After he denied, ”Adventure games never really died. They kept selling the same number of units that they’ve always sold. The problem is that everything else was selling more units. They reached more of this stagnation rather than a dip.”
He then blamed DOOM for the genre’s decline, stating, ”I blame Doom. Because before Doom came out, games were a lot slower paced and people were a lot more interested in thinking and strategy.”
Citing games like Civilization and Ultima, he noted ”These are very kind of slow moving games and you just sort of absorb yourself into it. You just kind of enjoy the moment of being in the game.”
“And then Doom came out… it was visceral, and it was fast, and you shot stuff, and gibs flew off of everything. And it just kind of flipped a lot of people’s thinking a little bit, and also attracted a much bigger audience into games. With the adventure game people stayed, they never left. But there were all these other people that kind of came and things like Doom just sort of started to dominate.”
Gilbert’s memory may be colored, since Civilization II was the best-selling PC game of the year - years after DOOM and its sequel were released. In addition, there were plenty of arcade twitch games on PC before DOOM was released.
Genres have ebbs and flows - during the late 90’s, there were no major roleplaying games til Diablo was released.
