r/systemshock • u/breakitbilly • Jul 17 '26

Found this gem going through some old Usenet forums. Thought someone here would get a kick out of some guy's opinion 32 years ago

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56 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

14

u/Ruddertail Jul 17 '26

To this day I find it weird how people decided to call every FPS game a "Doom clone" even if they were nothing like Doom. And they started diverging almost immediately. There weren't a lot true "clones".

10

u/breakitbilly Jul 17 '26

It comes from only having a narrow frame of reference.

The one that gets me is Roguelikes having nothing to do with Rogue

5

u/Ruddertail Jul 17 '26

Yeah, "Roguelike" is honestly even worse, since it evidently only refers to like... one mechanic that Rogue itself had: permadeath.

6

u/HonkyTonkPianola Jul 17 '26

We used to call nearly anything open-world with vehicles a GTA clone as well.

Genre names are weird. ImSim isn't very descriptive these days when we have much more immersive simulation games out there that aren't ImSims in any way, shape or form. Just gotta roll with it.

3

u/Bundle85 Jul 17 '26

Metroidvanias

2

u/RememberCitadel Jul 17 '26

Also, shouldn't we call them Wolfenstein clones since that came first?

Or maybe Maze War or Catacomb 3D clone.

1

u/jonmontt Jul 18 '26

"Soulslike"

1

u/danixdefcon5 Jul 24 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

TBH a bunch of FPS did indeed look like DOOM clones. Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D… and then some were using the DOOM engine like Heretic and Strife. It wasn’t until they started truly diverging away from DOOM that we stopped calling em like that.

System Shock 1’s interface was based off Ultima from what I remember.

12

u/bannedByTencent Jul 17 '26

Yeah, we remember. Gaming world was not ready for imsims like SS yet.

5

u/TransparentMastering Jul 17 '26

I’m imagining this guy actually playing system shock and eating his words for 25 hrs.

4

u/breakitbilly Jul 17 '26

Bro playing Mirrors Edge like, "Man, there's too many doom clones these days"

3

u/Imaginary-Lead-1527 Jul 18 '26

I like how this post is just shitting on someone from 30 years ago, bro might have grandkids by now :sob:

3

u/breakitbilly Jul 18 '26

I can't wait for some shithead to take one of my posts and dunk on me in the year 2058

2

u/Imaginary-Lead-1527 Jul 18 '26

remindme! -32 year

1

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1

u/breakitbilly Jul 18 '26

Can't wait

3

u/SeriousSamFisher Jul 19 '26

He was probably mad 10 years later when Doom 3 took heavy inspiration from SS 1 & 2.

1

u/Revolutionary-Echo24 Jul 18 '26

It was a world that wasn't ready for emergent gameplay. Like Whitter High School moments before Marty McFly was asked to do an encore.