I still remember sitting on my father's lap as a small child while he played Wolfenstein on the computer. Then my mom got mad at him for letting me watch him play.
Funny. It's awkward sometimes as a parent to weigh the excitement of "how cool is this" with the possibility of your kid being exposed to that kind of excitement before it's really appropriate. Particularly if your own childhood worked out more or less fine that way...
You got me thinking though...I first saw Wolf3D in high school drafting class. Mostly 386/40s but some 486/33 systems too. My mouse sat on top of a big digitizer tablet next to the computer.
The teacher was cool with us playing games and things at lunch. Sometimes people would pop in to ask about drafting and CAD while we were playing on Wolfenstein or...what was the artillery one? Scorched Earth I think. Death's Heads going off while brushing doritos crumbs off the shirt and saying "hi there, welcome...so these are all CAD systems running AutoCAD, and uh..."
To counterbalance this, another student was usually rendering things in POVRay and I think at one point I brought in VistaPro to show people.
It's funny to think about the scariness factor. Wolf3D and Doom were both pretty good for jump scares and relative tension. But the feeling of excitement was really well balanced in various ways. Finding weapons, using cheat codes, etc.
I still remember that I found Friday the 13th for the C64 _far_ more terrifying than even Doom on the PC. Similar with Force 7 and Aliens for the C64, in which the landing sequence made you think you were playing Master of Lamps and then boom, you were screwed.
Weirdly, I also remember Prince of Persia for DOS being kind of scary in an atmospheric way. It was one game that I'd usually quit after too long when playing it alone at home. Terminator Rampage was atmospherically intense and I couldn't play that one for long either.
Apogee and Microprose games in general were way easier on the atmospheric tension...some Blake Stone followed by Aces of the Pacific and then a bit of FastTracker II was so often my jam. Good memories...
I remember playing this a bunch way back in the day. My dad overhead me playing, he recognized one of the levels played morse code in the background of the music and decoded the entire message.
