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Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

If you played other games at the time, there wasn’t really anything else like it. Wolfenstein and similar existed, but Doom was a significant advancement. Us lowly console players were many years from anything similar.

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I still feel Marathon was at equal level, even surpassed it in several areas. And released maybe a couple of months after Doom.

But it was only known by Macintosh gamers at the time.

In which ways I feel Marathon was better:

- better light effects

- ability to look up and down

- secondary effects on various weapons

- deep story (done through interactions with computer terminals)

- variety in physics based on levels and weapons (e.g. grenade launcher) is affected by physics

- having to deal with oxygen depletion in some levels

- some AI that aids you (defense drones that support your fight against the aliens)

- more variety in level objectives (e.g. prevent humans from being killed by aliens)

- more comprehensive multiplayer (I believe Doom supported 4 players; Marathon supported 8 - Marathon has more types of multiplayer games than just Deathmatch).

I think Jason Jones [0] was probably at an equal level as John Carmack at this point in his career.

A deeper comparison between the 2 game engines can be found here: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/78805-marathon-vs-doom...

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Jones_(programmer)

Sounds like an example of releasing a good product on a relatively unpopular machine.

Marathon was better on paper, but as far as visceral gameplay experiences go it lagged behind Doom quite a bit

Despite it having more or less the same graphics tech it's a very different game. It's slower paced, more atmospheric, and with more story. The story in doom was a single page of text after beating each episode. Marathon had in-game computer terminals where they drip fed the story of the Marathon and its AI that was going "rampant" (interestingly Microsoft borrowed that idea for Halo 4, the first one that Bungie didn't create).

Yeah, I had heard of Marathon but never watched any gameplay. Watched some stuff on YouTube and it's not nearly as entertaining as Doom, imo.

Playing the limited shareware release of Doom the very first time in single player mode was already incredible, but it was the multi-player mode that was mind blowing.

It would be fun to see a graph with sales stats of NE2000 clones around that time. They were the cheapest Ethernet expansions boards at the time, and one of the few that Doom supported.

Most of the Id games were significant advancements (up to Quake at least); in addition to Doom, the other major revolutions were:

- Commander Keen (smooth scrolling)

- Catacomb 3D/Wolfenstein 3d (pioneered ray casting on PC)

- Quake (introduced full 3d worlds)

As a side note, Terminator: Future Shock ([1]) had 3D enemies in '95 - but still 2D-sprite explosions and weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator:_Future_Shock

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II still used 2D sprite explosions and weapons in 1997. Was Terminator: Future Shock true 3D? I seem remember it used the Daggerfall engine which was 2.5D.

First generation 3D games were kind of a mess IMO. They usually hadn't figured out the controls yet and polygon counts were so low I always thought they looked worse than sprite based games. It isn't a surprise to me 2D-sprites hung around for awhile. Billboard sprites are still a pretty good/cheap choice for symmetrical things like explosions.

XnGine (the engine behind Daggerfall, Terminator: Future Shock, SkyNET, etc - i think the last game to use it was Redguard) was full 3D however Daggerfall relied a lot on sprites for NPCs and such (most likely because it had a ton of NPCs in towns) but the maps were fully 3D and there were 3D objects in them (the screenshots in this tool[0] that show daggerfall maps make it clear). Terminator used sprites for small objects (weapons, pick up items, etc) but enemies were 3D models as was the world. In Redguard almost everything was 3D.

[0] https://www.dfworkshop.net/introducing-daggerfall-scout/

Yeah, I can vividly remember when my friends and I booted up a copy of shareware Doom the first time. We'd played the heck out of Wolf3D and so on.

Nothing was like Doom when it came out. It was shockingly, impossibly smooth.

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