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FPS. Next question.
This video is made by Ahoy (quality content). And it’s a fairly short video (around 10min) with an interesting conclusion. I highly suggest you watch it.
I see the dismissiveness as a reaction to the title clickbait/burying the lede. I get that this is how you have to do video titles on YouTube to get views, but a sentence or two about what the video’s actual premise is in the post body would have gone a long way to interest people who are, understandably IMO, a bit apathetic towards headlines like this.
Then let’s transcribe part of the opening:
I know what you’re thinking – it’s a stupid question, it’s an FPS. It’s the definitive FPS. And it’s a fair point. DOOM ticks all the boxes required for a reasonable definition of a first person shooter. It’s presented from a first-person perspective, and shooting the bad guys is a key part of it. But the FPS genre didn’t exist when DOOM was released. The term “first person shooter” wasn’t common until a few years later.So what genre was DOOM? How was it originally described?
Edit I’ve now understood that quoting most of the video’s opening salvo has unfortunately misrepresented the video’s contents to the people who are still trying to leave comments without actually watching it. It’s a video about what DOOM’s genre is and what DOOM’s genre was, not only the latter. The title looks clickbait-y but is honestly pretty accurate regarding the subject of the video.
the FPS genre didn’t exist
Wolfenstein…
People arguing with the video without having watched it lmao
I have watched the video. I think it’s Stuart’s worst.
The thesis statement is more like “We now call Doom an FPS, but that term really didn’t come about until Half Life, so what did they call Doom at the time?” Which would have been a quick aside in another video, but here it’s the whole thing. I don’t think there’s enough meat there for a whole video, and the “obviously, but what I’m really getting at is…” title isn’t great.
Given a choice, I’m going to rewatch Chicken-o-meter instead of this video.
He’s not saying Doom was the first FPS, he’s saying the term “First Person Shooter” didn’t exist yet to describe the few games it would apply to at the time.
Then the title should’ve said that… But it’s asking what the current genre is in the title (uses word “is”), presumably to appeal to the “Boomer shooter” vs “FPS” debate, when that’s not what the video is about at all.
A better title would be: “What genre was Doom? Hint: FPS didn’t exist yet.” Or even just “What genre was Doom originally?” Neither is click-baity or overly long.
The video covers that and Catacomb 3-D, which I don’t remember hearing about before but it looks like they released it half a year earlier.
…ye gads, something about the low-framerate EGA + flat topology in catacombs 3D gave me ferocious motion sickness at the time; even looking at screenshots still makes me feel queasy to this day…
(never had that problem with ultima underworld)
The projection’s also wrong. Things in the background move faster when you turn. Essentially it’s a third-person camera with an invisible protagonist. The camera swings around behind you, and stuff appears and disappears when it shouldn’t.
Weirdly, another game did the opposite. Die Hard by Dynamix (not the other hundred licensed titles with the same name) is a third-person shooter with very dungeon-crawler movement but smooth turning animation. Unfortunately that animation shows your character occupying the space in front of you. So you don’t turn, you sort of shuffle around a little circle.
Except what’s really happening is that it’s a first-person perspective, and John McClane is your gun.
The answer is still FPS.
I understand it might be an interesting video on Doom being the trailblazer of its genre, but you give me a simple dumb question as the title of your video and I’ll give it a snarky dumb answer every time.
If this is offending you as a clickbait title, I fear for your long term survival on the internet. This is a downright polite title compared to most of what you’d see on YouTube. Count your blessings.
It is true, every time I have opened YouTube, I have died.
I now realise this video’s existence is my one true blessing and will scoot post haste to the Patreon listed and hand over all of my worldly possessions as penance.
The title used “is.” They should’ve said, “What genre was Doom? Hint: FPS wasn’t a genre yet.” It’s a little more wordy, but I probably would’ve watched it. I’m not watching this out of principle because the title sucks, and I don’t want to reward that.
My quote is not the only content of the video; I’ve just included most of the introduction. The 13:23 long video has the following chapter markers:
00:00 Introduction 00:50 How was DOOM originally described? 02:20 DOOM clones 04:33 Quake Killers 6:06 A hypothetical question 12:05 Conclusion
Only the first half of the video is accurately described by your suggested title. The video as a whole is described by the existing title with reasonable accuracy. It’s not a bait-and-switch: the video also discusses what genre DOOM is, not only what genre DOOM was.
It seems that you (and many others) have used a heuristic of “clickbait-y sounding titles don’t accurately describe the contents of videos” and left corresponding comments. Although often accurate, that heuristic has failed in this instance.
I ended up watching it, and I thought it was generally just okay. Basically, here’s the tldr from what I remember:
- Doom was originally a “virtual reality adventure” game - I guess that was the terminology for “first person” game back in the early 90s
- Doom clone became a thing for a couple years until Quake came along, at which point “Quake killer” was the term used; just prior to this, “first person shoot’em up” was used
- Some random discussion about what Doom would’ve been called if it didn’t get popular - not sure what that speculation is worth imo, maybe trying to discard biases?
- conclusion that Doom was actually an action RPG? Because it has similar gameplay as gauntlet? Gauntlet was a hack and slash dungeon crawler, not an action RPG, so the proper conclusion imo is “first person shoot’em up dungeon crawler,” the “action RPG” argument came out of left field
So that’s my take. I don’t think it was a particularly noteworthy watch, and I’m not particularly motivated to subscribe to watch more. It was okay though, so I’m not going to avoid the channel or anything.
According to Betteridge’s law, the answer is “No.”
I had to look up Bettridge’s law, which was more effort than I took with the original post. Excellent work! I have to agree now and change my answer.
My cup overfloweth with impractical and obscure yet mildly interesting tidbits. In any case, laws are made to be broken, so I think you’re all good. (:
Someone didnt watch the video
Why watch a video with such a pointlessly clickbait title?
Because it is a good video by a channel that makes quality game related content.
Its not the fault of a channel that google made an atrocious sorting algorithm.
They could have made the title about the fact that FPS wasn’t a term at the time instead of using a question that is worded in the present tense.
“What genre was Doom when it was released”
I share your frustration, but YouTube offers you a choice: use honest titles and suffer at the hands of the algorithm, or use clickbait and get access to a much wider audience.
If the creator needs to use clickbait in order to have the funding to produce higher quality videos, I find it hard to hold them personally responsible for the systemic issues of the platform.
And that’s fine, I just won’t watch those videos. The channels I tend to watch have pretty clear titles, e.g. Gamer’s Nexus and Digital Foundry are awesome.
I’ll take this one: Wolfenstein Clone.
It makes no sense to call something a clone when it was made by the same studio that made the original. Very few wanted to call quake a doom clone.
It’s an interesting and entertaining video. That was the reason for me at least
How did you know that it would be entertaining before watching the video?
What the hell is the passage of time anyway?
It’s from Ahoy, that’s how I knew
Now imagine someone doesn’t have any idea who Ahoy is and you might understand why they wouldn’t want to just watch a video with a clickbait title.
You asked why someone would want to watch it and I answered why I wanted to lol. At no point had I trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t want to
Yup, I’ve never watched one of their videos, and if this is how they make their headlines, I probably never will.
What about the title is clickbaity? There’s no “the answer is going to surprise you”, no surprised face in the thumbnail, no “you won’t believe what happened next”. The video examines the question in the title.
That was really good. It’s something I hadn’t given any thought to , but the fact that First Person Shooter didn’t exist as a term when Doom released, it was interesting seeing the progression. I remember as a kid referring to Heretic and Hexen as Doom-clones, but wasn’t really cognizant of the term as it fell out of use in favour of other descriptions.
What genre is Rogue? 🤔
A text-based adventure, perhaps? (:
Definitely roguelike, I mean, how much more alike can you get?!
I paused midway through to think about it, and settled on “action 3D dungeon crawler.” But for some reason “RPG” sounds completely fucking wrong, even though… that’s arguably what dungeon crawlers are… right?
The problem is that “RPG” was a very early term that’s stuck around, and it’s been smeared across a wide variety of influential games. So no, Doom is very obviously not an RPG in the sense of even decade-prior games like Ultima. But the first-person kill-em-all presentation is hard to separate from Akalabeth… an obviously seminal RPG, and the origin of proper dungeon crawlers. And the immediate predecessor to Ultima. It’s like we never separated “shooter” from “shoot-em-up.”
Yes, if you simplify things down to just combat, then yes, I kind of agree. But the thing that generally separates “RPG” from the rest is whether the player feels like they’re playing a role or just playing a game.
Akalabeth gives the player interactive choices (which weapon? Climb the ladder?). The limitations are a mixture of the platform at the time and the skill of the game dev (was built by a teen). But it’s obvious that player choice and interaction with the character was a major component here, and the goal is to get the player to the end.
Doom just presents enemies to kill. Yeah, you can change weapons, but it’s less in a “character choice” way and more of a “best tool for the job” way. Yeah, it has a character portrait, but I took that to be an indicator of how injured player is, not a RP mechanic. At no point do I consider the character, I just want you press forward to find the next area of monsters (monsters being the goal, not the end or whatever).
If we ignore “shooter” as a category, I think “first person action dungeon crawler” is a good description for Doom, and “first person dungeon crawler RPG” is better for Akalabeth.
(monsters being the goal, not the end or whatever)
This is the only part I disagree with. Doom is about maps. The monsters are pleasant friction.
… at least in id maps. Slaughter maps and combat puzzles are a different story.
Right, but why do you want to get to the end of the map? To see the next one, which hopefully has new monsters to shoot.
The story fits with this. Basically, you’re a marine (no name) dropped on a Martian moon to secure a facility. His team is wiped out, so he goes in alone. The facility is apparently working on teleportation, so he battles demons through the facility and into hell. After that, a portal to Earth opens and he enters to fight more demons.
Some notes here:
- the Marine is never given a name, and you are never asked to provide one
- the goal is to get revenge, not to grow as a person or defeat some evil (though you end up doing that)
- there are no character classes, only weapons you find along the way
The character itself is completely forgettable, and there’s certainly no progression (you even lose all your weapons at one point). The game seems to go out of its way to distance itself from other games.
In an RPG, the character matters more than pretty much anything else. In Doom, I’m not given any reason to care about the character. Why am I doing all this? Because there’s baddies to shoot! That’s really all there is to it.
If it were an RPG, it would have some kind of persistent progression (levels, abilities, customized equipment, etc), as probably some kind of internal motivation for the main character (aside from simple revenge).
At the time, I wanted to get to the end because that’s how you beat the game. It’s like asking why you run to the right in Mario. The enemies there matter about as much as the enemies in Doom, and serve the same purpose in any action game: they’re lively obstacles. You don’t have to donk every goomba and you don’t have to blast every imp.
This is only important because a bunch of mid-00s shooters got it completely wrong. Painkiller in particular was a sequence of kill-em-all rooms. Spawn thirty dudes in a room, kill those thirty dudes, walk to the next room. The enemies were the entire point. There’s exactly ten levels like that in all of classic Doom… and that’s counting both Final Doom episodes. Only 10 levels out of 132 give one solitary shit about what you kill. Everywhere else - you don’t need to shoot anything. It’s just fun and useful to do so.
Goals do not tend to be optional. There’s a reason the end screen shows a percentage of what you could have done, but that figure has zero mechanical impact. Not even Gauntlet is about the monsters.
Just because you’re not obligated to kill the monsters doesn’t mean Doom isn’t about the monsters. The whole point of Doom is that you’re running through a facility and later Hell, both of which are swarming with enemies. You get to the next level to see what else the game is going to throw at you.
And Super Mario is more than just “run right,” the point is to save the Princess of the Mushroom people (original game manual PDF). But even that backstory doesn’t make Mario an RPG, because the point of the game isn’t Mario’s story, but the enemies and worlds you go through along the way.
If we look at the Doom instruction manual, we read the purpose here:
Your mission is to shoot your way through a monster-invested holocaust. Living to tell the tale, if possible.
There’s a backstory, but it’s pretty short and doesn’t really give you a real reason to engage with the character. You’re there to get revenge on the monsters who killed your platoon, and that’s about it.
And let’s look at Akalabeth. There’s a backstory, but more importantly there are stats: dexterity, strength, wisdom, and stamina. You get a random start, and can replay the same start by using the same seed. The game is all about the character, not the enemies or the world design. Yeah, it’s a dungeon crawler with simple combat, but the whole point is the character.
Therefore Akalabeth is an RPG since that’s where the focus is. Doom and Mario aren’t, they focus on something else (in Doom, that’s monsters, and in Mario, it’s getting to the end of the level (there’s a timer and reward for getting there quickly).
even that backstory doesn’t make Mario an RPG
… who said otherwise?
I’m clarifying my own position to make it clear that story != RPG. That’s it. I’m not claiming anyone is saying Mario is an RPG.
That’s an interesting idea. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment or perhaps I just have a poor conception of genres, but, IMO, one of the defining features of dungeon crawlers which seperates them from rpgs is that they’re, for the most part, randomly generated. It pains me to say it because it seems rather absurd, but I feel like RPG is actually closer.
Edit: I just finished watching the video. xD
ITT people not being able to see the differece between clickbait and a catchy title.
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Boomer Shooter?
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Honestly, when I first heard the term “boomer shooter” I thought the games were called that because of the amount of explosions they have. Ion Fury in particular is full of them. It a was a while after I realised that by “boomer” they basically mean “old”.
I think “retro shooter” is the much better term, though “classic” also works.
Yeah, a boomer shooter is like the original Asteroids, but that’s also a stretch because it didn’t come out until 1979, which is around the tail end of the Boomer generation.
When I was a teenager in the 90s I played doom with both friends of my age and of my parents generation. They would have been in their 40s but not really “old”.
Looking at the maths boomers would have been between 30 and 48 when doom became widely available in '94.
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My dad was born in 1947 and he loved Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, I always assumed that other boomers also loved the genre.
