numerous entities rendered in low-poly, blurry-texture perfection.

It’s wild, energetic and difficult, taking inspiration from Romero’s classic level design philosophy of asymmetrical areas with non-linear paths.

Argentinian studio Saibot is preparing Hellbound for release later this year.

Its title deploys modern-looking graphics, but fuses them to a gleefully dumb story about a “huge-ass motherf***er killing demons in Hell.” The goal is to make a game that runs at a breakneck pace from start to finish, with minimal interactions outside of blowing foes into little chunks.

You’ll notice that these games come from independent studios, for the most part.

That stripped-down design philosophy is attractive to smaller developers simply because of the financial impossibility of competing in the high-end, ultra-realistic AAA space.

The development budget of a game like Battlefield 4 ballooned to $100 million, spread over a massive team.

It’s just not feasible for anybody but a megalith like EA to bankroll a game of that magnitude.

That’s why 2016’s Doom and now Doom Eternal feel so fresh.

They merge the adrenaline-soaked action of these indie titles with high-end production values to create something much like what iD would have done in the '90s, had the technology been in place.

Coupled with the rush of indie studios delivering their own takes on the concept, it’s a golden age for retro FPS games, broadening the genre to appeal to both old hardcore fans and new blood looking for a fresh challenge.

Hell's armies invade Earth on March 20.

To save mankind, make sure your PC meets these system requirements.