I was confused why you mentioned haptics, as the Rumble Pak did not exist when the N64 launched. But Wikipedia cites EGM as saying later versions of the game had Rumble Pak support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_Pak

Quake released the day before Super Mario 64.

Those 48 hours were likely the peak of video gaming. Certainly they have yet to be equaled.

First of all, DOOM isn’t raycasted. Second of all it’s 3D in the sense that all objects have xyz coordinates and can move in that space. You can miss the monsters by having a rocket go over their heads. The main limitation is that the levels couldn’t have more than one ‘room’ per vertical space.

The rendering can still be implemented as polygons (making it true 3D rendering) whilst still maintaining the same level-based limitations, as we can see with DOOM 64.

Most people would call DOOM a 3D game. Its popularity spelt the end of 2D games which is why people bring it up.

It doesn't matter that it's raycast with billboard sprites, it was first-person-perspective with pixel-perfect lit texture-mapped wall and floor rendering with lifts and stairs. 3D enough.

Hey, Mario 64 isn't "real 3d". It is just a projection of 3d coordinates to 2d triangles on a 2d screen.

As a Marathon fanatic, it killed me that the game didn’t get more love. I recall watching a Doom game and someone shot a rocket at a player above them. The path of the rocket was bizarre and being baffled that this was ‘good’.

It was a fun era to live through as the progress was so quick.

doom's rendering is 2.5d (but is still fully accurate to 3d rendering, if the pitch of the camera is fixed to 0), but doom's _logic_ is fully 3d (the only reason enemies were infinitely tall was to save on cpu speed (and different to enemies, projectiles always had full 3d collision), it was just a few lines of code change to make them have real height for player-enemy collisions, which was done in heretic, another game using the same engine as doom)

If we're going that hard, I would argue anything that's not viewed stereoscopically by definition cannot be 3D.

When we started Abomination[0] it was born from X-Com which was totally 2D. It was assumed this was going to be 2D. Then we tried to create all the characters and monsters we wanted and ran out of RAM instantly with all the rendered angles.

Slapping my own 3D engine on wasn't too hard, but there was no tooling in those days. How do I get the meshes and textures out of 3D Studio Max into the engine? Who can I call? Nobody. You had to work all this stuff out from first principles. It was a grind.

[0] https://www.zombs-lair.com/abomination