Descent

Descent abandoned the flat corridor mazes typical of the shooters of its time and offered genuine movement with six degrees of freedom – the player's spacecraft could turn and fly in any direction, with no concept of up or down. The player infiltrates a network of underground mining complexes controlled by treacherous robots that have attacked mining facilities across the solar system, and must navigate winding tunnels, destroy enemies, collect key cards and hostages, and finally escape each level before the mine's self-destruct system detonates. This principle of free movement in space was completely new on DOS computers and disorienting at first, but it also opened up a type of level design entirely different from corridor shooters with a fixed sense of up and down.

The game used its own 3D engine with textured polygons, which was demanding on the hardware of the time but made the mine environments feel genuinely three-dimensional and maze-like, with corridors crossing in every direction. Ambient electronic music and sounds echoing through the metal corridors reinforced the claustrophobic atmosphere and disorientation the game deliberately built up. Controls combining keyboard, mouse, or a joystick with a throttle lever required practice and adjustment to flying without a fixed horizon, but the reward was an unusual freedom of movement that the shooters of the day did not offer. The gradual unlocking of new weapons and ship upgrades between mines also gave the game a certain sense of progression and reward for successfully completed missions.

Descent built a strong fanbase largely thanks to its innovative multiplayer, where battles in fully three-dimensional space demanded entirely different tactics than a classic ground-based deathmatch. Together with its sequel, it laid the foundation for the six-degrees-of-freedom space action subgenre, which remains fairly rare and prized to this day for its technical boldness and uncompromising approach to design.