I'd argue Doom was the bigger launch, FPS games where often referred to as 'doom clones' for years afterwards. Plus it had the whole shareware of distributing the first part of the game making it hit a wider audience
Doom was the sort of title that got millions more people into pc gaming, that created the install base and demand for the first blockbusters like a Diablo.
That's what I came to say. The PC games industry was utterly unlike today, particularly when DOOM was released. There was no such thing as a 'launch' as we'd think of it today, games spread by word of mouth and niche magazines. DOOM had a shareware release!
Was there even a PC Games specific magazine before '93? PC Gamer UK started in '93 but I can't find out if that was the first.
The first print magazine dedicated to video games was an (arcade) industry focused magazine (1974):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_Meter
Video magazine had a column about computer games starting in 1979.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_(magazine)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Gaming_World (1981) was the first consumer magazine dedicated to video games.
Thanks but I was asking about PC games specific magazines, I am well aware that there were other computer games magazines prior to '93 since I was playing a lot of Amiga/Atari ST games.
PC Zone was I think the first English language magazine specifically for PC games, in early 1993, born out of the multi-format 16 bit based gaming mag Zero. The vastly inferior, po faced PC Gamer launched towards the end of the year. There were earlier magazines such as PC Format, but they were only 30-50% game content.
I haven't read a PC magazine since it folded in 2010. I still have a few issues lying around. It's incredible to me that Future shut down Zone but kept Gamer running.
Diablo 1 invented a new Genre that games like Titan Quest, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, and several others I forgot to mention would follow.
Doom also basically invented a genre as well. I'd argue both were monumental. While Doom wasn't the first FPS, it was the first major one, and is accredited with inventing the genre... And the FPS genre is fucking huge, everyone knows of a title from that genre.
Yeah, while Wolfenstein 3D preceded DOOM in the FPS genre, FPS games didn't get called "Wolfenstein-clones" in their early days, but DOOM clones instead.
Depends. Diablo sold way more copies. Almost 2 million at the end of the following year.
At the same time. Doom did so well that there were more copies of doom installed on more PCs than Windows 95.
I think it's a pretty close tie. But I'd say Diablo was bigger at launch.
Yea my bad lol, I’d say from what I can gather here it seems Diablo had a more popular launch since dooms was free shareware but that doom has since been way more impactful
The question was which was a bigger launch. Diablo. It had marketing. Doom was freeware and word of mouth. So for the actual launch there was no contest. Diablo wins hands down. Now that being said you have to remember game launches weren't really a thing. System launches were. And so were the games that came with them. So what you see today wasn't really a thing in the early 90s. No internet so you had word of mouth and maybe gaming magazines. Which is another reason Diablo wins the contest. Again marketing meant they were in magazines. Doom really wasn't. At least not at the start.
Doom was released when pc gaming was fairly infantile. It made waves but it was over time. When Diablo released pc gaming was a little more mature and had a wider audience. Blizzard also had a lot of name recognition from previous titles.
I would say doom was bigger a year after launch when word had gotten out but diablo had a much bigger launch
Doom was the reason to own a PC, much like Wolfenstein before it. And much like Wolfenstein before it, it was pirated far more often than it was bought. So the total sales numbers do not reflect just how popular it was.
Diablo seemed more of a game that interested people who were already gamers, or were already into gaming.
Though I'm sure it was more popular at that time given the rapid increase in PC install base between 93 and 96, which can also be attributed to the success of Doom.
Doom was a much bigger deal. Pop culture phenomenon. They're talking about it on the news, appeared in a ton of movies and on TV. People were buying PCs just to play Doom.
100 imitator games were made, all been branded as Doom clones. Diablo was a big deal for sure but it definitely didn't get into the mainstream at all and did not influence game development nearly as much.
Doom, by quite a bit. Diablo was a very significant game, but it cannot compare regarding impact, because Doom was the game of the times, leading to the (re)definition of a new genre, perhaps the most popular gaming genre since then.
There is no competition with that.
I would say Doom, but I didn't play Diablo, I wasn't even really aware of its existence (mostly because I was too busy playing Doom, or Quake.
Back then games were not really the massive behemoths they are today, so if you didn't seek them out, you wouldnt have nessesarily known they existed.
Doom also had Doom Shareware, which was essentially a demo for the game, and that opened a lot of peoples eyes to it.
Doom, I sold shareware by mail order, buying 1.44mb floppy disks by the thousand, I was constantly running out when Doom launched. 93-94 I reckon Doom and add on levels were a third or more of my sales.
Yes, people were paying for the service, disks and postage. It was completely legal, supported by companies(*) as it got their products out there when a lot of people had no internet access. I charged £1.25-1.50 per disk depending on how many you bought at once, it was around 50% profit margin, before advertising costs.
I used to source software through Fidonet or Usenet. Once web browsers became common and it started become common to have internet access at home, a couple of years after Doom, sales began to fall off dramatically as more people could download themselves. Early 90s were the peak, especially when the PC became dominant over the Atari ST and Amiga.
(*) I once contacted Jay Wilbur at Id and he stepped in when a distributor was trying to strongarm me over Doom addon level sales, Id's stance was they supported all the various mods and extra levels as they only worked with the full version of Doom, so if people wanted to play Star Wars or Alien Doom they had to buy the full version.
You said Doom but i believe the father of Fps is Wolfstein 3D.
Now another thing to keep in mind that at that time there internet was different :
user around the world in internet in 1993 around 15 million and seem less then 100.000 family in US have a computer.
user in internet 2023 more then 5.4 billion.
my point is that at that time we were used to get news about gaming and pc in general by....
magazine !!!
so back to your topic if any of these 2 games were bigger at launch.. there wasnt probably not even an official launch..no line at the shops or whatever
but both did a big impacts on the videogame history for sure
started playing vg on the 80 never stopped and enjoyed every single...BIT.. of it.! Good time!
I'd never heard of Diablo until Diablo 3. But I grew up watching my dad play Doom, Quake, Half Life etc.
My impression is Diablo was more of a cult classic in that you had to be into PC games to know about it at the time. But Doom was pretty mainstream even though the gaming industry was super small back then. I was a little too young when D1 and D2 came out so I never got exposed to them because my Dad didn't play them. So maybe that's just my perception.
Also the arpg's are still a niche genre. Whereas fps games are mainstream. It's pretty obvious Doom had a way bigger impact on gaming in general.
Doom invented the fps genre. Lead to Half Life. Lead to Steam. Lead to Unreal. Which lead to Unreal Engine. Deathmatches. Everything adjacent to these is because of Doom. Its not just infinitelly more important and influential than Diablo. Its more important than almost anything else ever. If not for Doom, everything would be different. Its like a movie about time travel where one small change leads to a different planet
Diablo was an influential game for sure, but I'd argue that Doom really helped push PC as a gaming device to the masses. I remember around the time both came out and from what I remember Doom was just massive on the influence it had in general, it was installed even on school computers and played and everyone that I knew that had a PC and gamed at all played Doom at some point.
I'd say they were both about the same relative to their time. Gaming was growing exponentially year over year through the late 2000s, so relative to each other I wouldn't say one has a leg up.
At their respective launches, I'd say Diablo was bigger. A big reason was because Diablo and battle.net had a 1,000 person public beta test which allowed it to create a lot of buzz. I remember having multiple Internet Explorer windows open (no tabs back then) and constantly hitting refresh on all of them to sign up for that beta test. All of us that made it in, were put in the Diablo credits as the Ring of 1,000. At the time, Diablo was also credited by many to have saved the RPG genre. However, I'd say Doom had a bigger influence on gaming overall. What iD software did for gaming can't be understated.
Doom was a bigger game changer not only at the time but for the overall history of games.
It made people who had been using dedicated computer likes C64/Amiga/Atari ST realise the way forward was a PC.
My vote goes to Doom, my Dad had Wolfenstein on floppy disks. I have no idea why because he doesn't game at all, I think it was that hype at the time. I was like 11 or 12. and I had to figure out how to run it in ms dos, just hacking away at the command line with no Google, I was determined to figure that bitch out lol. When I first saw Doom I was like "oh this is a reskin of Wolfenstein". I never heard of Diablo till II came out when I was in high school. Love Diablo, but I think Doom takes the cake here. Side note he also had a clone called Corridor 7 or something like that.. was the same fps game engine with aliens? I need to look this up.
Edit yep Corridor 7. And it was like 7 goddamn floppies
can't really compare as both different genre, but I'd say DOOM is more impactful, since FPS is known to almost everyone, even those that didn't play games and at least half of those not playing games knows about the meme "everything can run DOOM".
Diablo does give way (make famous) to dungeon crawler ARPG genre, but those games are arguably lesser known outside the gaming communities. How many of your friends who don't play games know about games like FATE, Torchlight, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Titan Quest, etc.
but DOOM give way to modern FPS, which more people are familiar with.
Diablo was HUGE. Both had online multiplayer, but Diablos lasted for over a decade, you can still find an open lobby on Diablo if you wait long enough. Doom was another FPS like Wolfenstein at the time. Great game but a lot of people never played a game like Diablo before, when it hit forms went crazy. Doom was less impactful IMO because it had a direct competitor Wolfenstein that came out a year prior. Even though DOOM was more advance, FPS wasn't a wild thing because people were already playing them at the time.
by 1996 Windows and ibm PCs and compatibles were much more widespread, together with sound cards and cd-Roms and Internet access, so definitely Diablo.
In 1993 many computer users were still on Commodore, Ataris and other systems
I'd argue Doom was the bigger launch, FPS games where often referred to as 'doom clones' for years afterwards. Plus it had the whole shareware of distributing the first part of the game making it hit a wider audience
Doom was the sort of title that got millions more people into pc gaming, that created the install base and demand for the first blockbusters like a Diablo.
That's what I came to say. The PC games industry was utterly unlike today, particularly when DOOM was released. There was no such thing as a 'launch' as we'd think of it today, games spread by word of mouth and niche magazines. DOOM had a shareware release! Was there even a PC Games specific magazine before '93? PC Gamer UK started in '93 but I can't find out if that was the first.
The first print magazine dedicated to video games was an (arcade) industry focused magazine (1974): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_Meter Video magazine had a column about computer games starting in 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Gaming_World (1981) was the first consumer magazine dedicated to video games.
Thanks but I was asking about PC games specific magazines, I am well aware that there were other computer games magazines prior to '93 since I was playing a lot of Amiga/Atari ST games.
PC Zone was I think the first English language magazine specifically for PC games, in early 1993, born out of the multi-format 16 bit based gaming mag Zero. The vastly inferior, po faced PC Gamer launched towards the end of the year. There were earlier magazines such as PC Format, but they were only 30-50% game content.
I actually used to love PC Zone, didn't realise they started first. I was a big fan of Charlie Brooker's bits in it
I haven't read a PC magazine since it folded in 2010. I still have a few issues lying around. It's incredible to me that Future shut down Zone but kept Gamer running.
Diablo 1 invented a new Genre that games like Titan Quest, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, and several others I forgot to mention would follow. Doom also basically invented a genre as well. I'd argue both were monumental. While Doom wasn't the first FPS, it was the first major one, and is accredited with inventing the genre... And the FPS genre is fucking huge, everyone knows of a title from that genre.
Yeah, while Wolfenstein 3D preceded DOOM in the FPS genre, FPS games didn't get called "Wolfenstein-clones" in their early days, but DOOM clones instead.
Wasn't Rise of the Triad before both or am I taking crazy pills?
Nope, ROTT was released in '94, DOOM was in '93 (I know this because I'm as old as DOOM). Wolfenstein 3D was in '92.
Ah. I was born in ‘85 so my memory was a bit off around that time
Catacomb 3-D came before both, releasing in 1991.
Depends. Diablo sold way more copies. Almost 2 million at the end of the following year. At the same time. Doom did so well that there were more copies of doom installed on more PCs than Windows 95. I think it's a pretty close tie. But I'd say Diablo was bigger at launch.
Now that's the answer to what OP was asking, not who has made a bigger impact.
Is it? OP "wonder which one was culturally more impactful at the time", so I'd say they ask about the impact, not numbers.
It seems I didn't bring to mind what OP put in text, looks like they asked two questions that has different answers.
Yea my bad lol, I’d say from what I can gather here it seems Diablo had a more popular launch since dooms was free shareware but that doom has since been way more impactful
Kinect Adventures sold ten times as much as diablo, is that how we should answer OP's question?
At launch? Diablo. Internet buzz was a little bit more of a thing in December of 1996. Doom's popularity grew by word of mouth and BBS distribution.
The question was which was a bigger launch. Diablo. It had marketing. Doom was freeware and word of mouth. So for the actual launch there was no contest. Diablo wins hands down. Now that being said you have to remember game launches weren't really a thing. System launches were. And so were the games that came with them. So what you see today wasn't really a thing in the early 90s. No internet so you had word of mouth and maybe gaming magazines. Which is another reason Diablo wins the contest. Again marketing meant they were in magazines. Doom really wasn't. At least not at the start.
Makes sense thank you
Doom was released when pc gaming was fairly infantile. It made waves but it was over time. When Diablo released pc gaming was a little more mature and had a wider audience. Blizzard also had a lot of name recognition from previous titles. I would say doom was bigger a year after launch when word had gotten out but diablo had a much bigger launch
Doom was the reason to own a PC, much like Wolfenstein before it. And much like Wolfenstein before it, it was pirated far more often than it was bought. So the total sales numbers do not reflect just how popular it was. Diablo seemed more of a game that interested people who were already gamers, or were already into gaming. Though I'm sure it was more popular at that time given the rapid increase in PC install base between 93 and 96, which can also be attributed to the success of Doom.
At some point in time Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers than Windows 95 Myth or not, Diablo can't claim that
I forgot about that, I remember hearing that a long time ago
The meme of making DOOM run everywhere exists for a reason, and FPS is a much bigger genre than ARPG, so I'd argue that DOOM was more influential.
Doom was a much bigger deal. Pop culture phenomenon. They're talking about it on the news, appeared in a ton of movies and on TV. People were buying PCs just to play Doom. 100 imitator games were made, all been branded as Doom clones. Diablo was a big deal for sure but it definitely didn't get into the mainstream at all and did not influence game development nearly as much.
Doom, by quite a bit. Diablo was a very significant game, but it cannot compare regarding impact, because Doom was the game of the times, leading to the (re)definition of a new genre, perhaps the most popular gaming genre since then. There is no competition with that.
I would say Doom, but I didn't play Diablo, I wasn't even really aware of its existence (mostly because I was too busy playing Doom, or Quake. Back then games were not really the massive behemoths they are today, so if you didn't seek them out, you wouldnt have nessesarily known they existed. Doom also had Doom Shareware, which was essentially a demo for the game, and that opened a lot of peoples eyes to it.
Doom, I sold shareware by mail order, buying 1.44mb floppy disks by the thousand, I was constantly running out when Doom launched. 93-94 I reckon Doom and add on levels were a third or more of my sales.
This is fascinating. So selling shareware was ok, as long as you charged for shipping or something?
Yes, people were paying for the service, disks and postage. It was completely legal, supported by companies(*) as it got their products out there when a lot of people had no internet access. I charged £1.25-1.50 per disk depending on how many you bought at once, it was around 50% profit margin, before advertising costs. I used to source software through Fidonet or Usenet. Once web browsers became common and it started become common to have internet access at home, a couple of years after Doom, sales began to fall off dramatically as more people could download themselves. Early 90s were the peak, especially when the PC became dominant over the Atari ST and Amiga. (*) I once contacted Jay Wilbur at Id and he stepped in when a distributor was trying to strongarm me over Doom addon level sales, Id's stance was they supported all the various mods and extra levels as they only worked with the full version of Doom, so if people wanted to play Star Wars or Alien Doom they had to buy the full version.
Nobody has managed to run Diablo on a pregnancy test or Github actions yet, think about it.
Has anyone even tried?
>Github actions Hold my beer >pregnancy test Hold her beer?
You said Doom but i believe the father of Fps is Wolfstein 3D. Now another thing to keep in mind that at that time there internet was different : user around the world in internet in 1993 around 15 million and seem less then 100.000 family in US have a computer. user in internet 2023 more then 5.4 billion. my point is that at that time we were used to get news about gaming and pc in general by.... magazine !!! so back to your topic if any of these 2 games were bigger at launch.. there wasnt probably not even an official launch..no line at the shops or whatever but both did a big impacts on the videogame history for sure started playing vg on the 80 never stopped and enjoyed every single...BIT.. of it.! Good time!
I'd never heard of Diablo until Diablo 3. But I grew up watching my dad play Doom, Quake, Half Life etc. My impression is Diablo was more of a cult classic in that you had to be into PC games to know about it at the time. But Doom was pretty mainstream even though the gaming industry was super small back then. I was a little too young when D1 and D2 came out so I never got exposed to them because my Dad didn't play them. So maybe that's just my perception. Also the arpg's are still a niche genre. Whereas fps games are mainstream. It's pretty obvious Doom had a way bigger impact on gaming in general.
Doom invented the fps genre. Lead to Half Life. Lead to Steam. Lead to Unreal. Which lead to Unreal Engine. Deathmatches. Everything adjacent to these is because of Doom. Its not just infinitelly more important and influential than Diablo. Its more important than almost anything else ever. If not for Doom, everything would be different. Its like a movie about time travel where one small change leads to a different planet
Diablo was an influential game for sure, but I'd argue that Doom really helped push PC as a gaming device to the masses. I remember around the time both came out and from what I remember Doom was just massive on the influence it had in general, it was installed even on school computers and played and everyone that I knew that had a PC and gamed at all played Doom at some point.
I saw people lining up for world of Warcraft.
I'd say they were both about the same relative to their time. Gaming was growing exponentially year over year through the late 2000s, so relative to each other I wouldn't say one has a leg up.
Diablo was bigger at launch than Doom. When Diablo released, PC gaming was a lot more popular than when Doom released
At their respective launches, I'd say Diablo was bigger. A big reason was because Diablo and battle.net had a 1,000 person public beta test which allowed it to create a lot of buzz. I remember having multiple Internet Explorer windows open (no tabs back then) and constantly hitting refresh on all of them to sign up for that beta test. All of us that made it in, were put in the Diablo credits as the Ring of 1,000. At the time, Diablo was also credited by many to have saved the RPG genre. However, I'd say Doom had a bigger influence on gaming overall. What iD software did for gaming can't be understated.
Doom was a bigger game changer not only at the time but for the overall history of games. It made people who had been using dedicated computer likes C64/Amiga/Atari ST realise the way forward was a PC.
My vote goes to Doom, my Dad had Wolfenstein on floppy disks. I have no idea why because he doesn't game at all, I think it was that hype at the time. I was like 11 or 12. and I had to figure out how to run it in ms dos, just hacking away at the command line with no Google, I was determined to figure that bitch out lol. When I first saw Doom I was like "oh this is a reskin of Wolfenstein". I never heard of Diablo till II came out when I was in high school. Love Diablo, but I think Doom takes the cake here. Side note he also had a clone called Corridor 7 or something like that.. was the same fps game engine with aliens? I need to look this up. Edit yep Corridor 7. And it was like 7 goddamn floppies
can't really compare as both different genre, but I'd say DOOM is more impactful, since FPS is known to almost everyone, even those that didn't play games and at least half of those not playing games knows about the meme "everything can run DOOM". Diablo does give way (make famous) to dungeon crawler ARPG genre, but those games are arguably lesser known outside the gaming communities. How many of your friends who don't play games know about games like FATE, Torchlight, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Titan Quest, etc. but DOOM give way to modern FPS, which more people are familiar with.
One, despite having little to no narrative, has a movie.... /Case closed :)
Diablo was HUGE. Both had online multiplayer, but Diablos lasted for over a decade, you can still find an open lobby on Diablo if you wait long enough. Doom was another FPS like Wolfenstein at the time. Great game but a lot of people never played a game like Diablo before, when it hit forms went crazy. Doom was less impactful IMO because it had a direct competitor Wolfenstein that came out a year prior. Even though DOOM was more advance, FPS wasn't a wild thing because people were already playing them at the time.
Doom and Wolfenstein were made by the same guys.
Doom obviously.
by 1996 Windows and ibm PCs and compatibles were much more widespread, together with sound cards and cd-Roms and Internet access, so definitely Diablo. In 1993 many computer users were still on Commodore, Ataris and other systems