What do you think life be like if WOLF3d was made but not Doom?

Let grungo hypothesize and think "What if Wolfenstein 3D Existed, but Not Doom, ID Software just gave up on fps games" 

Me want here theorizes and thoughts of this alternate universal conundrum 

quake wont exist so half life wont exist so half life 2 wont exists so all its rip offs wont exist so portal wont exist so tf2 and ow wont exit so on so on so on

also we would still be playing damn commander keen after 10000 years

everything is the same except doom is now by blue sky productions and you have to drag medkits off the ground into yr inventory

I would hate to be in a universe where Doom never existed, but on the other hand, if it meant more Commander Keen, that might make up for it. Maybe.

9 hours ago, thelamp said:

JOHN: You know what? You're right, Tom. This game is too violent. Let's scrap it and get working on Commander Keen 3D instead

how hasnt someone done this yet???? (unless...)

Grungo has travelled from Neanderthal times to here, so maybe Grungo should visit those other timelines where Doom is not made

to see how it's like. 

Because someone had to post it.

I mean, that's the start of a whole chain of events that leads up to Steam not being a thing so perhaps we'd still be buying games in physical form? I dunno.

50 minutes ago, OniriA said:

Grungo has travelled from Neanderthal times to here, so maybe Grungo should visit those other timelines where Doom is not made

to see how it's like. 

Grungo can time travel, not traverse universes

38 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

I mean, that's the start of a whole chain of events that leads up to Steam not being a thing so perhaps we'd still be buying games in physical form? I dunno.

That's probably true, with Half Life on the Quake Engine and all.

It might be the first non-Japanese game to be a house-hold name, as well, not sure about that. It's easy to forget how niche any form of video gaming as an idea used to be. Halo 2 is probably best labeled the game that changed the industry I think, but it's not like Halo doesn't borrow from Doom religiously, if indirectly.

Arguably, Doom accelerated the awkward mid-90s transition to 3d.

Those of us who are older remember a weird period where cameras and controls were awful, and 2d games were under pressure to pretend to be 3d somehow (Sonic 3d Blast) or to be lush af (Castlevania SOTN). When Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released, its innovative "Z-Targeting" feature was seen as a huge leap over the "tank controls" that were then standard (Croc: Legend of the Gobbos).

I think Sega died because they jumped the gun on the full-3d era. The failure of Sonic X-Treme changed the whole history of gaming. In a 2d-first world, the Saturn is quite a strong system.

I think if it weren't for Doom we would have gotten a few more years of point and click adventures, and one more mainline installment of Sonic & Mario that were less ambitious -- maybe lush sprites with 2d gameplay and 3d levels.

The swansong era of late-90s hand-drawn 2d fighting games probably would have lasted longer too.

I think something like Doom was destined to happen one way or another, but there likely would’ve been a lot more Wolf 3D clones that would’ve had a bit more success than they did. Shadow Warrior began early development as far back as 1993 with Duke Nukem 3D not far off from then either. Without Doom I imagine both of these games still would’ve came out but would’ve been very different. 

We'd still see advancements and progress in games from then onwards, but in different ways. It's not like anything would halt if Doom never came out. Things would just evolve differently.

1 hour ago, Grungo said:

Grungo can time travel, not traverse universes

Easy, go back in time and kill John Carmack.

Then go back in time to stop yourself killing Carmack.

Nothing ill could come of this what so ever, I promise.

This forum would be called Wolfworld, and someone called Grungo would be posting asking what if id never made Wolfenstein 3d and decided they had peaked at the height of gaming excellence that was Catacomb.

Fuck yeah Catacomb Eternal.

4 hours ago, Grungo said:

Grungo can time travel, not traverse universes

Well you've already found out how to time travel apparently, despite being a Neanderthal.

The latter seems to be the logical next step. 

22 minutes ago, OniriA said:

 

Well you've already found out how to time travel apparently, despite being a Neanderthal.

 

The latter seems to be the logical next step. 

well grungo no make time machine, funny scientist man gave grungo machine

I imagine that the success of Wolfenstein 3D would have inspired id to top themselves. If not with a completely new game using idtech1, they might go with Wolfenstein Really 3D or Commander Keen 3D:Psycho Killer Edition. If we assume that, then it's likely that Bungie would have come out with their Marathon series or something like it, and bragged, "We have deep liquids, scripting, and other technological superiorities to that id stuff, so hook up with us!" And maybe the Amiga scene still would have given us my beloved Breathless AGA and Alien Breed 3D, which come to think of it, is kinda like a Commander Keen 3D, or Wolfenstein 3D itself, as the Alien Breed series was originally a top-down shooter and eventually evolved into an isometric game, IIRC. And along the way, it also became a GZDoom TC known as Project Osiris by Arcturus  that I love to promote;

So yeah, life without Doom would suck, especially for mappers and lovers of endless, high-quality free content, unless another id project would provide us with the source code.

Depends on if it's an "id still existed in basically the same form but for whatever reason chose not to make Doom" timeline or a "something catastrophic happened to id before Doom could be a thing" one.

I don't think an "id still existed" timeline would be terribly different, maybe they'd make Wolfenstein 4 or the Quake concept would've come forward in priority (and, perhaps, been more like the old vision that we had a glimpse of in the Commander Keen blurb?)  But the general concept of an id-style FPS would probably exist in some form, and we might even have something fairly similar to the Doom engine, just with a different skin and perhaps some altered features to better support whatever concept the game was built around.  I don't particularly think we would have got more (authentic, I know we like to forget Keen GBC was a thing but y'know...) Commander Keen regardless, every interview/insider story thing I've seen that touched on it suggested there was already some internal resistance with Adrian Carmack disliking working on it, and TBH I'm not sure the 3D Keen concept would have been good.  I suppose if anyone could have pulled it off, the id guys were good candidates to do it.

If id somehow broke up/one of the key members died/etc. then I can see gaming potentially taking a different trajectory with less of a presence of FPS games as we know them.  The number of "Doom clones" that tried and failed to recapture the magic even when having a model to work off of suggests to me that it wasn't all that intuitive a formula to just hit upon without the right combination of factors.  Some sort of 3D games would still be a given, since they were being attempted since the early days (the really early ones that were action-based rather than Wizardry descendants tended to be either wall-less space or open field games like Star Raiders or Battlezone, or else faltering attempts at "Pac-Man but in first person" which is a concept that doesn't work very well).  But they might be more along the lines of a focus on flight or vehicle games which were already doing action in a first person perspective with some success, or action-RPGs cropping up as some sort of bastard children of Eye of the Beholder and Wolf3D.  We may still have had Blake Stone (I'm not 100% sure how far along it was when Doom came out, and how much it borrowed ideas they were hearing during development?) and perhaps it would've been the model for a further generation of Wolf descendants.  The more "realistic" 3D military sim type of game would probably have eventually come about in some form regardless, unless we envision a world where 3D accelerator tech atrophied completely which seems kind of doubtful.

iirc Ken Silverman had begun work on Build Engine right after Ken's Labyrinth, though its well known he consulted Carmack for assistance. How the build engine would be developed is an interesting question without the doom engine to reference, nonetheless its likely Apogee/3DR would have beaten everyone else to the punch, though Bethesda was a possible contendor, unless id was developing something else.

Since Doom was inarguably the most powerful engine of its time, we'd assume the debelopment of a 3d Engine would.be delayed by around a year or so, and without Doom to make everybody go back to the drawing board, their features and quality might be different, potentially better or worse than Doom.

Nonetheless the arrival of Hardware Accelerated cards for the home PC and the PS and N64 would usher in develipment of full 3d engines but whether FPS would be the pioneering genre is an interesting question.

I mean, it's fairly obvious: Duke would've come along, blown people out of the water, and we'd be looking at 3D engines based on 3D Realms instead.

Maybe the original late 90s version of Prey would've happened. Who knows.

Don't forget there was an id engine between Wolf3D and Doom that produced Shadowcaster and In Pursuit of Greed.

I think the most pessimistic universe has the industry sticking with the tile based formula longer since there were a ton of such engines (even after Doom going through to games like Tomb Raider), but otherwise probably wouldn't look too much different in the long run.  It seems like a lot of the Doom style 2.5D engines have a lot of Doom/id influence on them one way or another, and I think one of the keys for id Software was just knowing that you can compromise on features and deliver a better experience (kind of an awkward sentence but basically Doom showed that that style of engine was viable and people don't care that it wasn't full 3D).  I don't know how much of an influence Doom was on Descent's development but it's possible that the progression would have looked more like tile based straight to full 3D.

They wouldn't have had enough money to continue feeding their cocaine addiction. They would have all gone to rehab and re-entered society as responsible job-holding adults instead of being grown men making video games and building rockets. They would have lost their virginity at a younger age and would have had sexual intercourse in a variety of positions instead of shoving drugs up their assholes.

It wouldn't be life then.

ah nah; We'd be looking at Rise of the Triad franchise being bought by Bethesda now...