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download onlyDoom1993MS-DOS / PC
download onlyOperation Body Count1994MS-DOS / PC
▶Xenon 2 Megablast1989MS-DOS / PC
▶Silkworm1989ZX Spectrum
info onlyHexen1995MS-DOS / PC
info onlyDuke Nukem1990MS-DOS / PC
Two entirely different traditions meet in this collection of shooting games. One is the first-person shooter, invented on DOS in the early 1990s and refined at extraordinary speed over the following five years. The other is the scrolling arcade shooter, older by a decade, built around memorised patterns and a single life between you and the start of the level. Both are represented here in depth, and both run straight from this page.
Wolfenstein 3D is where the modern shooter begins: flat corridors, hitscan weapons and a pace that felt physically impossible on a 1992 office computer. A year later Doom added height, darkness, non-orthogonal walls and a soundtrack that still turns up in gyms, and it did so as shareware that spread through floppy disks and office networks faster than anyone could count. Doom 2, Final Doom and Quake continue the line, while Heretic and Hexen rebuild the same engine as fantasy.
Build engine, arcade shooters and everything between
The middle of the decade belongs to the Build engine and its interactive worlds. Duke Nukem 3D put pool tables, cinemas and working light switches into a shooter and let you blow all of them apart; Blood and Shadow Warrior pushed the same technology further, one into horror and the other into slapstick. Rise of the Triad, Blake Stone and Corridor 7 fill in the stranger corners of the same years.
On the arcade side the collection holds R-Type with its famous detachable Force pod, Gradius III, 1942, Galaga 94, Space Invaders, Space Harrier and Xenon 2 Megablast, plus Tyrian 2000, the vertical shooter that gave the genre a proper upgrade shop and a plot. Descent 2 sits between the two traditions, a six-degrees-of-freedom shooter that disorients almost everyone on the first level.
All of it plays in the browser. Pick a game, let the emulator load for a few seconds, and shoot. There is no installer, no plugin, no account and no registration, and every game page lists the keyboard and mouse mapping so you can be moving within a minute.
The game that defined the genre has a hub of its own — head to Doom Online for every entry of the series in our catalogue.