For anyone who enjoyed Descent, please go buy Overload. It's a pretty much perfect spiritual sequel, with a great soundtrack.

And I believe made by some of the people that formerly worked on Descent.

I absolutely LOVED this game when it first came out. I played with a trackball + keyboard, and the 6 degrees of freedom, paired with an environment where there often was no natural sense of "up" or "down" (zero gravity, inside tunnels) really blew my mind. I experienced a sensation I had never before experienced, almost out-of-body.

For example, you approach a "T" junction, and depending on your pitch angle, the branches may be up/down or left/right. But since there's no natural ground or sky, you can either maintain an orientation memory (I usually did automatically), or you can just let all that go and travel with no sense of true orientation.

Occasionally you reach an area with some signs or printed panels, and then you realize what the regional up/down orientation was; but it didn't matter in zero gravity.

Mr. Doob has been doing experiments like this for at least a decade, glad to see that he's still at it.

He's the creator of three.js, and it looks like this uses that for rendering instead of being a straight port.

DOS Games, where every game was a completely different game engine.

The VGA era was something special.

Descent was a huge part of my childhood (and surprisingly my little kids are now big fans as well)! Unfortunately this seems to stutter pretty badly with audio issues as well for me on Firefox on Linux. As a huge fan of three.js and other past work... I guess I'll blame Claude?

I play inverted mouse on every game because that was the default on Descent, my first 3D game. At least that's what I remember.

However this version uses mouse up/down to do up/down, and that seems so wrong. Can't play it :(

Need WebGL2.

WebGL1 WASM version based on https://github.com/dxx-rebirth/dxx-rebirth -> https://midzer.de/wasm/descent1/

Very impressive - graphically it runs very smoothly on Firefox under Linux - but unfortunately the audio is extremely choppy.

There's something wrong on Chrome + MacOS Tahoe, the bottom text in the intro is getting cut off.

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I remember buying this at fry’s with my dad in the 90s!

Impressively faithful, right down to weapons functioning incorrectly at a high framerate!

I remember mostly playing the port of this to the PS1, which had a fully animated opening cut scene. When I got the PC port like fifteen years later at a Goodwill, I was disappointed to see that that was a Playstation exclusive.

Descent is good, but I do think the series peaked with Descent II, if for no other reason than the rocking soundtrack. Very awesome, cool, industrial rock; I used to put the game CD in my car to listen to it since it was Red Book audio.

Since it's not linked anywhere that I could see, here's the source I found: https://github.com/mrdoob/three-descent

And Quake for web by the same author: https://mrdoob.github.io/three-quake/

I’ve been following Mr. Doob since the flash days. Cool to see they’re still doobing cool things.

Oooh. All this needs now is gamepad support

I was lucky enough to have a flight stick with a hat switch. Absolutely unfair, but I tore up my peers in the dorm because of that. Fantastic memories.

Surprisingly faithful! Works great on Safari, latest Mac OS.

Is there a way to play this without geting vertigo?

I need to replay this game with a dual stick controller. Previously played it on a serial joystick and keyboard.

I used to play this game incessantly. Audio on Firefox on Linux is, sadly, very very garbled.

Grew up with an Acer running Windows 95 that came with this preinstalled… now that’s bloatware that ain’t bloat. Descent floatware.

works excellent on m2 max -- thanks! good times.

Seeing this kind of games so beloved by the HN greybeards, makes you wonder what will be the equivalent nostalgia games for the next generation. Pokemon red maybe? Perhaps Fortnite?