A strange little side quest
DoomCraft may feel immediate, but the ideas around action games have been evolving for a very long time. Gun Fight reached arcades in 1975 and became the first arcade video game to use a microprocessor. That is only half the story. In 1958, Tennis for Two used an analog computer and an oscilloscope to turn simple physics into a playable tennis-like demonstration. That long chain of experiments is part of why action games still feels fresh when a game finds the right twist.