Doom clones

As evinced by counting their frequency on Usenet, "Doom clone" was a more common term than "first-person shooter" until the late 1990s.

Doom clones are games that mimic Doom's gameplay. In other words, most early first-person shooters — due to Doom's popularity, a huge number of such games appeared soon after its release. The term "Doom clone" was in fact the common term for first-person shooters until the late 1990s.

Among games often counted as Doom clones are those based on the Doom engine, such as Heretic and Hexen (see Commercial games for more). Others include Rise of the Triad, The Marathon Trilogy, Gloom, Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D. While subsequent games using 3D technology such as Quake and Unreal featured similar gameplay to Doom, the term quickly fell out of use after the appearance of games such as Half-Life which offered different gameplay and design styles.

In the late 2010s a revival of Doom and Quake inspired first-person shooters and indie games such as Dusk and Ion Fury began to be known as "boomer shooters", a term which was added as a Steam category in January 2024.