30 years of the Playstation: Descent

On September 9, 2025, the Sony Playstation will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be exclusively covering games released for Sony’s first entry in the console market, with an emphasis on those that explain, in some way, its unprecedented success. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

DOOM was not 3D. Heretic? Not 3D. Wolfenstein 3D, despite the name, was also not 3D. None of those first-person shooters were actually 3D in the way we think of it in the present, but were instead 2D games shown from a first-person perspective to give the illusion of 3D — a fancy programming trick no different, conceptually, than Super Mario Kart or OutRun or Pole Position. Ridge Racer these were not.

The early 90s had true 3D games, but the breakthroughs in polygonal experiences that felt like more than just a sign of what was to come were still, well, to come. Namco and Sega were tearing it up in the arcades, trading blows back and forth, and in the case of the latter, even getting military-grade technology involved in order to push ever-forward. Nintendo and Argonaut Software partnered up on the Super FX chip, which allowed for actual 3D experiences like Star Fox to exist on the 16-bit system — the game chugged along, sure, and looked very basic, but that was genuine 3D in action. Sega got the fully polygonal Virtua Racing working on the Genesis, with similar (and expensive!) technology. Even with all of this happening, even with the success of Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, it wasn’t entirely clear to Sega that the full switch to 3D was happening right then; the technology was, at the time, too expensive for that to have happened essentially overnight — hence the partnership with GE Aerospace to get the cost down for their own games.

And then, literally all of a sudden, the cost was down enough to go all-in on 3D, which Sony did for the Playstation in what was a real big swing for the future direction of video games (and early enough for Sega to add on further to the Saturn’s hardware before that design was finalized, as well). The Playstation retailed for $299 at launch; Virtua Racing on the Genesis, to make up for the cost of the chip inside of it that allowed for it to exist in the first place, released in the spring of 1994 and retailed for $100. To give you a sense of how expensive said chip was, Sega was basically selling Virtua Racing at cost just to get it out there and show off what they had managed to do on their 16-bit system. The Genesis itself had been introduced at a price of $200 in 1989, and a later bundle with Sonic the Hedgehog was sold for $149; the value of that bundle was part of what helped Sega cut into Nintendo’s market share in North America to the degree that they did.

The Playstation selling for $300 with the kind of tech that enabled Virtua Racing on the Genesis, only for all games as a baseline, was something of a miracle that would have seemed impossible even a couple of years prior, especially when you consider that the 3DO launched about two years earlier in North America for $700. Sega straddling the line between a 3D future and high-powered 2D present for the Saturn makes a whole lot more sense when you remember that the 3DO cost, again, seven-hundred dollars at launch, and that its 3D tech wasn’t even as advanced as what the Saturn and Playstation would end up with. It’s difficult to believe now, considering the way that history played out, but it was very possible that Sony’s bet on 3D didn’t pay off, since developer and publishers still needed to want to invest in that space for the gambit to work: simply having a console capable of 3D gaming wasn’t enough on its own. Again, I present to you the 3DO.

Sony’s inaugural foray into the console space released in Japan in December of 1994, and September of 1995 in North America. By April of ‘95, Sony had released the first true 3D platformer, Jumping Flash!, which was meant in some ways to be a tech demo for the Playstation’s 3D capabilities, but also a fully formed — and excellent — game in its own right. North America would receive a finer-tuned version of the game two months after the console’s launch in that region. While this was going on in the living room, PC gamers were enjoying a title from Parallax Software: Descent. This was to first-person shooters what Jumping Flash! was to platformers: the first fully true 3D experience in the genre, and the title that would popularize “six degrees of freedom” in games.

When you went up a flight of stairs in DOOM, you didn’t actually ascend the stairs. It just looked like you did, in the same way turning a corner in Super Mario Kart looked like an actual turn. In reality you were moving through space in the same way you do when playing indoor golf: the background made your movements look real, but that was all there was to it. DOOM can be played entirely from the overhead 2D map, because the game is actually 2D, but presented as if it is 3D. The enemies are sprites, the projectiles are sprites, it’s all sprites in a 2D game.

Descent, on the other hand, utilized polygons in an actual 3D space. When you fly up, you are actually moving up within a 3D space. When you fly down, the same. You do not appear to be traveling in a 3D level, but you are actually doing so. You can actually change your orientation within a 3D space through rotation, and, as the name suggests, can move within that space in six different ways: forward and backward, up and down, and left to right.

Descent, by the way, made a lot of people experience motion sickness.

If you’ve never seen the game in action before, you will understand why people felt ill back in early 1995. That kind of movement within a 3D space is normal now, but we also have 30 years of experience with that sort of thing in the present. This was some anti-gravity, floating-in-space shit that our brains were not yet wired for. A miniaturized version of astronauts-in-training puking after weightlessness training.

For the initial MS-DOS release, Descent was controlled with a keyboard and mouse, much the same as the likes of its faux-3D predecessors in the FPS space. On the Playstation, however, movement needed to be figured out without the use of a keyboard and mouse, and without analog controls: the original Playstation controller had Sony’s variant of the D-pad, cross buttons on the other side of the pad, and four buttons on top. How it was handled was notable enough that I included it as a table-setting example of how developers and hardware manufacturers handled the transition to 3D gaming during this era, in the Lost in Cult book, Joysticks to Haptics:

Rare incorporated similar control scheme options for later FPS titles like GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark — even though the N64 pad had an analog stick in the middle, the D-Pad and four C-buttons served as an equivalent to the Playstation’s setup, which Descent utilized to great effect. (You could also use the analog stick and the C-buttons in a similar fashion, and as the default; these games purposefully had more customization than was really necessary, to the point there was a setup for two controllers held by one player in order to get “true” dual analog going.) Descent, being the first FPS of its kind and released to consoles months before the Nintendo 64 landed in Japan, was a pioneer in multiple ways.

That the Playstation release of the game controlled so splendidly and intuitively, and that it also played as smoothly as its initial PC release, is multiple turning points for the industry packed into one. You did not need the most expensive, high-powered arcade-level hardware or a robust PC setup to play true 3D games. You could spend $300 on a Playstation and plop that thing down on the living room floor in front or your family television set, and those experiences would just be there for you for $30 or $40, thanks to the move to the CD-ROM format that allowed for lower-than-cartridge pricing.

This isn’t overstating things, either. Descent was not just a critical success — and it was — but a commercial success, as well. That a very popular PC game, one both purchased and passed around as shareware in lofty numbers, could make it intact to the Playstation with the kind of tech it needed was a big deal — it’s worth noting that reviewers at the time complained about the high system requirements for the Macintosh port of Descent, which, like the Playstation edition, also released after the initial launch. Macs struggled to get it going with the smoothness of the original MS-DOS release, but the Playstation? No problems in performance or controls, which were more intuitive than FPS conversions from PC tended to be at that stage, especially when you factor in the whole six degrees of freedom thing.

As for how Descent plays and what you’re doing within it: you’re piloting a ship that’s been sent in to rescue miners and destroy robots that have been corrupted by an alien computer virus. The only thorough way to do this — the latter bit — is to destroy the mines themselves. Yes, things are dire enough that you’ve been hired to intentionally not just halt space capitalism and resource extraction, but blow up the stations that make it possible. Don’t worry, though, rescuing the miners is sort of optional, insofar as what’s expected of you from the brass, so they haven’t fully given up on being terrible.

“Sort of optional,” because even though the game does let you progress in theory without rescuing a single miner, they are a significant source of points. Each hostage held captive by the robots is worth 1,000 points, and you get double points at the end of the stage for rescuing them all — how much shield and energy you have left at the end of a stage, and whether you get the “skill” bonus or not, is highly variable. Something as reliable as the miner points ends up huge when it comes to tallying a high score and reaching extra life thresholds.

That shield bonus should be self-explanatory: you have a shield that allows you to take damage from these infected robots, which are all armed with lasers and explosives to help with mining. The more shield you have remaining at the end of a stage, the larger the point total awarded to you. You’ll want to keep plenty of shield left for more than just the points, though, as it (1) keeps you alive, duh and (2) the end of each level is one bumpy ride. That’s because you have to destroy a reactor powering the mine in question, and the robots know how important of a target it is, so they are swarming the thing and defending it. You’re going to have loads of blasts and missiles and such fired at you, and even when you do survive this, you then have to escape the mine before the whole thing explodes with you in it. Not only will you be fighting the walls and some explosions a bit in this regard, but more robot craft will appear to stop you from leaving, and you’re sure to take extra damage here, too.

As for energy, that’s what powers your weapons. It’s just your ammo, and you find recharge stations and energy pickups throughout levels both hidden and in plain sight, but it works a little differently here than in many FPS: imagine that in DOOM, rather than needing different ammo types for stronger guns, you just used more rounds per shot to inflict more damage. Your weapons can be upgraded, too, through items that you find hidden around. So while you start with a base, level one laser, find enough upgrades and it can be a level four laser, instead, which bumps the damage up to about 150 hit points per spent energy point, up from around 120. (Someone on Gamefaqs calculated all of this through trial and error over two decades ago; none of this hit point information appears in-game.) Then there is the quad laser, which fires off two beams instead of four, and when fully maxed out if you’re hammering on the button, can do about 600 points of damage per second, but then you’re also consuming two energy points per second.

There’s a spreadfire cannon that does a ton of damage, but it costs more in energy, and is best at short range. The Vulcan is rapid-fire but low-damage; luckily, it doesn’t consume energy and it stuns enemies, so you can just fire away. The downside is that, if there are multiple enemies on screen, the other can have a field day with you while you slowly destroy the other. Fusion is extremely powerful, and goes through enemies, to boot, with the damage increasing with each robot touched by the shot. It fires slowly, however, so you have to make those shots count.

Enemy behaviors differ depending on their programming: there are those that will lose interest in you whenever you’re out of sight, those that won’t move unless it’s to dodge and just continue to fire on you, and those that know the moment you enter a room and actively hunt you in a way that has them coming up behind you, not revealing themselves to you until they’ve started firing from an advantageous position. Descent does not mess around: it has 27 levels, and they get progressively more demanding and difficult, which is saying something for a game designed to disorient you in a true 3D space where you can fly the entire thing upside down if you want. You might be in tunnels throughout, but it’s pretty clear how this movement influenced one of Parallax Software’s successor studios in their next project, Freespace, even if the context it’s used within is entirely different.

The good news about the game asking so much of you, difficulty and challenge-wise, is that you can save whenever you want. If you want to avoid replaying levels, then when you know you’re about to get into a large-scale fight with a bunch of robots before hitting a reactor, just save. If you want to take the risks and suffer the consequences of failure, then don’t. Retrying isn’t so bad when you don’t have to go through everything all over again, and can learn from your mistakes before trying to avoid making them again. There are also options for actual in-game difficulty settings, but the ability to save at any time without consequence if that’s how you want to roll makes Descent approachable for anyone, so long as they have the literal stomach for it. Which, again, less of a problem now than it was three decades ago, especially since, graphically, this looks less “real” in a way that impacts your brain than it would have back in 1995.

Descent was Parallax Software’s first game — originally funded by Apogee until that budget ran out and the publisher dropped the game, as per an interview with Game Informer, it moved over to Interplay, which also eventually spent all it was going to spend on it without the studio asking for more cash. Which founders Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog did not want to do, so they instead spent their own money on the project to finish it up. Kulas and Toschlog had worked together on Lerner Research’s Car and Driver, which EA had published for MS-DOS in 1992, and the two decided to relocate to Illinois and start up Parallax together to make what they wanted to make. Descent was developed by an exceptionally small team — they tested it themselves because they didn’t even have testers, and had begun work on the game’s prototype with Apogee before they even hired an artist , and when work on a sequel began, said team had grown to 14 people.

And that was it for Parallax Software, despite the fact that Descent and Descent II were critical and commercial successes that showed off some fantastic applications of a burgeoning technology. Not because of any kind of unfair shutdown or failure, but because Kulas and Toschlog decided to part ways to form separate — but amicable — studios, after initially splitting Parallax into two offices in two different states. Toschlog’s office in Michigan became Outrage Entertainment, and Kulas’ in Illinois became Volition. Outrage would develop Descent 3, while Volition kicked things off with Descent: FreeSpace — The Great War.

While Outrage found critical success with Descent 3, it didn’t sell nearly as well as the previous games in the series, and their next title, the action game Alter Echo, was not as well-received nor did it sell in droves. It turned out to be their last game, as well, as THQ had acquired them in 2002, the year before its release, and shut them down after the game’s release. As for Volition, Freespace is simply one of the greats in its genre, a stunning achievement in space combat simulators, and received a sequel created by Volition that was similarly lauded. There were plans to make Descent 4, with Volition at the helm instead of Outrage, but issues with publishing rights kept them from doing so: Interplay owned the Descent name, and as Volition was no longer in business with them after Freespace 2, owing to Interplay’s financial troubles and the studio’s desire to work with a publisher without said issues, Descent 4 was shelved. Instead, per the interview with Game Informer, assets and technology that had been utilized for early development of Descent 4 went into something else entirely: a little game called Red Faction.

Kulas would eventually leave Volition in 2011, after the studio had found success with the Red Faction and Saints Row franchises, and would end up reuniting with Toschlog at Revival Productions. If you guessed that what they did with a studio flying that banner was to effectively make Descent 4, then you’re correct: Overload, originally released in 2018, is a spiritual successor to their original six degrees of freedom hit, and it’s available through Windows, macOS, Linux, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. Well before Overload, Probe Entertainment would develop Forsaken, which had both a similar look and similar gameplay to Descent. While the original Descent hasn’t been retouched in the present, Forsaken received the Nightdive remaster treatment in 2018, making that a banner year for returning to the early days of 6DOF shooters.

While the Playstation version of Descent is only out there in the form of used, physical copies for the original system — as well as emulation, naturally — the MS-DOS edition is available through GOG and Steam. It was, in fact, a Good Old Games original when that service launched. Though it was temporarily pulled from digital store shelves owing to royalty payments not heading to where they were supposed to — i.e. the game’s developers, to the tune of “tens of thousands of dollars” — it’s back on both storefronts in the present. And is a game you should still experience now, in all its 6DOF glory.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.