In the previous two posts, I talked about the first five “Epochs” of PC gaming. The usual disclaimer still applies that these are arbitrarily made up, but they gel pretty well with the way the PC gaming market developed.

The last Epoch listed was the end of an era in more ways than one. Looking through the history of PC gaming up until Quake 3 Arena, ID Software more or less dominated each generation. From Wolfenstein to Doom to Quake, hardware refreshes were linked to the latest ID title. Sadly, that doesn’t hold true going forward. ID lost its way with Doom 3: it was graphically impressive and certainly some people upgraded to play it. But it wasn’t DOOM. It was jump scares and monster closets, but none of the fun that made Doom so popular up to that point. Even so, it might still have opened up the next epoch if it weren’t for the massively successful release from another company.