My friend Christian Metts and I, 15 and 14 at the time, decided to start a virtual reality arcade in Jackson Crossing mall in Jackson Michigan in 1996.
We wrote a business plan, got $10k in investment from friends and family, rented space in the mall, bought the best PC at the time, two VFX1 3d headsets, licensed Descent for our use case by snail mailing the company with our idea and receiving a contract back from them which we signed and sent with a check, and my dad helped us design, build and weld a custom desk with arms to hold the headsets when they weren’t in use. It was designed as a standing desk so you could just walk up underneath, reach up and put the headset on, and play. I think we had Nintendo style controllers for the hands.
Unfortunately we were terrible salesmen (sales boys?) and then the Quake demo came out and we just played that non stop for 2 months without charging for it because we’d run out of budget for licensing.
Thankfully by August we were able to get construction jobs and managed to pay off our loans a few months ahead of the original plan (I think the terms were 10% over 12 months).
Great game, great learning experience, and a lot of fun. Haven’t failed at a business venture since. Ended up being an entrepreneur for the next 14 years before taking a more standard day job as a software engineer.
Wild to see a Jackson Crossing reference on Hacker News. Haven't been there since around the time you would've had your business, but I don't think I remember an arcade like that. What was it called?
Don't remember that -- not even sure at the time I would have realized it was a business? I can imagine some version of that taking off in the mid 90s. Would've beat Descent on my Pentium.
If you want to use a non-modern joystick on a modern machine, there are adapters; I have one I like, and if I remember, I'll post the brand when I get home.
Only downside is that it is self-calibrating, so if you have a joystick pot that sometimes jumps to very high (or very low I suppose) resistance, it will scale the axis to that very high value; calibration on the PC in that case will give you terrible resolution (since it is quantized before being sent to the PC). I suggest cleaning the pots with DeoxIT if that happens.
I loved Descent and Descent2! Most importantly, because speed was coded as uniform in the unit axes (x,y & z), everybody who played always chorded and flew in a permanent diagonal, which I recall was much easier to pull off with the keyboard than joystick.
Early applications of Pythagorus' theorem in action!
Surprised to see this game on here. This was the first playstation game my dad bought me and I remember the entire family were watching with awe at the opening sequence:
Really a terrifying game for kids. I remember I used to get sweaty hands after blowing up the reactor and trying to remember where the exit was with the female computer voice counting down. No help, it was brutal.
The psx version came with :
- dedicated studio produced soundtrack that simply stands the test of time
- voice over FMV sequences with symphony orchestra track
Descent 2 & 3 continued the trend on the playstation with the same formula.
The story also had a nice element of modern realism. You are a cynical mercenary for a major space mining corp with a machiavellian corporate executive just using you. I won't spoil it but one of the best endings ever in a game.
I've also read Peter Telep's novel based on Descent universe. Yeah I'm kinda obsessed with this game.
Loved Descent, we used to play it for hours on the company lan, multiplayer was awesome!
They were are great early games. I kept one of my office mates transformed into a chicken in Hexen for hours, his cries of frustration still ring in my ears!
++ on ROTT. Just pure fun. I loved the "missile cam", and when you played it on Dec. 25, the music was changed to "Good King Winceslas" in a minor key and characters had Santa hats.
My undergrad senior project was to build a game chair where we strapped ourselves into a seat we pulled from a totaled Ford Probe, and use 2 joysticks (one on each armrest) to control the ship is Descent. We had to static mount a pair if very heavy 21" or 22" CRTs, which was annoying.
We used 2 pneumatic cylinders and a U-joint to move the chair so it rotated on 2 axes. I now know that hydraulics would have let us stop in the middle, but that did not occur to me at the time. The chair still moved a lot, banged around, and generally made a lot of noise.
It was great fun to strap a small student into the chair and let them start playing. It was all OK until they got hit from behind with the first missile, and their space ship started spinning, and the chair started massive movements. Then they started high-pitched screaming like in the movie "Jaws." After 90 seconds, they were having the time of their lives shooting up alien-hacked mining equipment that had become ersatz weapons.
It only worked with small students because we lacked large enough pneumatics, and because the chair rotated about an axis below the chair, so that it would flop one way or another and not have the power to right itself id we strapped in a large (200 lbs) student.
A few years ago Descent3 was modernized by Icculus(Ryan Gordon) to play on modern hardware running Linux and released thru Steam. The old version was unable to run on modern distros. The new released version uses SDL2 and runs nicely on modern hardware even the SteamDeck. Anyway it has some bugs which hopefully can be addressed if more people chime in. Find the bugtracker on github: https://github.com/icculus/descent3-bugs/issues
The Mac version, which was enhanced to run at 640x480 and had a game disc that did double duty as a redbook audio CD soundtrack, was bundled with the Performa 6400 that was the family computer in my house in the mid-90s.
I wasn’t able to play it too much until that computer became mine as a hand-me-down some years later but it was the first “real” video game I’d ever played and it left an impression. For a couple years in the early 2000s it was a minor obsession of mine to hunt down custom levels on the internet to play with it. It was also the first game that I found an alternative client for, when I ran across versions built for OpenGL and GLIDE that could run at higher resolutions.
I've got to admit, Descent was the only game to ever make me physically ill. Not because it was bad - it really wasn't - but for a short while in the 90s the Genre of "fly tiny spaceship through low resolution, spinning 3D maze where there's constantly a wall right in front of your face" was really popular. Today, I can't watch a five minute gameplay video without feeling nauseous.
I played Descent, Forsaken and Hellbender that all followed that formula. Only later did games like Incoming, G-Police and Yager take the 3D-flyee-shotee genre to the wider outside and it became less nauseating.
Wow, that's the original release I did ages ago, with my notes and everything! I spent a few weekends extracting proprietary code/libraries from the code base so it could be released. Doing that work changed the direction of my life in a way, leading me from hobby game development work to working on Descent 3.
jcotton as in Kali Jay Cotton? Nice to 'see you' again after all this time! (ps, I think it's funny we both put 42 at the end of our usernames).
Short answer is yes. It's probably on me to get official permission and strip out some code we can't legally distribute. I'm not sure how many people I want to look at my code from the 90's though. :)
I'll shoot an email to the owners and see if it's ok to get it up on github. It's not too much work for me to strip stuff out.
Afraid not, funny that I share a username with someone from Kali though.
As for the Descent 3 code, that would be awesome! D1 and D2 have been modernized through source ports, but getting D3 to work on modern systems has always been rough, and a source release would be an awesome starting point.
What would be the best place to keep tabs on for the release happening?
Please, Gods of Indie Devs, grace us with more games like Descent. Bless not the devs writing accurate physics, but those writing fun and exciting physics. Inspire them to make the moment to moment gameplay smooth and fun, not "realistic".
But what content will fill all those triangles and pixels we have now? Descent happened at a time when the stars were perfectly assigned for their "there is no up and down" worlds (which are actually quite ironic, given the name). Game visuals were a hot mess of pixels even when they tried their best at being subtle and realistic, the screaming textures and geometries native to Descent fit right in. Increased visual fidelity kills the basic premise of this game world.
I can't play Descent for more than a few seconds without succumbing to motion sickness, so I may be very wrong, but the cyberspace segments in the System Shock remake seem to map closely to what Descent is going for.
Actually the community that got me into figuring out how to make computers dance for me.
Loved the FreeSpace Source source Code Project. Loved the Universe. Game engine was awesome. So many hours wiled away as a kid on FreeSpace/Silent Threat/FreeSpace 2.
What’s the best Descent-like modern game? Heavy emphasis on the importance of full 3D movement (3-axis rotation and 3-axis translation), maze-like levels, and a combination of time crunches with untimed puzzles. I loved Descent 2, but found the open spaces of Descent Freespace sorta boring.
IMO they nailed the look and feel. I haven't gone too far in the game though, not a whole lot of time or carpal-tunnel-budget left for playing games sadly :|
There is sublevel zero, also. It's a similar experience, but made for VR and has a procedurally generated map system that makes the playthroughs a bit different from time to time.
For some reason, I always think that Descent II came out around the same time as DOOM, but then I remember that Descent II was one of the first games to support 3D accelerator cards.
I was so excited when I got my ViRGE. Then I tried playing games with it. Mechwarrior II came with it but you had to run at 512x384 and even then it didn't run great. My next video card was a 3dfx Voodoo and I was in heaven.
My second GPU was a Rendition 2200. I was pretty upset, to be honest. I had asked for a 3dfx Voodoo for Christmas, and was given the Rendition instead.
It was mostly worthless. At the time, games were almost all using the Glide API.
This game made me understand why I needed a full-size keyboard with numpad back in the days. It was such a nice game and made use of the full keyboard to 3D position your ship. No other game was doing it like Descent.
Shame we don't have innovative games like this anymore.
I had shareware version of Descent and didn't know that.
I'd finished first chapter many, many, many times and never can kill final boss robot of first chapter. I didn't understand, that it is unkillable in my version.
I played Nethack a lot on my Atari ST. Took me quite a while to figure out why I could never get past level 1. "You are blocked by a mysterious force!".
The best way to keep viruses off your computer is always use diskettes with write protection on. Only remove the write protection when you actually want to write something to the diskette. It's just a small physical tab you slide to the side.
The game magically started working one day when I moved it to a ramdisk on my new Atari STe with lots of memory. Turns out that Nethack needs to write Level 1 to disk before it can allow you down to Level 2 in the dungeon... What a wonderful error message? :-)
The copyright notice (and this article’s submission) say 2012 but the web design (998 px width, use of “under construction” PNGs, W3C badges) and the HTML 4 (Strict) doctype would seem to indicate that the content is at least 5 years older.
It’s nice to see a submission with a usable, clutter-free, retro design that’s fully compliant with web standards and not loaded with tracking cookies and requiring JavaScript to display text like so many modern sites.
My dad used to watch me play it when I was growing up, and he could only watch for a couple minutes before he had to go lay down :)
I blame Descent for my good spatial memory. Getting turned around in those levels really challenges how well you remember your location and where to go next.
Playing Descent with friends over modems is one of my great memories of the early 1990s. Thanks for sharing the DXX links -- I had no idea we could still play this. The OpenRA titles have been great nostalgia, so DXX sounds promising.
Good memories hijacking the school lab to get Descent, Rise of the Triad, and Doom running over IPX. Absolutely worth getting reamed out and called a degenerate when the dean of men found out.
Descent and Descent 2 were among the best games I've ever played. They were also very good for game parties — I daresay they were more enjoyable than FPS like Doom, Quake and similar. The fully-3D environment and the complex rocket mechanics (smart missiles that you could bounce off the walls! Mega missiles that were very hard to evade but if you did, you were really proud!) made for unforgettable experiences.
I still remember carrying those heavy CRT monitors…
Descent was my favorite FPS in the nineties. It was fun getting a new person to play with us, because they didn't understand that the game was fully 3D, and that we could come at them from any direction. Plenty of Wrath of Khan (2D thinking) or Ender's Game (the enemy's gate is down) references in those first games. Then, they'd "get it", and you could see this rapid progression in tactics.
Descent was brilliant, especially multiplayer, which we used to play every lunchtime at the games company I was working at the time.
I just loved the full freedom of movement/any orientation ‘thing’. It had a really unique ‘vibe’ that I’ve never really experienced with any other game.
I can't remember if it was descent or descent 2 but I remember there being a bug on the final level when flying down a super long corridor that caused a 15 minute or so reload time each time you died. Took me hours to complete and I drank so much tea while waiting.
This game had one of the best first level soundtracks ever. Didn't matter what sound hardware you used, it just sounded intense. There are port engines that allow for additional features (OpenGL acceleration, etc) and keep the game alive for the modern era.
My first computer fair ever I got to try a virtual reality helmet with Descent playing on it. It was never really my type of game but I remember thinking it was pretty cool. On the next booth though they were showing Full Throttle, now that blew my mind.
I returned to this recently and man it is brutally hard, I'd argue in not a good way.
The robots with the hitscan gattling gun just plain aren't a fun design they're just a shield-cost you pay for not knowing exactly where they are in the level - and worse there's a bunch of keycard pickups where the moment you grab the card you're stuck dead center of a room where 4-6 of the things then come out of unopenable secret doors (which basically makes them impervious to foreknowledge - you can't complete the level without going through there, you need a minimum amount of shields to survive the alpha strike, and even knowing it's going to happen doesn't help).
Still a heckin' fun game, but yeah once they start throwing those things at you en masse (around the Mars missions) my tolerance fell off pretty rapidly since there wasn't really any "puzzle" to solve.
In cases where they're around a blind corner waiting in ambush (not behind those secret doors), it's often possible to sort of preempt them by shooting lasers so that the bolt(s) on one side just barely go around the corner. Since the lasers go from the edge of the screen towards the middle, you can shoot into a place behind a corner that you can't see.
Since getting hit makes the robots lose their ability to shoot (or move) for a brief, sub-second moment, you can use that to kill them without getting hit yourself despite their ridiculously quick aim and hitscan weapon.
Even if you don't know exactly where they are (or whether there even is anything behind the corner), you can start shooting that way around a corner preemptively and slowly and progressively slide around the corner until you'll be actually hitting them or seeing that there wasn't anything there.
Of course if you don't know where they are, you'll have to be doing that preemptively at lots of corners just in case, spending energy which can also be in short supply on higher difficulties. It also means you basically have to creep carefully around corners a lot. And it doesn't help in other kinds of cases.
I agree that those robots were frustrating when I played through the game again after years some time ago. Interestingly, I don't think there are hitscan robots in Descent 2.
You might be interested in Extra Credits's video on "Challenging vs Punishing Games" https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
They mention some games basically require you to memorize levels (Battletoads) or otherwise have things happen that aren't telegraphed. They remove player agency from the equation and make a game punishing rather than challenging, and punishing games just aren't fun.
My strategy against them was hide and seek. The tactical peekaboo.
I would look fast, see where the Gatling gun sparks appeared, hide fast, wait a second for the bullets to hit something, then move again, shoot at where the sparks were an instant before, and hide again.
This was my tactic for the invisible ones, the others were easy, as they can't aim while being shot. For the visible ones, the missiles were made just for them.
By the time the sparks appear, you're already hit. It doesn't take a second or any time for them to hit something. They're actually hitscan. That tactic can still work against them but generally not without a cost to shields, at least not if you take the time to see the sparks.
You can use that tactic effectively to deal with other kinds of robots without taking a hit because their projectiles take time to travel. And Descent 2 and 3 had gatling gun robots that IIRC were not quite hitscan, so you could in principle do that with them too.
Homing missiles are great against the (visible) vulcan robots but you still need to know where they are, or spend missiles speculatively.
When I played this in the 90's, I had a sidewinder joystick, and then used the keyboard for strafing. Once you master circle-strafing, the ai enemies don't really stand a chance.
That doesn't quite help with the vulcan bots in the first Descent game as much because their weapons actually are hitscan, they aim ridiculously quickly, and they're often waiting behind corners or behind doors already facing you so they can pretty much immediately hit you when you open the door and/or pop out behind it.
Yeah I always struggled with that too - I only had a gamepad, or just the keyboard. I always felt I didn't have enough keys/fingers, and I never mastered strafing due to that.
Of course not, as that would make no sense in a game where you play as a person. But the engine is fully capable of it, either through console commands or the various flying vehicle mods for the game.
We wrote a business plan, got $10k in investment from friends and family, rented space in the mall, bought the best PC at the time, two VFX1 3d headsets, licensed Descent for our use case by snail mailing the company with our idea and receiving a contract back from them which we signed and sent with a check, and my dad helped us design, build and weld a custom desk with arms to hold the headsets when they weren’t in use. It was designed as a standing desk so you could just walk up underneath, reach up and put the headset on, and play. I think we had Nintendo style controllers for the hands.
Unfortunately we were terrible salesmen (sales boys?) and then the Quake demo came out and we just played that non stop for 2 months without charging for it because we’d run out of budget for licensing.
Thankfully by August we were able to get construction jobs and managed to pay off our loans a few months ahead of the original plan (I think the terms were 10% over 12 months).
Great game, great learning experience, and a lot of fun. Haven’t failed at a business venture since. Ended up being an entrepreneur for the next 14 years before taking a more standard day job as a software engineer.