Also, looking at it, Marathon 1, 2 (the PC port, at least) and Infinity were released two or three months after Doom II (for M1) and Quake (for M2 and Infinity), which is as sure a death sentence for any game as I can think of. Especially since Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces, Heretic, Hexen and I don't know whatall else were out around the same time.
Honestly, it doesn't matter how good a game is or how advanced the engine is (because the Marathon engine was superior to Doom's at release) or how deep the plot is (
); it can only be influential if enough people played it to be influenced. I imagine that there's some rabid Rise of the Triad fans out there who just won't shut up about how Quake or Duke Nukem weren't the first 3D games or the first to have flying gibs or destructible environments or complex level traps or breakable glass or whatever, but nobody gives a shit because - get this -
nobody played Rise of the Triad.
That up there probably isn't relevant to anything anymore, I've realized, but after spending all that time on it I really don't want to delete it now...
Back on topic, I can see where everyone thought HL was hot shit: It actually feels like you're in a world rather than a series of disconnected levels that don't look like what their names say they are, and I did get the impression that there were things going on outside my field of view despite being the unmoved mover of the game. I didn't give a shit about the story, mostly because it pretty much boiled down to "aliens are here, escape with your life until you get to a point where you can stop them," which is the standard FPS fare, but I suppose that it was how it was done that made the difference.
