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.
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.
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.