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In the history of first-person shooters, Descent is often handled as little more than yet another Doom clone or spin-off. Nothing could be further from the truth. Descent is not based on the Doom engine, and it has very few similarities with Doom at all.
Michael Kulas and Matthew Toschlog, the founders of Parallax Software and the masterminds behind Descent, had previously been employees at Looking Glass Studios. Both had worked on Ultima Underworld, Matthew Toschlog on System Shock as well. It is probably System Shock with which Descent is most closely related, but on the whole it is a completely original game.
Descent can, of course, be categorized as a first-person shooter, but there are several differences to the standard fare in this genre. As you would expect from a game developed by former Looking Glass Studios employees, Descent sports a true 3D engine. And the way it is used really gives you six degrees of freedom, for you pilot a craft through a gravity-free maze of corridors. Instead of just staying alive and reaching the next level, you are supposed to rescue hostages, destroy a specific target, and then leave the level within a limited time. Of course there are lots of enemies making your job more difficult.
Descent offers more background story than your average first-person shooter. Right at the beginning you are treated to a lengthy introduction. On the other hand, it is closer to the arcade tradition, in many ways it reminded me of Raptor: Call of the Shadows.
Releases
While the copyright on the title screen is dated 1994, the game was actually released in March 1995. The Mac version was published at the same time. The publisher was Interplay, and they were very active on the Macintosh market at the time. I do not know whether there was a shareware version for Mac as well.
Descent: Destination Saturn was a CD-ROM with the shareware version of Descent and the manual in form of a series of PCX files with a nifty viewer. Though it was not the full game and contained the usual registration form, Interplay considered it a commercial product and did not allow distribution.
A full version on CD was released only later, in 1996 or 1997. It had an updated version of the engine that supported resolutions up to 640×480.
Technical Stuff
There is an ongoing rumor that the music in Descent is somehow optimized for Soundblaster AWE32 cards. This is not true. The recommended soundcard is a General MIDI device, which at the time usually meant a Roland SoundCanvas. It did support the AWE32 though, as well as about any other soundcard on the market at the time.
Descent has a built-in function not only to save screenshots, but to record demos. Hitting PrintScreen will save a screenshot in PCX format in the game directory. In a new game session, old screenshots are overwritten, so move them elsewhere after ending the game. The full version even came with a public domain PCX viewer. Hitting F5 will start the recording of a demo, hitting it again ends it, prompting for a file name. Demos are saved with a DEM extension.
The full version of Descent supported most of the then common VR headsets.
It should be noted, and this goes for the whole Descent series, that the game is very hard to play without a joystick. It is, after all, a sort of flight simulator.
Sequels
- Descent II (1996)
- Descent³ (1999)
About This File
This is the original shareware version of Descent. The archive contains three files designed to fit on two floppies. The installer works without problems under XP.
