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.

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.

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.

Need WebGL2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

Is there a way to play this without geting vertigo?