Developer American McGee had to learn he was destined for goth greatness at some point, so why not during Quake 2's development? Somewhere around 30 years ago, he found out he was interested in telling stories through video games in a way his co-workers at id Software didn't care for, and it eventually led him to create my favorite, graveyard smash Alice games.

In response to a clip from his 2000 game American McGee's Alice on Twitter, the former Doom developer remembers the moment he discovered others at id Software weren't eager to use the studio's proprietary Quake engine for "proper cinematic storytelling."

The gameplay clip demonstrates what he means: it's from early in Alice, when the wayward girl gives into her anger at everyone who seeks to confine her, developing ram horns and an itchy red glow. The Rage gives her temporary invincibility, plus a firepower buff, and in the short clip, we see a player using it to demolish enemies in seconds. Then they push open a few squeaky doors and wander into a series of treacherous, floating puzzle sections characterized by black-and-white tiled floors, winding stone staircases, and the sneering Cheshire cat who delivers advice through insults.

"The proper order of things is often a mystery to me," he says at one stage. "You too?"

The game camera tracks Alice in different ways throughout all of it, to set different moods. It gets in her face when she's full of Rage, then it zooms out at odd angles when she's navigating a puzzle and disoriented.

McGee's interest in constructing a game this way – with emotional layers – he says in his Twitter post, traces back to "this one time at id Software when we were working on Quake 2 and everyone piled into [late video game artist] Paul Steed's office to check out what Valve was doing was our tech. And there was a cinematic scene with characters moving around while a crane operating and multiple cameras panning around to convey some element of the narrative. Proper cinematic storytelling using the Quake engine!"

"And I let out a breathless 'WOW,'" McGee continues. "The whole room turned around and scowled at me. Ha. That was the moment I knew, 'OK, well. I want to tell stories with this tech. And these guys don't.'"

McGee was eventually fired from id Software in 1998, though, he says in another Twitter post, "I have no idea why I was let go from id. In the meeting where I was told I was being let go, I recall [studio co-founder John] Carmack or someone saying something along the lines of, 'We feel you no longer fit in here.'"

That day, McGee "first cried," he says, then "I began smiling. Then laughing. And the first chance I was given to do something on my own with that tech? Well, I pushed it as hard as I could in relation to surreal visuals and cinematic storytelling. 26 years later and I can still say 'Wow.'"

Alice and its 2011 sequel Madness Returns, which McGee says "felt like magic" to make, stun me with their narrative and stylistic ambition. Plenty of developers have tried to imitate them in the decades since they were made, but the games are surely made with a secret recipe combination of fairytale horror and dizzy platforming that I don't think anyone other than McGee understands. That's why I nervously confirmed with him earlier this spring that he was working on a spiritual successor to the games – and why I'm overjoyed that he is.

Alice Madness Returns creator American McGee is making a spiritual successor, and he's not worried about EA: "There's a kind of obvious overlap, but not one that gets us in trouble with the lawyers."

Doom fans have a lot to look forward to in the upcoming DLC for The Dark Ages, according to game director Hugo Martin.

In a new Slayers Club livestream, Martin dropped a bunch of previously unknown information about the untitled DLC, which doesn't yet have a release date. The stream was almost two hours long, so there's no way to break down every little new detail, but suffice it to say, there's gonna be a ton of new stuff.

"It's massive," said Martin. "It's so big. Look, guys, I know that it's been ultimately a while since we shipped the main game and you're waiting for the DLC, but just know that it's freaking huge. It's basically like a sequel. I mean, that's what it feels like, it's just ginormous."

A lot of what was talked about in the stream is extremely vague, but I think the point Martin and senior community lead Joshua Boyle tried to get across is that the DLC will be mechanically very different from the main game. "The DLC is nothing like this," said Martin as he played the main game on stream. "What I've been playing [in the DLC], I haven't been playing like this."

In terms of specifics, Martin revealed that there will be a new spear weapon possibly tied to some sort of dash, leap, or teleport ability, but again, vague, vague, vague. Sadly, nothing was revealed about release timing for the DLC, but Martin said the teaser trailer is "a little ways out there."

Doom devs including John Romero respond to terminally ill fan spending his final days playing Doom: The Dark Ages: "You are not alone in that hospital room"

Despite revolutionising the FPS genre with the likes of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom co-creator John Romero's greatest love appears to be World of Warcraft.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Romero dived deep into the games on his PC. He revealed that his most-played game is none other than Blizzard's iconic MMO, saying, "I have probably 3,000-plus hours in WoW." Romero explains, "I lived in that game every day for five years. Six hours usually, every day. And then weekends were as long as I could stay awake."

As for where the obsession came from, Romero notes that "I was making an MMO at the time, and studying that game was really important to me as far as 'Why do I want to do this? Why am I putting up with this? What are you thinking about second to second while you're doing this?'" The love went so deep that Romero didn't even stick to one character, saying "I had 10 characters total. When you start a new character, you're starting the game from the beginning, but I knew how to optimize burning through. I could get to level six in half-an-hour."

Granted, World of Warcraft is somewhat universally beloved by MMO fans, the more surprising love of Romero's is one he describes as a game he'll never uninstall: Ubisoft's 2018 shooter Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Romero speaks about his love of the original game in the series, thanks to its approach to realism, "It's such a hard game, you know? You could get shot once or twice and you're dead."

But as for the poorly received 2019 release, Romero explains that after 20 years of the original "it was like "This is the new Ghost Recon game". [It's] open world, number one, hundreds of levels…in Breakpoint, [you can] get in a helicopter at night and fly up and just see all the different lights of every single installation in the place. It's insane the amount of content that's in that game, even though really they had to rush that thing out in a year and a half." So Ubisoft can rest easy knowing that at least one Ghost Recon fan likes the newest entry in the series.

John Romero awards John Romero "the most satisfying weapon in gaming history" award for Doom's Super Shotgun, and he's right

Employees from Doom developer id Software and publisher Bethesda are rallying around a terminally ill superfan who's choosing to spend his final days as Doom Slayer.

Reddit user Wanderingreader123 recently shared a bittersweet image of him playing Doom: The Dark Ages in a hospital room. In the post, he said he was diagnosed with cancer in 2022 and now has "possibly weeks" to live.

Wanderingreader said he's been a Doom fan since 2016 and has ripped through the reboot, Doom Eternal, and all DLCs, but due to financial constraints, hadn't played the latest entry, Doom: The Dark Ages, until the Toronto hospital where he's being treated bought a PS5 and the latest Doom game so that he could play from his hospital bed.

"I am currently blasting my way through hordes of demons in Chapter 4 and I have nothing but childish glee as I return to my roots as a badass Demon Slayer," he wrote. "I may not live to see the upcoming DLC, but I am nonetheless happy to finally play the game in my own hands."

"To the developers of ID Software, thank you for bringing such a beautiful piece of art that not only brought the FPS genre to its roots, but also revitalized and reinvented the wheel that no other game could," added Wanderingreader. "Not only that, but thank you for crafting such an awesome series for a fan like me.

"Rip & Tear, lads!"

My days are nearing and my local hospital allowed me any request. This is how I will go out. Rip & Tear, brothers and sisters. from r/Doom

Pinned to the top of the post are heartfelt responses from various members of the Doom development team, including Hugo Martin; director on 2016 Doom, Doom Eternal, and Doom: The Dark Ages; and series creator John Romero.

"I tell the team all the time, people care about our games, we have to put the same amount of care into making them," said Martin. "It has been the honor of our professional lives making these past three games for fans like you. To make the Slayer feel STRONG in DOOM, we infuse him with all the attributes of a true old school hero: we give him strength, courage and heart… we make him like you. RIP AND TEAR my friend. You are the real Slayer."

Romero said he's "moved and honored that you carried DOOM with you for a decade and chose to live in DOOM as your journey nears its end. You are the definition of bravery and courage. You are the reason DOOM exists.

"When we made DOOM, we wanted to create a world where you felt powerful even in the face of overwhelming odds," added Romero. "Knowing that it has been a companion to you, something familiar, something steady, something alive, means more to me than I can properly put into words.

"You are not alone in that hospital room. You are standing in a place millions of us have stood, fighting. Every enemy, every level, every moment matters because you do."

Bethesda community manager Joshua Boyle, who's appeared alongside Martin in official Doom livestreams for years, also stopped in to say he'd reached out to Wanderingreader via Reddit direct message. "Wanna see if we can do as much as we can for ya," said Boyle.

In the wake of these messages of encouragement, Wanderingreader expressed his gratitude and said it's "an extreme privilege" to be a part of the Doom community.

It's worth highlighting the outpouring of support Wanderingreader continues to receive from the Doom community. I found a few messages that are every bit as profound and thoughtful as the ones shared above, and I'd like to close with this one from user Temporary-Share5153:

"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rip & tear against the dying of the light."

Doom and Wolfenstein 3D may never have happened if a developer hadn't almost fallen out of his chair playing their poorly selling FPS Catacomb 3-D.

While Wolfenstein 3D is often considered the origin of popular FPS games before Doom then sent the genre into superstardom, neither were the first FPS that id Software made. Tank-based shooter Hovertank 3D was the studio's first dip into the genre, while Catacomb 3-D was the studio's first foray into a character-based FPS.

However, despite Wolfenstein and Doom becoming revolutionary titles that would define a genre, they might never have happened if id made more responsible financial decisions. id only made $5,000 on Catacomb 3-D – about "ten times" less than the studio's 2D platformer series, Commander Keen was making – but thankfully Adrian Carmack got a fright.

"One of my more cherished memories of making Catacomb was Adrian almost falling out of the seat when he turned around right in the face of a troll," John Carmack recalls in John Romero's documentary on the making of Catacomb 3-D (spotted by PC Gamer). While this could have simply been a funny memory of development, it actually proved to be more pertinent than you'd think.

"This is where we could tell we're starting to get it," John Carmack explained, adding, "This is the future of gaming, rather than looking at the little sprites moving around on the screen and maybe getting tense. But it was the sense of shock. That was the first moment that locked into my mind that we were really onto something in this new genre and style of play."

Adrian Carmack defended himself, saying, "It just automatically sucked you in visually. You couldn't help it," adding, "That was just one of the craziest things in a videogame I'd ever seen. We definitely knew that we'd found a new game style, a new game type."

And despite Catacomb not becoming a massive hit, Romero recalls "One night, we talked about how Catacomb 3-D was just the beginning of a new way to play games, and that the future was 3D." He adds, "Within an hour, we had decided what our next game would be: Wolfenstein 3D, the grandfather of first person shooters."

FPS legend John Romero says Doom is "one of the great privileges" of his life on the game's 32nd birthday

If there's anything gamers love more than playing video games, it's arguing about video games on the internet. Yet, every once in a while, a question comes around with an answer so obvious that it's tough to even put up a fight about. Like yes, obviously, Doom 2's Super Shotgun is the GOAT FPS weapon. Even legendary Doom designer John Romero isn't about to put up any false modesty about it.

The Twitter account for the revived Apogee Entertainment brand posed a straightforward question over the weekend: "What's the most satisfying weapon in gaming history?" Given the brand doing the asking, you probably wouldn't be too surprised to hear that most of the replies name classic FPS weapons, like Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun, Doom's BFG, or the Quake railgun.

But one weapon packing two barrels of destruction keeps coming up, and Romero put it in the simplest terms possible: "Super Shotgun." As our friends at PC Gamer note, the iconic Doom 2 armament is probably the closest thing to an objective answer this question can have. Iconic, powerful, and there nearly from the dawn of FPS history. You might have a personal favorite, but how can you argue against the Super Shotgun?

There's something a little Obama Awards Obama a Medal about Romero naming a weapon from his own game for this honor, but, well, he's right. And he's been pretty consistent about saying it. He responded to a similar prompt in 2023 to name the Super Shotgun the "most iconic weapon in gaming," and took the time to tell a fan with incorrect weapon opinions that "the super shotgun is the GOAT." There's no fighting with the legend on this, I'm afraid.

These are the best FPS games you can play today.

Doom designer John Romero has revealed that he almost co-founded another iconic studio instead of id Software, and we may have been calling him "System Shock designer John Romero" in another world.

1993 and 1994 would prove to be extremely important to the PC gaming landscape as two titles that would go on to define their genres dropped. I don't need to tell you the effect id Software's Doom had on the first person shooter genre, but then the next year LookingGlass Technologies' System Shock arrived and laid the foundation for the immersive sim that its sequel would then properly define (much like Doom did to Wolfenstein 3D's foundation).

Well it turns out things could have been much different for both studios. Speaking to Nightdive Studios (via PC Gamer) – who remade System Shock back in 2023 – id Software founder John Romero revealed that had he not made a promise a week prior, his career would have been very different. Romero said that while working at Origin Systems, his coworker Paul Neurath "had asked me before I left if I wanted to start a company with him, and I told him that I'd already promised the week before to found a company with my manager."

The studio Neurath founded, Blue Sky Productions, would later become LookingGlass Technologies, which in turn created the System Shock and Thief series. Nightdive's Larry Kuperman then points out how wild it would've been if John Romero had instead gone to work with Warren Spector, to which Romero reminds him they were coworkers at Ion Storm, where Spector directed Deus Ex, and John Romero made "you his bitch" with Diakatana.

"So much of DOOM’s soul is down to heavy metal": FPS legend John Romero says "without Ozzy and Black Sabbath, I am not sure it would have been the same."

Doom co-creator John Romero has paid tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, citing the metal genre's influence on the game.

If there was ever a game that felt like a distillation of heavy metal (aside from Brutal Legend, which is very literally that) it's Doom. The cover art by Don Ivan Punchatz is one of the best metal album covers of all time – if you ignore the fact it's not for an album – and the game itself feels like an album come to life.

So it won't shock you to hear that Doom was heavily inspired by the genre, which is widely considered to have been created by Black Sabbath.

Following Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne's passing earlier this week, id Software co-founder John Romero took to Twitter to pay tribute to the pioneer of metal.

"So much of DOOM’s soul is down to heavy metal, and without Ozzy and Sabbath, I am not sure it would have been the same," Romero said, adding, "Certainly, I would not have been the same. Metal gave a voice to a whole generation of kids that didn’t fit in for one reason or another. It still does."

While never appearing in a Romero game, Ozzy Osbourne has had numerous appearances in various games, with his music featured in titles such as Madden, Rock Band, WWE 2K, and GTA over the years.

Plus, he actually appeared in Brutal Legend (which was recently made free in honor of Osbourne), in which he played the fitting role of the "Guardian of Metal," and Guitar Hero: World Tour as a playable character along with his songs Crazy Train and Mr. Crowley.

Pac-Man and Tetris are "the two most important games of all time," says Bethesda lead Todd Howard, with Doom and Super Mario Bros. standing as the most "influential."

Of all the best retro remakes and reboots of old games, Shadow Labyrinth might very well end up as one of the strangest. A dark and gritty sci-fi game about cruel enemies, all the while being empowered by the dark, eldritch horror known as… er, Pac-Man? Yes, Shadow Labyrinth is a reboot of the Pac-Man franchise that seems to be inspired by games like Hollow Knight, Metroid and Inside, among other things, and certainly one of the more unique new games to come out in recent memory. I can't say anybody saw it coming, but I suppose you should credit developer Bandai Namco with not being too obvious and wanting to keep things fresh. Personally, I can't wait for the boss battle with a giant cherry.

But Shadow Labyrinth is only the latest in a grand history of retro reboots that went out to reinvent the games they were building on. Some of these stumbled hard, like Metroid: Other M falling short of the best Metroid games, or the 2002 Space Invaders remake "Space Raiders" best being forgotten. But there are some success stories! In fact, some of the best games in recent memory have been new takes on the supposedly "untouchable" classics.

With that in mind, I've been going back through my library of games to enjoy all the great reworkings and modern twists on old classics out there, the 5 best retro remakes and reboots, or at least those sequels that found new angles on what came before. Though for the sake of this list, I'll be considering "retro" as anything that came out 20 years ago or more. If that slaps you in the face with the cruel reality of the merciless passage of time, so be it.

5. Tetris 99

Developer: Arika
Platform(s): Nintendo Switch

It shouldn't work. It couldn't work. "What if Tetris was a Battle Royale Game" sounds like some silly meme, and yet the end result is undeniably entertaining. With nearly a hundred players all furiously building walls at each other like competitive bricklayers, there's something completely absorbing about the sheer frenzy of it all.

If you've got a Switch online subscription, you can get this one for free, and it's definitely worth a try on that basis alone. That being said, maybe brace yourself for a brutally tough playerbase – after having been out for several years at time of writing, those remaining are likely to be some very stiff competition.

4. Wolfenstein: The New Order

Developer: MachineGames
Platform(s): PC, Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, PS3

The Wolfenstein franchise has had multiple reboots and remakes to various degrees of success, but it's the New Order that easily takes the gold. Focusing on a whole new alt-history continuity where the Nazis win WWII with space-age tech, hero B.J. Blazkowicz becomes head of the resistance and begins fighting back in colorful locations all across the world – and even beyond it.

Yes, the New Order is a gleefully fun and ridiculous game – to the extent that one mission has you fighting fascists on the moon while dual-wielding shotguns – and yet it's really well-written in a way that can be incredibly affecting, with character development being a high point in our Wolfenstein: The New Order review. Despite his capacity for extreme violence, Blazkowicz is a soft-spoken protagonist who seems permanently (and understandably) exhausted by his exploits, and the supporting cast is all robustly written too. Not to mention that you can actually play part of the original Wolfenstein in a hidden easter egg!

3. Pokemon Heart Gold and Pokemon Soul Silver

Developer: Game Freak
Platform(s): Nintendo 3DS

Let's get this out of the way: Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal, the second generation, are the best Pokemon games in the core franchise… Or at least they were, until Heart Gold and Soul Silver basically just improved over them in every way possible. This is arguably the only regular remake on this list, rather than a full reboot, but to be honest, HG/SS builds so expansively on what came before that they feel like a bona fide elevation.

As games go, these are complete fan-pleasers. You want quality of life improvements that don't compromise the core experience? You want your Pokemon to follow you around like they did in Pokemon Yellow? How about having your Pokemon follow you around in real life, with the attached Pokewalker device? I tell you, if Game Freak wants to win people over, just port these to Nintendo Switch 2 – it'll be the easiest fortune they ever made.

2. Doom (2016)

Developer: iD Software
Platform(s): PC, Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch

The 2010s were just a really good time for reimaginings of classic FPS shooters, perhaps none greater than Doom (2016), a game so good it launched a new era for Doom games that's still ongoing today, and arguably helped to inspire the bouncier, faster-paced era of shooters that supplanted the heavier, more realistic military ones before it.

Doom (2016) is a game so cut down to basics that it's both deeply refreshing and completely hilarious. The Doom Slayer is basically the Tasmanian Devil, a vortex of endless violence who wakes up, starts murdering demons, and does nothing else for the next fifteen hours. Fighting first across a Martian space base before venturing into hell itself, there's never a moment where you doubt that you're the most dangerous thing on the battlefield, submitting anything the slightest bit infernal to atrocities that even they would probably consider a bit much. Still, that's part of its charm, and one of the reasons that our Doom review gave it full marks.

1. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Platform(s): PC, PS2, GameCube, Xbox

Did you forget that this one wasn't the first? The original Prince of Persia was a supremely retro step-platformer that came out in 1989, for the Apple II computer! The legendary 2003 reboot for the franchise immediately became a contender for one of the greatest games ever made, and Sands of Time has managed to hold onto that crown and stay in those discussions ever since.

A fluid and wonderfully charismatic game with a great gimmick, Sands of Time blends parkour, combat, and the ability to play with time seamlessly together, while also featuring a great story and developing romance behind it all. A highly anticipated remake has been in development hell for years, but if you can find a copy for PC or an old PS2 to play it on, you'll still have a great time with it even now.

Feeling old-school in your tastes? You can check out the best PS2 games right here, or go even further back with the best retro games!

Doom The Dark Ages is finally in the hands of players who wanted to spend extra cash on the premium edition of the game, with the actual release date being tomorrow, May 15. Id Software has gotten out there to answer questions about the game ahead of release and to warn players of potential bugs and glitches found in the game. One of which has the most Doom-like solution possible.

In an FAQ posted on Steam , the developers answer a number of questions about the game, such as if the Steam Deck is supported (sadly, no) or if the game requires a Bethesda.net account to play (also no), before going into known issues.

In Doom: The Dark Ages, once you fully upgrade a weapon, you are given "Mastery Challenges," which require you to pull off feats with the gun to unlock something special. For the Shotgun and Super Shotgun, these challenges are "Barrel Stuffer" and "Super Barrel Stuffer." These require you to hit demons with every single pellet of a shotgun blast a number of times.

The issue is that smaller demons crumble under the power of the shotgun, so id Software has devised the most Doom-like solution possible, simply saying, "Try on Heavy and Super-Heavy Demons for more consistent progress."

A lot of Doom: The Dark Ages' combat encounters have you get up close and personal with the demons you're fighting anyway thanks to the new parry system, so if you're struggling to get the Barrel Stuffer, running right up to a massive Mancubus and blasting away at its belly is the optimal tech for now – but given that the problem is listed as an issue, it's probably safe to assume you'll be able to get it by hitting little demons eventually.

Make sure to read our full Doom: The Dark Ages review to get our verdict on the new Doom game

Doom has been going strong for decades, but the upcoming entry, Doom: The Dark Ages, is looking to switch things up by taking us to a Lovecraftian dimension known as the Cosmic Realm and giving us a gun that fires a melee weapon. It's rad.

In a new trailer and gameplay showcase, game director Hugo Martin reveals the new world of the Cosmic Realm. It's got trippy, "Cyclopean architecture" that shifts around and flying squid things – it's definitely got that Lovecraft feel.

"An unholy union between Hell and the Cosmic Realm has been formed," so that explains why the Doomslayer needs to go there and kick some butt. This means there are twisted new foes to face off against, like the Cosmic Baron, which has two bladed arms and can unleash psionic projectile attacks if you try to fight it at range.

Luckily, it and other enemies can be parried with the new shield to open them up for a counter attack. There's also a Kaca demon, which, to be honest, looks like a floating brain with tentacles. It would be at home in Bloodborne.

To help you dispatch these demons is the new Reaver shot, a gun that fires a large metal ball attached to a chain that can recall it. It's awesome. Its light attack simply targets one opponent, but its heavy attack can whip around to hit multiple at once. It looks like a great new piece of kit.

Martin calls Doom: The Dark Ages "the best Doom game we've ever made," and says "we gave this everything we've had, we've left no feature unpolished." There was originally going to be multiplayer added, but the team scrapped it to ensure the single-player mode could be as good as possible.

For now, check out all of the best FPS games available to play.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a pseudo-Christian, science fiction hell pit seeking to challenge the overwhelming violence of the amoral Doom series after three decades of mayhem – or something, I don't know, I just watched its new trailer wholly soaked in lore, and now my brain is pulsing.

"The makers felt a weapon as powerful as the Slayer," a narrator says Doom protagonist, "should be guided." We watch as knightly Slayer – crowned in a medieval-ish silver helmet rather than his usual modern military green – is imprisoned and bound in chains of lightning.

But when a Diablo 4-ass demon king plans to grow his power in Hell, the Slayers' wardens request a mysterious Bishop Creed to "launch the Slayer." This is the point where you start bursting fat aliens' brains out with monstrous guns, or breaking their eight limbs off with a ball-and-chain flail.

"I can never rule as king," the demon growls at you, "so long as you are the only one they fear."

Based on this trailer alone, Doom: The Dark Ages looks set to be an intense Game-of-Thrones-in-space experience, which pairs well with the skull-cracking, wet gloom of every other Doom game.

But, as someone whose favorite aspect of Doom is zooming around maps like a werewolf while I listen to Nine Inch Nails, I'm a little hesitant about The Dark Ages' apparent number of cinematic cutscenes.

id Software studio director Marty Stratton, though, tells Edge magazine that the developer is now focusing on lore because many fans have been invested in the series' story. Plus, id Software has "data that shows that, in Doom Eternal, an extremely large percentage of people who play through the game watch the cutscenes."

Now that I think about it, I guess I do watch Doom cutscenes, too. I'm just also listening to Nine Inch Nails and eating a hamburger.

Doom director claims The Dark Ages can be beaten without using a gun, but "the game's not necessarily built to do that."

Steam has added another genre tag to the digital storefront, this time officially recognizing the old-school "boomer shooters," as games about booming and shooting surge. 

The boomer shooter moniker simply refers to retro shooters (Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein) and the waves of modern games, usually indies, built in that style (Dusk, HROT, Turbo Overkill.) They're sometimes characterized by their nostalgic pixelated/voxelated art, sometimes by their labyrinthine levels, and always known for how furiously you can blast baddies.

Steam’s latest genre tag has given the boomer shooter some newfound validation since, for years, the title has been a little controversial around online forums, mainly because Doom and other 1980s shooters were more likely played by Generation X. But I guess the "OK, boomer" meme makes the term easily understandable. How about Doomer Shooter?

Andrew Hulshult, the composer behind several throwback shooters including the excellent Dusk, shed some more light on the term’s origins in a recent social media post. "The term 'boomer shooter' was a lovingly cheeky term we saw used when developing Dusk as a description for Doom," Hulshult explains. "So we ran with it because it was funny. It would go on to be associated with an entire genre of shooters. Today it’s a category on Steam. I love this reality."

The boomer shooter, erm, boom will certainly expand in the coming years thanks to the storefront’s new tag. You can head over to Steam’s Boomer Shooter section to find all those trigger-happy games that make you feel like you're ice skating around demons. Among them is one of the best Warhammer games ever made and the spell-slinging Hexen, a classic that Phil Spencer wants to see return now that Microsoft owns Activision Blizzard. 

For now, check out the best FPS games to get your classic fix. 

It's just over 30 years since Id Software launched Doom onto an unsuspecting world. Famously, the studio decided to make it available by uploading the shareware version onto the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin, immediately crashing the institution's entire network. This was just a hint of the chaos this seminal first-person shooter would wreak. Sure, Doom wasn't the first FPS and it wasn't the first game with online multiplayer, but it innovated in so many ways, it was so fast, so advanced, so imaginative, so violent, that it changed the games industry forever. 

Sitting here in (almost) 2024, the age of photorealistic 4K visuals and 1GB broadband connectivity, it's tempting to believe that Doom has long since faded into irrelevance. But that's not the case. In his recent autobiography, Doom Guy, John Romero lists the set of design rules he laid out for the game while the team were working on it. Playing the very latest shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, it's clear that most of the those rules are just as relevant to the FPS genre as they ever were way back in the mists of time (i.e. 1993) – especially in terms of online multiplayer modes. The ghost of Doom still lurks in the burned-out corridors of Modern Warfare, and I'm going to show you where.

Doom with a view

First of all, let's think about map design. Doom's levels were primarily built for the single-player experience, but they had a very compact, non-linear structure. Players often had to double-back and re-explore old areas to open locked doors. Indeed, one of Romero's Doom design rules was: "Reuse areas in the level as much as possible, as it reinforces the understanding of the space every time the player goes through an area again. For example, if players come back to a central hub before going out to a spoke, they will remember the hub the most." 

While modern single-player campaigns tend to be almost entirely linear, this principle still lives on in multiplayer maps. Most are designed around two core archetypes: three-lane maps, which have a trio of parallel channels leading from one end of the map to another, and circular maps, where a central hub is surrounded by concentric orbital routes. Some maps contain elements of both.

It's really interesting to look at how similar these modern maps are to Doom levels. Let's look at two examples side by side. First, we have the opening level of Doom; and second, we have Highrise from the Modern Warfare series.

Notice how they're roughly the same size, and how they both have a central hub surrounded by smaller, winding channels. Both adhere to Romero's principle of reuse, of encouraging players to memorise and constantly renegotiate the space, creating their own routes through the alleyways, tunnels and open hub sections. How we behave in MW maps is exactly what Doom speedrunners were doing 30 years ago. 

One of the key principles of multiplayer map design is over-watch – the provision of hidden elevated positions with long sightlines from which cunning players can watch (and snipe) unsuspecting enemies. On Activision's Call of Duty blog, multiplayer design director Geoff Smith explained how and why these areas were reintroduced into 2019's MWII maps: "In our previous games, we would have these power positions, and those got boiled out of the game due to concerns about 'head-glitching' or camping. But that was the kind of special sauce that made Team Deathmatch work so well; that you have a power position and you actually have an advantage by having a line of sight and people would gravitate toward you."

This idea of gaining visibility over players elsewhere on the map was there right in the earliest stages of the Doom design process. "I remember we were barely starting to get multiplayer working," says Romero. "But I was finishing off a level design and I visualised looking through a window into another room and just thinking about two people out there throwing rockets and plasma rifle shots at each other. I thought, there's nothing that can be better than this. Blowing away a guy who's fighting another guy. We saw that the network gameplay, no matter how it's connected, was the critical must-play part of the game."

Stick 'em up 

Weapons are another area where Doom's blueprints live on. Its standard guns – the pistol, shotgun, chain gun (basically an LMG) and rocket launcher – all remain in the FPS arsenal, but more importantly, the way they were designed to fulfil different and lasting roles in the game had lasting ramifications. "Doom really expanded the vocabulary of FPSs," says Romero."It defined a lot of the rules, one of which was extremely important for all modern games, which is in the weapon selection. Every weapon in Doom is always useful.

You do not wipe out the previous gun because you got a better one. In Wolfenstein, that's not true – as soon as you get the chaingun, every other gun is useless. But in Doom, every gun is totally valuable, and that was one of the most difficult design and balancing exercises: to get the weapons different enough that you had to choose one depending on what you were doing. None are ever eliminated."

The facets that made Doom work so well are continually being rediscovered by new designers. For the re-imagined Modern Warfare maps, both Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer have prioritised fluidity of movement through 3D space. Players can climb up scenic objects such as air conditioner units onto previously inaccessible roofs, they can mantle over walls, they can slide across floors and then fire their weapons immediately, they can opt for Covert Sneakers and sprint unseen and unheard for long distances. The new games are all about uninterrupted motion. 

This is exactly what John Cormack was going for when building the Doom engine. "You're always moving forward," says Romero. "It was critical that the engine was super smooth – the speed of the acceleration, the amount of friction it took to stop moving, the strafing speed, the mouse movement being rock solid. It was just the feel of the movement through that space." It's also there in Romero's first rule of multiplayer map design: "A player should not be able to get stuck in an area without the possibility of respawning."

Doom took the audio as seriously as the visual elements of the environment, and this is another vital element that still influences FPS titles today. Id Software used sound to enhance the sense of impending battles. You hear monsters before you see them, often from nearby rooms; you hear doors opening and closing. These give vital clues to the player – just as footsteps and gunshots do in Modern Warfare. Doom was one of the first games to introduce the concept of spatial audio as a strategic element. 

"[It was about] setting up that environment to feel like you're under threat," says Romero. "Hearing sounds off in the distance that something is coming, that kind of thing. We had a little bit of that in Wolfenstein beforehand, but with Doom, we purposely put those wandering sounds in so players could hear them moving around and be scared to hear it. Coming up with that palette of playability and gameplay was really critical."

The chances are a majority of Modern Warfare III players have never seen the original Doom running on a 386 PC in 320 x 200 resolution – the way it looked and felt thirty years ago. But you can buy it on Steam for a couple of quid, or try the homebrew update GZDoom. Graphically, it's hopelessly dated in a lot of ways. But the feel of it – the speed, the guns, the player movement, the design of the maps, the drama of player-vs-player engagements in dark corridors – all those elements still work. The rules Romero shared with Id's designers and programmers hold up. In fact, Romero is still using them - as well as a lot of the original Doom code - in his next project, the spiritual sequel, Sigil 2. Doom is to games what Halloween is to slasher movies – an inescapable blueprint. You can run from it, but even after 30 years, you can't escape. 

Here are the best FPS games you can play right now 

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said he'd be "all in" when it comes to revisiting the company's "trove" of IP.

Speaking during the Official Xbox Podcast, Spencer discussed the recently closed Microsoft Activision deal and reflected on the company's other IPs. "When I think about Activision Blizzard King, you add in Bethesda, you add in Xbox's history, Rare - like the amount of franchises that we now have in our portfolio is kind of inspiring, it's daunting. I feel that we have to be a great custodian for the content that we touch," Spencer explains.

"When you look across all of the franchises that are part of our teams, there's an opportunity for us to go back - even if it's just to recognize the moment and what those things meant in gaming's history and do something right with it," Spencer continues, "If teams want to go back and revisit some of the things that we have and do a full focus on it, I'm going to be all in on that. I think there's just an amazing trove of things that we can go and touch again."

Using Id Software's Quake 2 remaster as an example, Spencer explains that the team behind the 2023 title "did a real good job revisiting a game, making it current, but also not leaving the history behind," noting that he'd "love to see more things like that." The Xbox exec also mentioned games like Raven Software's Hexen as well as Activision's Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk series' but didn't reveal any future plans for any of these franchises. 

Elsewhere in the same interview, Phil Spencer pledged "100% parity" across Call of Duty in an attempt to reassure PS5 players. Addressing not just PlayStation players but also Nintendo fans (Microsoft did sign a deal to put Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles for 10 years, after all), Spencer said: "I want you to feel 100% part of the community. I don't want you to feel like there's content you're missing out [on]." 

Find out what's definitely in the pipeline with our upcoming Xbox Series X games list. 

The original Zelda has been transferred to virtual reality via the power of Doom.

Yes, not only can Doom be played on virtually any interface in history, but it can also be used to play other games entirely. In the creation just below, for example, we can see one enterprising Meta Quest 2 headset user has utilized id Software's classic shooter to remake The Legend of Zelda entirely in VR.

The actual act of playing the Zelda VR port comes via the player swinging around their sword to throw out fireballs at enemies they're aiming at. Their isn't really much sword combat per se, like you'd typically associate with The Legend of Zelda games, but there are, at least, some fiery balls of destruction instead.

You can still use the original Zelda's shield ability to block incoming attacks though, vital for surviving boss encounters. The player even pulls up a dungeon map at one point in front of them, closely examining the layout of the cavern to decipher where they are and where they should be headed.

This is all just the initial level of the original Zelda game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, as the video closes out with the player obtaining the first piece of the Tri-Force. We don't know if this user plans on remaking the full game in VR, but it could be well worth paying attention to their future exploits.

If you've never played the original Zelda game, it's worth noting you can take a stab at it right now via the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service on the Switch, as well as a bunch of other classic NES games.

Check out our guide to the best NES games of all time to see which ones you need to play first. 

Update - November 16: In a new statement, Bethesda called Mick Gordon's allegations "one-sided and unjust" and asked Doom Eternal fans to "refrain from reaching conclusions" based on his account alone. 

Original story follows...

Shortly after the Doom Eternal OST released in the wake of the game's launch in March 2020, players could tell that something was wrong. Back then, composer Mick Gordon declined to comment more than to tell PC Gamer that "I take a lot of pride in my work. It's all I do, it's all I have and I pour my heart and soul into it." Now, in a lengthy Medium post, Gordon alleges that the OST has been the subject of a lengthy legal back-and-forth between himself and representatives of iD Software parent company, Zenimax.

Throughout that post, Gordon alleges significant crunch in the development of the game's original soundtrack. He claims that he was asked to provide two level scores a month, but that audio teams were reluctant to approve music as levels were rarely complete. With Doom Eternal's soundtrack sticking closely to the player's actions, it was extremely difficult to commit to audio until late in development. Gordon describes months of overwork, exacerbated by the outright rejection of some scores, requiring four tracks, instead of two, being provided the next month. By the time the game shipped, Gordon says that he'd "delivered more than double the minutes stated in the contract," but wasn't paid anything extra.

Things got worse when, at E3 2019, iD Software announced a Collector's Edition of Doom Eternal set to contain an OST that Gordon claims was not in production at the time. Gordon claims that efforts to expedite that production schedule were rebuffed by executive producer Marty Stratton until the issue was escalated to Bethesda. In those conversations, which took place in March, Bethesda allegedly told Gordon that he'd receive a bonus if he could provide a 12-song OST by April 16.

Gordon says that on April 3, with less than two weeks before that deadline, Stratton contacted him to say that the April 16 date was now a hard deadline, as consumer protection laws could mean that buyers who didn't get the OST by April 20 would be entitled to full refunds. At the same time, Stratton revealed that another developer, lead audio designer Chad Mossholder, was working on an alternative version of the soundtrack. Metadata purportedly accessed by Gordon revealed that work on that project had begun in August 2019, despite later claims that it was a late decision.

Just before the deadline, Gordon's work was scrapped, replaced with a much longer OST that Gordon considers "wasn't up to standard". In an attempt to rectify that situation, Gordon alleges that he and Stratton agreed to a joint statement, after he declined to "take ownership" of the mistakes that he claims were made by Mossholder. A draft of that statement "never arrived."

Instead, Gordon says Stratton took to Reddit, with an open letter discussing "increasing concern[s]" in Gordon's ability to deliver the OST to deadline, among many other claims. Gordon describes this post as "an extensive series of lies that blamed me entirely for the failure of the DOOM Eternal OST", saying that it was "littered with lies and disinformation which directly contradicted the actual events and contractual clauses". Due to Stratton's seniority within the studio, he continues "nobody thought [he] would go out on a limb and post a series of false accusations on Reddit".

Despite distancing himself from the release on social media, Gordon claims that the post has led to notable harassment, and also says that Zenimax offered to settle when Gordon got lawyers involved in the issue. The deal at that time was that "they would pay me the money owed, but on the condition I produce a new, polished version of the DOOM Eternal OST." Gordon's counter-proposal, however, made it clear that he would be unhappy working under the "shadow" of Stratton's post, and asked for it to be taken down. Zenimax allegedly didn't accept those terms, and instead withdrew the settlement offer.

According to Gordon, however, the company's next move, was another settlement - "a six-figure sum in return for taking full public responsibility for the failure of the OST." Under those terms, Stratton's post would stay up, and Gordon would be forbidden from ever speaking about Doom, the OST, the post, or ever saying anything negative about any Zenimax studio or employee. Gordon declined those terms, and now alleges that further attempts to address the issue have been met by stall tactics from Zenimax. In a tweet last summer, Gordon says that he has made "many, many offers" to fix the OST, but none have yet to have been accepted.

Gordon also says he's posting his version of events as an attempt to "move on" from a "toxic client", and that "the truth is more important" than the "hush-money" settlement he was offered by Zenimax. 

We've reached out to Bethesda, iD's parent company, for further comment on the post.

2026 is offically here and we have some very exciting upcoming Bethesda games to keep track of, with new entries set to come our way for the studio's biggest and beloved RPG series. From a sequel to Skyrim with the next Elder Scrolls, to a new Fallout game, there's a lot here to look forward to - even if we are going to be in for quite the wait.

Last year was a very busy year for Bethesda, with them having a hand in releasing some of the best games of 2025, including Doom: The Dark Ages and the shadow-dropped Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. We also recently even saw them make it onto the Switch 2 with a new Skyrim Switch 2 Edition hitting Nintendo's latest-gen console. And, finally, Amazon's Fallout season 2 was released, sparking a new wave of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remaster rumours with it.

But looking ahead to the future and what has been fully confirmed past the rumour mill, it's great to know the studio is working to bring us follow-ups to some of its best RPGs. So while we wait for even more news and updates, here is a handy guide to keep you updated on the latest at Bethesda. Below, you'll find a helpful recap of everything you need to know about all of the upcoming Bethesda games confirmed so far.

Upcoming Bethesda games currently in development

TBC

Elder Scrolls 6 

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Release date: TBC (potentially 2026)
Platform(s): TBC

Over the last decade, Skyrim has enjoyed immense success, with the fantasy RPG finding its way onto almost every platform imaginable over the years. With so much love for Elder Scrolls out there among players, it's no surprise that another installment is in the works. That's right, we are getting The Elder Scrolls 6!

First announced with a short teaser officially confirming its existence with a title reveal in 2018, very little is known about Elder Scrolls 6, as the team's main focus has been on Starfield, which launched back in 2023, and was followed by the Shattered Space expansion. While reports have popped up over the years since the release of the initial 2018 teaser, we've seen not seen much of the game, and we may well be in for quite a wait for the next Elder Scrolls game to arrive yet.

Fallout 5

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Release date: TBC
Platform(s): TBC

As one of the longest-running IPs now owned by Bethesda, another Fallout entry has always been on the cards. In fact, even before it was addressed by Todd Howard, seeing a Fallout 5 someday felt inevitable, given the success of Fallout 4. We don't yet know much about our return to the post-apocalyptic world.

However, we know that Bethesda is working on The Elder Scrolls 6 first, and that it takes them roughly five years to make a new Fallout game. With that in mind, if The Elder Scrolls 6 were to very optimistically release in, say, 2026 (but that seems less likely by the day), we would be, in theory, looking at a 2030 release date for Fallout 5. All that's to say, this one is far out, but it's exciting to know we have a new entry to look forward to. While you wait, you can reflect back with us on the best Fallout games.

Marvel's Blade

Developer: Arkane Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Release date: TBC
Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series X/S

Bethesda is on board as the publisher for the upcoming Marvel game, Marvel's Blade. Originally announced in 2023, it's been some time since we had a major update on the project. But despite the lack of news, the game is still very much in the works. Deathloop and Dishonored developer Arkane Studios is leading the charge on the new vampire title, and we'll likely see them venture into new gameplay avenues with Blade.

While we only have a cinematic trailer to go off for now, we expect that Blade's gameplay will be stealth and combat-focused, given the nature of the Marvel Comics' character. After all, Blade is a master martial artist and gunslinger.

Look ahead to future releases with our roundups of all the most exciting upcoming PS5 games and upcoming Switch games on the way. Or check out all the new games for 2026.

To celebrate QuakeCon 2022 kicking off today, a bunch of classic Bethesda and Id Software games are now available on PC Game Pass.

As Bethesda revealed on Twitter, a total of six legacy Bethesda games have made their way to PC Game Pass: Wolfenstein 3D, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 4, Quake Champions, An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. There's also an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate bundle that unlocks all characters in Quake Champions.

Alongside these Game Pass additions, there's a sale going on offering some seriously juicy discounts on more modern Bethesda games like Deathloop (60% off), Ghostwire: Tokyo (50% off), Doom Eternal (60% off), The Elder Scrolls Online (70% off), and loads more. You can head to Steam to see the complete list of PC discounts or open up the PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch stores to see what's available across different platforms.

As we mentioned earlier, the online-only QuakeCon 2022 got started today with a jam-packed schedule full of streams covering games like Redfall, The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76, Ghostwire: Tokyo, and, of course, Quake. There's also a Fallout 4 charity run, a PC building show, tournaments, and a whole lot more planned. 

Head to Twitch to tune into the show or check the full schedule to see if there's anything you need to add to your calendar. Fun fact: QuakeCon originally started life as an internet chatroom in the early 90s, so it's cool to see how much it's blossomed in the three decades since.

Here are all of the new games of 2022 we can't wait to get our hands on.

The idea for QuakeCon originally came from an internet chatroom between fans and developers who wanted to play iD Software’s games together. 

As detailed in issue 227 of Retro Gamer, QuakeCon was born in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) room in the early 90s. Run for fans, by fans, the iD Software specific chat room was mainly used for people to discuss the likes of Doom and Quake during the early years of the internet. However, what many fans didn’t know back in the day was that developers from iD Software - such as John Romero and Christian Antkowoften - often lurked in the chat and sometimes even talked with players. 

"It blew people’s minds," long-time fan and chat room moderator David 'Wino' Miller says. "Somehow it got out that the developers hung out in that channel and it blew up from 100 to around 1,000 people just waiting to hear a developer jump in and say something about the game."

This, according to the Retro Gamer story, is how QuakeCon initially got its start. Following the IRC room popularity, it was suggested that Quake fans should organise local area network (LAN) party - which, for those of you too young to remember what a LAN party is, was simply just an in-person get together to play games online via dial up - which is how the first QuakeCon was born back in 1996. 

The first ever QuakeCon took place in the La Quinta Inn in Garland, Texas, with around 40 attendees. Which is quite the jump considering the last in-person QuakeCon - held in 2019 - instead featured more than 10,000 attendees. David, who with a few others organised the first event, reminisces in the Retro Gamer story explaining: "I didn’t think a lot of the hotels knew what we were asking for and what kind of power issues we needed." 

According to David, "the network was not a sophisticated network. Before ethernet became the standard, we had a different one called BNC. The problem with that network is when one person disconnects from it, the whole thing goes down. Games would stop. Tournaments would die. That happened a couple of times during the event."

You can find out more about the history of QuakeCon in issue 227 of Retro Gamer - pick up the latest issue of Retro Gamer here. 

Id Software's parent company, ZeniMax, has posted a raft of new job vacancies, sending the rumor mill into overdrive, with many speculating that the new hires may be working on a new Quake game.

A leap? Ordinarily, maybe. But ZeniMax has emphasized that the new positions – which are based at id's Dallas studio in Texas – will be supporting "the development of a long-running iconic action FPS", as well as reference "sci-fi and fantasy environments".

So: what could that "iconic action FPS" be? Well, given Avalanche leads on the Rage franchise and Wolfenstein is currently in the hands of Machine Games, that leaves just Doom and Quake under id's potential management. But given the former franchise only released its latest installment last year – and "sci-fi and fantasy environments" seem more fitting with Quake… well. You can see why Quake fans are excited. 

That's not all, though. It's an important time for Quake given the second game celebrates its 25th anniversary next year, and the enhanced edition of the original game has only recently been released, suggesting the franchise might be on the priority list for new parent company, Microsoft. Of course, there's no way to know for sure – I suspect ZeniMax won't be confirming any time soon – but hey, it's fun to dream, right?

ICYMI, that enhanced edition of the original Quake is now available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Nintendo Switch. There are updated visuals, online and local multiplayer, and new content available, plus two expansions for the original game - The Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity - are included in all purchases. You'll also get the Dimensions of the Past and the brand new Dimension of the Machine expansions, too.

"I knew the game was going to do really well," John Romero told us earlier this year, reflecting on how Quake came to be. 

"For a whole year before it came out, there were articles all over the place and magazine covers – everyone was waiting for Quake. People knew it was going to be the next thing. So it was great to have that kind of hype. When it came out and everybody was playing it, it was great for me because I was putting together a new company, and you always want to have a success when you're trying to do that. 

"The negatives were that I didn't actually get any money from Quake because I was gone, but the positives were that I got to leave after making a really successful game." 

Did the updated version of Quake make it onto our list of the best FPS games?

Following the news that Quake is being enhanced and re-released for modern platforms to celebrate the 25th anniversary of this legendary shooter from id Software, we thought some of you might like a little history lesson. This making of Quake from the pages of Retro Gamer explores the turbulent development of an FPS classic.

While many gamers didn't become aware of id Software until the release of the firm's genre defining IP Doom in 1993, it had actually been developing first-person shooters for several years before the arrival of its breakthrough title. Furthermore, prior to id's formation the company's founders had spent close to a decade in games development honing their respective skills on an impressive number of releases. 

After conquering mainstream gaming with Doom, id next produced a well-received sequel in 1994 with Doom 2 and, buoyed by the follow-up's success, the nine-man team moved on to their next project – Quake – with a belief that they were unstoppable, as id co-founder John Romero recalls. "We had been making games for over 10 years before Wolfenstein, so we were already experts before we got together," Romero beams. "We used to make games in two months – we made 11 games in 1991. so we were fast. Wolfenstein was four people, and it took us four months to make. We got Doom done mostly with only five people, and then we got a sixth person during the last few months. With Quake, there were only nine of us, but by that time everyone on the team was awesome." 

Lovecraft calling

Beyond Quake's striking name, the well-oiled machine known as id further differentiated its latest concept from the Doom franchise when one of Romero's fellow designers introduced him to the Gothic horror writings of cult author H. P. Lovecraft. "Sandy Petersen was a huge H. P. Lovecraft fan," Romero remembers. "I had heard his name, but I thought he was just a classic writer. Sandy basically said: 'Oh, no, no.' He gave me these Chaosium books, and when I read them I was mind-destroyed; I was just blown away by the monsters. so Quake was very inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, as I'd just been exposed to him." 

But in order to do justice to Lovecraft's nightmarish fiction, Quake's newfound aesthetic would need to be underpinned by cutting-edge tech, as Romero and his Quake team soon became aware of. "The idea was that we were going to have a full-3D engine that was on the internet and was scriptable in its own language," Romero explains. "We had never done this before, so it was a big technical undertaking, and since we were doing so much new with this engine we thought: 'Well, what can we do that's new in game design? Let's not tie ourselves to what we've done in the past with military themes, but maybe get closer to D&D with Quake'." 

However, the sheer complexity of building the tech for Quake resulted in a situation where its engine continually evolved over the course of a year, which hardly helped Romero's efforts to manage the game's design process. "There were ideas of abstract environments – medieval type stuff – but there wasn't any written-down design for Quake during its first year," Romero says of the game's initial design push. "So by November the team was really burned out trying to make a game that didn't really have an identity. They were making a lot of levels and having to delete them and start over because the engine was getting better. But when we got to the end of November, the engine was ready, and so now we could actually design a game around it." 

With Quake's underlying tech finally in place, Romero was ready to move on from what he viewed as R&D into full development and to create a game design that matched the innovation of id's recently completed engine. Unfortunately, his exhausted design team felt otherwise. "We had a big company meeting to decide whether we were going to slap Doom-style weapons in and make it a classic FPS, or experiment with some new game design ideas," says Romero. "Some people in the team just said: 'You know what? I'm broken, and I can't do it anymore.' They wanted to just throw Doom-style weapons in there and call it a day. I mean, obviously we were going to make them as good as we could, but we weren't going to be pushing game design in a new direction. So, when that decision was made, I basically decided that I was going to be leaving when the game was over." 

One last ride

But far from letting this decision sour his approach to Quake's design, Romero instead tried to inject the maximum innovation possible into the project's best level designs, all while respecting the framework established by previous id first-person shooters. "Basically my job after that meeting was to design the game around what we had at that point that made sense and was good," Romero considers. "The guiding light was that we had four 'dimensions' – each one designed by one of the designers. so i designed something very similar to what the game came out to, but a more complex version that had more story elements. But after a month or two of us cranking out levels, I had to simplify it even further because of how long it was taking us. So I basically had to ditch the RPG stuff and just make it a pure shooter." 

Of course, without the story elements that Romero had intended to connect Quake's wildly differing levels together with, the developer was left with something of a design challenge, which he ultimately resolved by making his game's hero an inter-dimensional, time-travelling soldier. "I was like: 'Ok, we need to tie all these episodes together somehow; somehow you're going between episodes,'" he says. "'Well, why aren't you a military dude?' and if you were a military dude you needed to be in a military environment and to leave that military environment to enter these 'dimensions.' So I was like: 'I need to come up with a teleporter for this game that doesn't just take you to somewhere in space, but somewhere in time to different dimensions.' So I came up with the name 'slipgate,' and told the artists: 'this is what i'm building. Can you make textures that fit this?'" 

Undeterred by the back-to-basics approach forced on Quake's design process, Romero opted to focus on the innovations made possible by the game's highly impressive engine, and in particular its ability to render truly three-dimensional environments. "The goal of Quake's level design was that we needed to explore verticality as much as possible," Romero enthuses, "so you could be under a bridge but be on top of that bridge later. That was a massive change from anything that we had done before, so designing vertically was really important. I had a rule for the designers that if they created a room in Quake and it could be replicated in Doom then they had failed. Every room needed to show the dimensionality of the engine. We were forcing the player to worry more about the environment on multiple planes, instead of like with Doom where your plane was always the horizontal. We were pushing players into the next dimension by enforcing a vertical design." 

Equally cool creatures were also being created for Quake, with aesthetics inspired by the macabre imagination of author H.P. Lovecraft, including a living thunderstorm that id dubbed the shambler. "We likened it to an arch-vile in Doom," Romero continues. "He was basically a really tough monster in the first episode – the real boss was Chthon at the end. The shambler was still really tough in the other episodes, but we gave him away in the first episode, not as a boss but as a mini-boss. We gave the player the shambler to go against because maybe they would think that it was the boss, but then we really showed them what a boss was in Chthon." 

One of the most obvious outcomes of Quake's vertical level design came in the form of platforming challenges, which Romero and his team integrated into their game's core objectives of continually powering-up and completing levels by finding their exits. "Even on the very first level, you got into a dark room where you were coming down ramps, and there was one hundred health up there. the only way to get it was to do some crazy platform-hopping," Romero says of an early vertical challenge in Quake. 

"There were little pegs sticking out of the walls, and if you could jump from peg to peg and get all the way up there you could get the health. There was another level with a room that had these pieces of stone that came out of the wall that you had to jump up the sides of the wall on. It was like going up stairs, but you had to platform jump to get up and out of the room." 

More sophisticated platforming standards followed as the Quake team implemented impressive set pieces spanning everything from retracting drawbridges to deadly elevators. "One of the things that we got to do in Quake was take the player on a ride," says Romero. "So they could walk onto a platform and it would just start moving. One thing that I did was take them in an elevator. When they pressed the button they were locked in, it started going down and it took them underwater, and all of a sudden they started dying. It was perfectly timed for them to come up out of the water at the end and pick up health, but they were panicking the whole time because they didn't know what was going to happen!" 

Romero's elevator ride was far from Quake's only use of an underwater environment; in fact, the Quake team filled their game with sub-aquatic challenges. These favoured gameplay over realism and allowed players to be as trigger-happy underwater as on land. "The only limitation was that if you had the Lightning Gun underwater you were dead if you used it – unless you were invulnerable," he says. "Gameplay was totally a priority. The only difference was that you moved a little slower than on land. But no one would have wanted to go in the water if we had lessened their ability to shoot the weapons. So it made it way more fun to be able to just do what you did on land." 

This thinking also followed through to Quake's hidden areas and levels, which were as likely to be found at the bottom of murky lakes as in equally obscure above-water locations. "Putting secret areas in the game made it replayable," argues Romero. "It made it so players would search all over the place and spend more time on the levels, which would help them understand them more. Typically, we hid the next most powerful weapon in a secret area so that you could get it early. There was also an exit to a whole secret level somewhere, and if you could find that exit then you had found an entire level of cool stuff." 

Creature comforts

Given the threat posed by Chthon, not to mention Quake's other nightmarish bosses, it must have been tempting to demand legendary firefights of players in order to defeat them but, as with previous design decisions, Romero chose innovation over expectation. "Chthon was unlike any boss that we'd had in any of our games," he says. "He was a huge lava creature that you couldn't just shoot to death, you know, you had to actually use lightning against him. so you were using the environment against the boss. Shub-Niggurath was the ultimate 'how do i kill that thing?', which you did just by paying attention to the environment and what was going on, and trying to figure out how you would kill him." 

Unlike Quake's bosses, the game's less challenging opponents could be shot to death, although the weapons Romero's team designed for their game included a couple of particularly visceral bullet-free options. "The nail-gun was one of the first weapons that we created," Romero reveals. "We hadn't seen one in a game, and we were joking around that it would be hilarious to just shoot nails at people! The axe was basically because in the first design you were going to be hatcheting characters. So the axe was a holdover from the medieval design, and the nail-gun was a holdover from the experimentation during the medieval phase." 

An equally gruesome but more elemental instrument of death followed, as Quake's medieval origins prompted Romero to dream up a gun that fired bolts of lightning. "I thought it was different and powerful because of the way that you could hold people up in the air with it," he continues, "and you could use it really fast. The really cool thing for me was how it could be like a BFG as well. I thought: 'Well, if it affects everyone in the room, what if you jump in the water and discharge and that blows up everyone in the water?' We didn't have anything like that, and it felt like a really good way to make a multi-function weapon." 

In order to compliment Quake's imaginative set of weapons, Romero and his design team also devised a range of power-ups, including one to enhance the weaponry that subsequently became synonymous with Quake thanks to the arrival of the game's box-art. "Originally, it was just going to be a rune that had 4X on it," he says. "It gave you whatever your weapon's damage was times-four for 30 seconds, and that was it. Then when we got the Quake logo it obviously had to be 'Quad Damage' because of the 'Q.' So we made that model. The Quad was like: 'What if we could do the Berserk from Doom, but on everything?' With Doom, you picked up the Berserk pack, and from the time you picked it up until you were dead your fist would destroy stuff. So my thought was: 'What if you could pick up something that gave you crazy amounts of power like the Berserk for every weapon you had, but on a 30-second timer?'" 

Tearing id apart

In the months following id's final changes to Quake, the game released to positive reviews that only fell slightly short of the dizzy expectations created by the pre-release buzz that had surrounded the game. Quake did go on to sell in its millions, however, regardless of the critical response, although Romero stuck to his decision to part ways with id Software, and so didn't see a penny of profit for his work on the title. 

"I knew the game was going to do really well," says Romero. "For a whole year before it came out, there were articles all over the place and magazine covers – everyone was waiting for Quake. People knew it was going to be the next thing. So it was great to have that kind of hype. When it came out and everybody was playing it, it was great for me because I was putting together a new company, and you always want to have a success when you're trying to do that. The negatives were that I didn't actually get any money from Quake because I was gone, but the positives were that I got to leave after making a really successful game." 

John Romero remains equally philosophical about his last, and arguably greatest, id FPS when asked for his thoughts on Quake now, although the fact that the developer's hopes for the game were repeatedly scaled back is still a matter of some regret, as is the knowledge that Quake was essentially responsible for breaking up the original id team. "I would have had a more cohesive design and spent more time during 1995 getting a design down that was more solid and could have improved upon the FPS instead of just making another FPS," Romero admits. "It also really needed to have better weapon balance, with more focus on the weak weapons. But I'm super proud of Quake; I think it's a great game. It's just too bad that it tore id apart because it was so hard to make. After Quake, within six months of its release, half the company was gone."

An unreleased Super Mario Bros. 3 port for the PC has been obtained by the National Museum of Play.

As first reported by Ars Technica yesterday on July 13, the museum has managed to obtain the incredibly rare unreleased port from id Software. This port was first assembled by id Software in 1990, before the developer had even released Doom, and was intended to enable Super Mario Bros. 3 to run on MS-DOS PCs.

Previously, this PC port of the NES classic has only ever been referenced, never seeing the light of day. According to Ars Technica's report, it was first revealed in 2003's Masters of Doom book, and would then be seen running for the first time in 2015, in a video released by id Software co-founder and lead designer John Romero.

The National Museum of Play Digital Games Curator Andrew Borman tells Ars Technica that it was actually a game developer who donated the unreleased demo to the museum. Borman reveals that the developer in question, who remains unnamed, never actually worked on the demo itself, but they instead "received it" during their work, for some unknown reason.

The demo itself is said to be a pretty early prototype from developer id Software, and certain features lack polish, as you'd probably expect from a PC port of a game that was released earlier that same year in 1990. It's revealed that Borman himself has played levels 1-1 through 1-4 of Super Mario Bros. 3 himself, but the curator never elaborates on just how much of the Nintendo classic game is featured on the demo disc.

Going forward, Borman revealed that the demo will actually be available to researchers upon request. There might not be any current plans to actually exhibit the unreleased PC demo of Super Mario Bros. 3 anywhere in the National Museum of Play itself, but it's fascinating that the demo has resurfaced after all these years, and that researchers and other academics might even be able to play the demo for themselves.

If you're interested in Nintendo's storied history, head over to our Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island retrospective for more.

An Id Software project codenamed Project 2021B has been rated by the Australian Classification Board, and naturally, fans of the studio have all sorts of theories about what it could be.

You can check out the listing here, but there isn't a whole lot to parse through there. Project 2021B is rated M for "violence" and "online interactivity," which is pretty much just modern-day Id Software in a nutshell. It's listed as a multiplatform "computer game," and it's being published by Zenimax Europe.

Curiously, its code name is very similar to Project 2021A, another Id Software game rated by the same board back in January which ended up being Doom 3 on PSVR. On the surface, that seems to suggest the new Project 2021B is something else Doom-related, but in actuality, Id Software could just use a similar template for codenaming its various projects.

There are a couple of key differences between the two ratings. Notably, Doom 3 VR is rated R18+ for "high impact violence," which is two whole levels higher than Project 2021B's Mature rating. It's also, obviously, a VR game, while Project 2021B is listed as multiplatform. In summary, whatever Project 2021B is, it appears its violence isn't as "high impact" as Doom 3 VR, and it probably isn't a VR game.

On to the theories, of which Resetera and Twitter users have a combined few. Some folks are keen to note that the 25th anniversary of Quake 2 is coming next year, which could mean Id Software is working on a remaster, a collection of ports for new-gen hardware, or something else Quake-related. With QuakeCon 2021 happening in August, the mysterious Project 2021B could be unmasked relatively soon.

Or, since it does share a similar codename to Project 2021A, it could be another Doom port, maybe of the OG games considering the lack of "high impact violence." Or maybe, just maybe, as fans are speculating, Id Software could throw us a wild card and reveal a new game from one of its other series, like Rage, Wolfenstein, or Commander Keen. Only time will tell.

Until we know for sure what Id Software's up to, check out our guide to all the (confirmed) new games of 2021.

Id Software executive producer and Doom Eternal director Marty Stratton has revealed that the Doom development team has talked to Nintendo about bringing Doomguy to Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Speaking to Metro, Stratton was asked to comment on the rumors about Doom Slayer coming to Smash Bros. Ultimate, to which he replied, "I don't know. We've asked them." Stratton continued:

"We’ve had… I don’t even know who talked to who, but we’ve bantered with them. We have a great relationship with them through bringing Doom 2016 to Switch and that kind of stuff. So we have great people over there but it’s one of those things where it’s like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool?’ But it’s never gone anywhere serious, so we’ll see."

Stratton clarifies that id Software haven't been asked for the rights to bring Doomguy to Smash Bros., but says they're open to the idea.

It's hard to imagine a character we're so used to seeing covered and surrounded in blood come to Smash Bros., and quite frankly I'm worried about the innocence of fighters like Pikachu, Villager, and Bowser Jr.

Just a couple of days after Stratton made the comments on Doomguy and Smash Bros., Nintendo revealed that Fire Emblem's Byleth would be the next Smash Bros. Ultimate roster addition. A recent leak says the next fighter coming to Smash Bros. could be none other than Crash Bandicoot.

Still looking for your main? Here's how to unlock every Smash Bros. Ultimate character and how to win with every character.

id Software president Todd Hollenshead has departed after 17 years with the company. Hollenshead was formerly CEO of the studio which produced the Doom and Quake franchises, though his position changed when the company was bought out by Bethesda parent ZeniMax Softworks in 2009.

"After many years with the studio, Todd Hollenshead decided to leave id Software to pursue other personal interests," Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines told IGN. "While Todd was not part of the development teams, he was an integral part of id Software’s success as the business head of the studio and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors."

id's had a rough couple of years since joining the ZeniMax family: long-awaited shooter Rage was poorly received and Doom 4 has reportedly mired in development hell for years.

Doom 4 is in its own special Hell on Earth--development hell. Kotaku reports that the first new game in id Studio's core franchise since Doom 3 in 2004 has been revised several times over five years of development, with little to show for it today.

Kotaku's sources say the game is now targeted for next-generation consoles, with no known release date.

You should check out the full story for the gorey details on Doom 4's troubled development--from a lackluster Call of Duty approach to RAGE issues when the two teams combined. id Software confirmed that the long-awaited horror shooter has been rebooted at least once.

“An earlier version of Doom 4 did not exhibit the quality and excitement that id and Bethesda intend to deliver and that Doom fans worldwide expect,” Bethesda said in a statement. “As a result, id refocused its efforts on a new version of Doom 4 that promises to meet the very high expectations everyone has for this game and this franchise. When we’re ready to talk about the Doom 4 id is making, we will let folks know.”

Despite only being eight years old, Doom 3's decidedly brutal and unforgiving approach may well lead some newer gamers class it as a bit creaky these days. Having just played the new Gamescom demo of the new and upgraded BFG Edition though, we’re as impressed as we ever were. Moreso, in fact.

It’s smooth, it's slick, and – exacerbated by some excellent surround sound headphones – still damnably scary. In fact, particularly for console gamers, it's likely to be the best it's ever looked or played. While the original Xbox port was a nicely executed 'quart into a pint pot' conversion, the 360 version is every bit as accomplished as the original release, which obviously required the best of everything when it first appeared on the PC in 2005.

The demo allows 3D viewing, although we were playing it through a ‘passive’ 3D display (the polarised kind you get in the cinema, rather than the more expensive active shutter set-up) , which apparently requires a much greater effort to set up to secure the optimal viewing distance. After a bit of a faff, we did get it working and discovered it runs at a decent lick of speed, although not quite the wonderful 60fps of 2D mode. So we switched back.

In 2D mode, however, the game positively shines. Sure, it’s made up of about 80% shadows, but if shadows could shine then... Anyway, the relentless attack of zombies, hell hounds and floating demon heads is a startling reminder that games these days have made us weak from all that hand-holding. The demo has loads of weapons unlocked and ready to roll, from a meaty but slow-loading shotgun through to plasma rifle and frag grenades.

So confident are Bethesda that their console versions are up to scratch, they don't even have the PC version present at the show. The console version runs at a frightening pace. And there’s something about the always-powerful atmosphere that’s still evoked by the now slightly blocky rendering of hell that makes Doom 3 feel as fresh and new as it ever did.

We can take or leave the 3D. As is often the case, it doesn’t have much real effect on the overall experience. But seeing the game ported so expertly to the Xbox 360 suddenly makes us wonder whether pushing the envelope is really necessary any more. Old graphics with strong production and atmospheric design can still look sensational. And of course, after years of Halo-style regenerating health bars, getting down to your last 2 points of vitality without a free recovery in sight is a tautly compelling experience all over again.

You’re fighting for your life, in the dark, against teeth-gnashing demon babies, with absolutely no help in sight. And we’d forgotten how great that is.

The great-grandaddy of first-person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D, today celebrates its 20th anniversary.

Released in 1992, the game gave rise to a fledgling studio of plucky young upstarts called id software, who later went on to make a little game called Doom. (Perhaps you've heard of it?) While that game is perhaps the better known of the two, Wolfenstein 3D is considered the birth of the genre that continues to be the cornerstone of gaming to this day.

To mark the occasion, Bethesda is giving away the entire iOS version of Wolfenstein 3D for the princely sum of naught. Ziltch. Free. Go ahead, download the entire game right now and shoot Nazis on the bus. Don't have an iDevice? No problem, just head here to play the game in your web browser. Everybody wins!

Also, be sure to check out Bethesda's special video podcast, which sees John Carmack revisiting the game and explaining the design process. It's an insightful watch.

Question is, does Wolfenstein 3D still hold up today? Or is merely a dusty digital relic? Let us know in the comments.

August 2-5 the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas will host QuakeCon 2012, the world’s largest BYOC (bring your own computer) LAN party. Attendance is free, hotel rooms are discounted, and there’ll be computers to be shared by those without, thanks to id, Bethesda, and all their sponsors. Who knows what great prizes and announcements will come out of the ‘con? Maybe id will finally have something concrete to say about Doom IV?

In addition to multiplayer madness, QuakeCon offers panels with influential id software employees like John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead. If you need further convincing to get your ass to Dallas, check out above highlights from last year’s QuakeCon. To truly stay updated on all things Quake, follow QuakeCon on Twitter and Facebook.

If you’re serious about going to this thing, you’d better book a hotel room now. The Hilton Anatole Hotel is offering a discounted rate of $154 a night, and the QuakeCon site has plenty of reservation info. Remember to pack plenty of rockets, nails, and body armor, and if you see John Carmack, could you ask him when we’re getting Doom IV?

PlayStation 3 owners finally have their chance to try out a level from id Software's Rage, whose post-release demo hit Xbox Live last month. While the game's been out since October, a preview's a preview if you haven't played the full game yet – and it's not like graphics technology has rendered Rage's post-apocalyptic flair any less impressive in the weeks since release.

Above: The demo's combat section was previewed back at E3

Just like the Xbox Live demo, this preview sees players explore the game's Wellspring area to meet the locals, try some racing action, and clear out the murderous clan of psychopaths threatening to poison the town's water supply. As anyone who's played Rage knows, this sequence comes a ways after the game's tutorial and initial stages, giving new players a chance to experience what id's shooter is like once the training wheels come off. North American players can download it now; if you're in Europe, it'll be available by day's end.

Do a bit of digging and you'll come across some delightfully unsubtle references to id Software’s previous entries to the FPS canon. Poke around the Ghost Hideout area and before you know it, you'll find an amazing RAGEnstein 3D Easter egg that’ll take you back 20 years to a time of primary colors, freaking huge pixels, and no texture pop-in problems...

It's not surprising that id would pepper Rage with shout-outs to its own back-catalog: the game represents the company's first new IP in a genre it was largely responsible for building, after all. Many references are subtle – a bobblehead here, an “Ultra-Violence” achievement there – but diligent searching will put you on the breadcrumb-trail to some far less oblique callbacks.

Above: This? This is nothing

The game also contains rooms themed after Doom and Quake – if you want to spoil the hunt for yourself, click those links and take a look. What game references have you found in Rage so far?

Oct 6, 2011

The power of friendship can move mountains. It can also greatly increase your odds of surviving a brutal attack by the Shrouded clan in Rage. See how id Software's end-of-days FPS will handle the co-op experience this October in its latest gameplay video.

Planning to team up on the PC? Bethesda today revealed the system specs required to keep Rage running at a good clip:

Minimum:

- OS: Win XP SP3, Vista, Win 7

- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo or Equivalent AMD

- Memory: 2GB

- Hard Disk Space: 25GB

- Video Card: GeForce 8800, Radeon HD 4200

Recommended:

- OS: Win XP SP3, Vista, Win 7

- Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad or Equivalent AMD

- Memory: 4GB

- Hard Disk Space: 25GB

- Video Card: GeForce 9800 GTX, ATI Radeon HD 5550

- Rage erupts for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on October 4^th in North America and October 7^th in Europe.

Sep 8, 2011

Sponsored content

You only need to look at the select list of key id Software titles below to understand why the developer has something of a legendary status in the world of video games.

With the likes of Doom and Quake to its name, the studio is considered the father of the modern day first-person-shooter and creator of the multiplayer formula that has made the FPS genre the most popular on the planet.

The chaps at id Software will be the first to point out that they created the iconic Deathmatch but they aren't the kind to rest on their laurels. Instead the developer has managed to produce a spread of industry changing titles throughout its lifetime making it one of the most important studios in gaming history. Here's why.

After making technological breakthroughs in the side-scrolling platform genre during employment with Softdisk, id founders John Carmack, John Romero and Tom Hall independently produced Commader Keen, a Mario-style side-scroller for PC.

And it's that Mario style that was so significant. With Commander Keen, John Carmack had managed to develop a game engine that could replicate smooth, scrolling platforming that was synonymous with Nintendo's NES system. It was an effect that had never been achieved on PC before.

But id Software was also making waves in terms of distribution as well. There were six episodes of Commander Keen in total, with the first one being released free as shareware with a previously unheard of try-before-you-buy concept.

Although id made some pioneering breakthroughs in psuedo-3D first-person gameplay with the likes of Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D in 1991, it's Wolfenstein 3D that many today recognise as the game that popularised the FPS genre.

Inspired by the Wolfenstein games of the 1980s, Wolfenstein 3D saw players gunning down scores of Nazi soldiers. But while the original Castle Wolfenstein had a strong stealth element, Wolfenstein 3D focused on visual prowess, fast-paced action and a requirement of quick reflexes that most gamers would claim to own today but were only on show in the arcades at the time.

Wolfenstein 3D was distributed using the same shareware model as Commander Keen and was a big commercial success.

If you're wondering how Space Marines became such popular protagonists in video games, you probably need look no further than Doom. Taking the role of an unnamed soldier in a sci-fi world of grotesquedemonic monsters, this was where id's popularity soared as the studio kicked the FPS genre into the stratosphere.

While it may have built on the foundations of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom is id Software's most important title.

It pioneered key elements of the modern day FPS that are now taken for granted. Immersive, 'realistic' pseudo-3D graphics, the birth of the Deathmatch and co-op in networked multiplayer and customisable modding opportunities? You can direct your thanks towards Doom.

The fact that it is still a household name today and thoroughly played by a passionate and well established following only emphasises its significance.

With id's path clearly set thanks to the megaton impact of Doom, the sequel was little more than an evolution. There were no major steps forward in terms of technology or gameplay other than some minor structural changes to level design and the inclusion of new monsters and the double-barrelled Super Shotgun.

Don't you dare dismiss Doom II though. In 1994, more of the same was exactly what fans wanted and, with the sequel breaking away from id's usual shareware distribution routes and moving into shops, it was also a massive commercial success.

If you've ever found yourself at the mercy of a multiplayer FPS veteran, one grizzled gamer who seems able to hit a headshot from a hundred miles away, it's safe to say he cut his teeth on Quake.

Although Doom had its own multiplayer offering, it was in 1996 that the gamer's passion for twitch-based frag-fests online and all the kudos or ridicule that came with it really took off. The unique manoeuvrability in Quake contributed significantly, with techniques like bunny-hopping and strafe-jumping adding extra tactical dimensions.

Elsewhere, while Quake clearly borrowed a lot from Doom in terms of style, it made significant advances technologically. The transition to fully 3D graphics over 2.5D visuals was made, polygonal characters replaced the sprites of old and new lighting techniques made for an all round more impressive display.

Quake II, published by Activision, is the sequel to Quake in name only. The title was used by id Software after it had trouble acquiring the copyrights to use a different title.

In terms of single-player, Quake II departed from the original in style by bringing more narrative elements into play and story playing a more significant part more generally.

Mission-based objectives and basic cutscenes between levels contributed to the player's progression through a linear storyline while Quake was organised into four 'episodes' visiting different dimensions with around eight levels each.

While the technological advances between I and II were minor, the latter did feature some slight flourishes such as enemies sustaining visible wounds after being attacked. Oh, and players had the ability to crouch, if you can call that a technological advance.

Again, although Quake III carried on many of the stylistic and mechanical elements of its predecessors it isn't considered a sequel to either game in the franchise because of its focus on multiplayer.

The single-player section of the game offered the same maps and modes as multiplayer, the only difference being that real life opponents were replaced with bots. Although an outsider may have seen this as a step back in the franchise in terms of content, the Quake audience was and still is a multiplayer audience at heart. For them, stripping back Quake only provided a purer medicine for their fragging addiction.

The game was praised by reviewers for its smooth playing, addictive nature and visual prowess thanks to a couple of graphical additions. Quake III saw the introduction of curved surfaces to the series, for example, and was one of the first games to feature separation animation sections for heads, bodies and legs on enemies meaning they could look around. Very handy.

Quake III Arena probably boasts the biggest cult following in the id library today, with many still considering it one of the seminal multiplayer experiences, choosing to return to it over all this fancy new 'Duty Calls' or whatever the kids are playing these days.

Commercially speaking, Doom 3 – a reboot of the franchise - is id Software's most successful title to date.

Reviews were somewhat mixed about how well Doom 3 maintained the core feel and principals of the original Doom duo. Although the game aimed to retell the Doom story it made changes to certain aspects and included cutscenes, giving the player's actions a narrative context.

In terms of feel id toned down the fast-paced and frantic shooting action somewhat in favour of a more tense atmosphere drawing on the game's horror aspect.

Most, however, agreed that the leap forward in graphics compared to id's prior output was undeniable.

The power of John Carmack's id Tech 4 engine is still plain to see at a glance even today. Id had managed to innovate once again with a lighting system that vastly improved visual presentation. Lighting and shadow were unified for the first time and in many cases computed in real-time.

Soon the long wait for id Software's latest offering to the FPS genre will be over with Rage set for release on October 7.

Once again the studio looks set to outdo itself graphically with Rage being the first game to make use of the new id Tech 5 engine.

But there's more. Although shotguns and headshots will be the most anticipated and scrutinised aspect of Rage, id will also use the new title to try its hand at driving mechanics as players are given vehicles to bolt around a pseudo-open world.

More chopping and changing is on the horizon for the father of the modern-day FPS then, and hopefully plenty more innovation as well.

August 15th, 2011