Doom, Myst, and the War for the Soul of Video Games
Literate Machine
English - November 20, 2020 22:23 - 20 minutes - 22.9 MBSociety & Culture Arts media criticism fantasy sciencefiction Homepage Download Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
In the 1990s, Myst and Doom fought a war for the soul of video games. Myst sold almost twice as many copies. Within ten years, the entire industry had remodeled itself around Doom. Special call out to Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian (https://filfre.net) whose work covering early video games I drew on extensively.
Some Corrections:
* I mention the Nintento 64 as the rival to the Genesis when I meant the Super Nintendo
* Doom was not Id’s last Shareware game; their next game, Quake, was also distributed as Shareware
* First person mode was the primary mode of Ultima Underworld
* There are 5 worlds in Myst, not 7
* Jimmy Maher points out the Lucasfilm’s games declined in quality after 1993, and so poor design may still have been a factor in the decline of Adventure games.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Computer Programming Used to Be Women's Work: https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding, https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/
Sierra c-founder Ken Williams on the future of the medium: https://community.telltale.com/discussion/23327/roberta-williams-josh-mandel-discussion/p6]
On the development and reception of Wolfenstein 3D: https://www.filfre.net/2020/05/the-shareware-scene-part-3-the-id-boys/wolf3d/ On Doom: https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom/
On Myst: https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/myst-or-the-drawbacks-to-success/
On Doom: https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom/ Computer ownership in the 1990s: https://www.bls.gov/cex/research_papers/pdf/computer-ownership-up-sharply-in-the-1990s.pdf
Example list of the most popular games: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/g30910862/best-video-games/
Feminist Frequency, feminist critique of gaming and target of GamerGate: https://feministfrequency.com/
More about GamerGate: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/gamergate-video-games-five-years-later.html, https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/video-games-shootings-el-paso-gamergate-8chan-connection.html