I grew up playing DOS games and have fond memories of id Software’s DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Heretic, and DOOM II. Back then, I didn’t really know that some games were actually shareware and you had to pay for the full release. It wasn’t until DOOM II that I understood the difference. Around that time, I got a PlayStation and missed out on a lot of the great first-person shooters like Quake and Star Wars: Dark Forces. Thanks to Nightdive Studios, a lot of the games I never played back then have been released on modern platforms with various enhancements.
For a few years, I’ve been getting more and more into boomer shooters thanks to the likes of Dusk, Amid Evil, and more recent releases like Selaco. The genre is booming (can you blame me for this pun?) and there’s a steady flow of newer releases and classics being brought back. Heck, we even got a fantastic version of Rise of the Triad. I never thought I’d see ROTT again when I played it on DOS many years ago. While there are a ton of developers putting out great games in the genre now, there are three entities that I hold responsible for me becoming obsessed with boomer shooters and classic first-person shooters again: Nightdive Studios, New Blood Interactive, and composer Andrew Hulshult.
While we all enjoy reminiscing about the good old days, there has never been a better time to experience classic first-person shooters and even new ones right now. Alongside the incredible games and soundtracks, Bitmap Books and Stuart Maine’s I’m Too Young To Die: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 1992–2002 serves as not just a complement, but also a reference for some of my favorite games, including ones I had no idea about until now.
I’m Too Young To Die: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 1992–2002 (henceforth I’m Too Young To Die) aims to be the ultimate guide, as the name suggests, to first-person shooters from 1992 until 2002. I’ve already read two Bitmap Books releases before with The King of Fighters: The Ultimate Guide and A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games. The former was a great learning experience, while I enjoyed the latter for discovering more about a few games I wanted to play, but never had a chance to. With I’m Too Young To Die, Stuart’s interviews and knowledge made me appreciate many games even more, but more importantly, got me to realize just how much I missed when I owned a PlayStation.
I’m Too Young To Die doesn’t just begin with Wolfenstein 3D, but how we ended up getting the technology that evolved to give us the landmark games in the ’90s that moulded the genre into what we all love. Every few games, divided by year, are peppered in with quotes and lengthy interviews with developers and designers who gave us games like DOOM, System Shock 2, and many more.
Each year covered here features some background on the engines, consoles, graphics cards, and basically how technology pushed developers to adapt or be left behind. While not every year is the same, given how Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM basically led to the rest, it has been fascinating to see what went down in years where I completely wasn’t paying attention to the genre, like 1999.
Learning what went into games like Star Wars: Dark Forces, or even GoldenEye and Metroid Prime, has been incredible. I’ve had a chance to interview some of my favorite people in the genre right now, but getting post-mortem-like interviews or even behind-the-scenes details for games like Metroid Prime and System Shock 2 has been amazing. If it wasn’t for Nightdive Studios’ deep dive interviews with the developers and designers on YouTube recently, I wouldn’t have known so much about System Shock 2’s development.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m Too Young To Die’s biggest win with its content is in how educational it is. I cannot believe I didn’t know id Software used to be called “Ideas from the Deep”. Maybe I read it in passing and forgot, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg here. At this point, I’d just buy a book featuring purely John Romero interviews, but I’m Too Young To Die does a lot more.
The one-two punch (or shotgun shot) of Stuart’s introduction and John Romero’s foreword set the tone for I’m Too Young To Die, and even though there are some games that no one will even care about featured here, every inclusion is important to show that not every game back then was a winner. Be it because of a lack of polish or just poor release timing and technology, games failed even back then.
If you aren’t familiar with Bitmap Books’ releases, it is known for stunning print work, binding, and packaging on top of incredible text. I already had an idea of what to expect since I owned two books before this, but seeing high-quality print images for many of these games makes me wish we had dedicated books just on the games. They would be worth buying, but I digress.
I’m Too Young To Die’s design, right from the dust cover with the incredible and appropriate art to the binding color and the various crosshair designs used in the endsheets, makes for one of the most consistent and confident designs I’ve seen in a gaming book.
I’ve praised a lot so far, but the structure of the introduction is the only area of I’m Too Young To Die that I didn’t like. The content is exactly what it should be, but the format for the early section made me feel like I was reading an article online and not a book. Thankfully, Stuart absolutely nailed the rest of the text, and I was hooked. My other issue is one that isn’t really fixable, given the lack of records for some of the games, but I’d have loved for every single game to get the same amount of space and backstory. It would also be good to have the hyphen added in for when Spider-Man is referenced.
I’m Too Young To Die: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 1992–2002, alongside Donkey Kong Bananza, has been the perfect one-two punch reward for me as I took breaks from playing RPGs over the recent weeks. This book has also given me a few more games to bring up when I interview Nightdive Studios next. I haven’t read the next first-person shooter book from Bitmap yet, but I hope a third one is in the works, covering the current genre renaissance thanks to modern boomer shooters
If you made it this far and wonder why we have a book review on Nintendo Insider, many of the games included here are playable on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, with a few being very important to Nintendo’s history, like GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Metroid Prime, and even DOOM with its different ports over the years.
This book has served as a tome to remind me about games I grew up with, give me context for their development, their importance, and also introduce me to games I hadn’t even heard of from the era, like Crime Crackers. I’ve often said that Nightdive, New Blood, and Andrew Hulshult are the three most important things for boomer shooters. Today, I’m adding a fourth one: I’m Too Young To Die: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 1992–2002.
Review copy provided by Bitmap Books
