COMM 344: Doom Clones

Before there were games like Bioshock and Deus Ex making the FPS genre as diverse as it is derivative, FPS games were not generally called such, as evidenced by this chart of Usenet term usage frequency found on The Doom Wiki.

Blue is the use of FPS, red is the use of "doom clone"

According to this data, it wasn't until 1997 that the term first person shooter took hold, around the time that id released Quake. Between Doom and Quake, there were few types of first person shooter in the world. Most notably considered to be unauthorized Doom clones are System Shock, Star Wars: Dark Forces (which later became the massively successful Jedi Knight series, and Duke Nukem 3D (which also copied id's penchant for making a famous side-scroller into a 3D shooter ala Wolfenstein 3D). Also of note, however, were first person shooters that not only cloned Doom's style, but also used it's engine. These included Raven's Heretic and Hexen, as well as Rogue's Strife. It is the second variety of Doom clone that I wish to consider for a moment.

Doom was the first game with an engine-as-a-product mentality. Before Doom, game engines were disposable. If one game used the same engine as another, there was a good chance the second was a sequel to the first, this is the case with Megaman 1-6, Super  Mario Bros and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2, and many other sequels of the era. The idea of another game series, or even another game company, using the same engine was unheard of before Doom, and now, according to Mark Deloura of the CEDEC (That is, the CESA Developer's Conference, a conference held by the Japanese CESA or Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association to connect with game developers), 58% of games in development in 2011 used a premade engine of some sort. This path was forged by Heretic, Hexen, and Strife.  Unfortunately, id did not end up gaining much from their precedent. The idTech version included with Quake 3 was delayed just enough for Epic's Unreal Engine to come out and overtake idTech's market share and become the lead game engine in the world. idTech is now only used in games published by id's owners, Bethesda, who don't use it in their flagship games (i.e. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout).