Carmack & Romero's First Person Shooters: Wolfenstein, Doom & Quake

"People were quite literally blown away by it because they had never seen anything like this. It really showed that there could be this whole interesting, compelling, edgy gaming experience on a PC that you weren't able to find on consoles or necessarily in arcades.

John Romero would show up at gaming conventions and there would be people literally bowing at his feet, and doing the Wayne's World 'I'm not worthy!' They really were the rock stars at that time, and then when all of the controversy came out over violent games, then they had all that too to kind of stoke their image.

John Carmack And John Romero's 1996 follow-up to Doom Quake enabled sixteen people to play over the internet and that really just blew it open. There started to be teams of gamers and they called themselves clans."

-- David Kushner, Author, "Masters of Doom"

"First person shooter is where your eyes are the monitor, basically. And you get to see your hands or your weapons or whatever in front of you, so it's you. And first person to us was the most successful interface that there was, because you didn't have to think about anything but just what you're doing in the game.

Through all of pretty much 1994, I was just addicted to Death Match. It was just the coolest thing I had ever experienced in my entire life.

I totally had fun buying fun cars and houses and all that kind of stuff."

-- George Romero, Co-Creator, "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom"

"My most seminal gaming experience was playing Doom with my headphones on late at night, with my wife asleep in the other room, and being really terrified, and feeling stupid for being terrified, but still being terrified."

-- Jeff Green, Editor-in-Chief, "Computer Gaming World"