First of all, DOOM isn’t raycasted. Second of all it’s 3D in the sense that all objects have xyz coordinates and can move in that space. You can miss the monsters by having a rocket go over their heads. The main limitation is that the levels couldn’t have more than one ‘room’ per vertical space.

The rendering can still be implemented as polygons (making it true 3D rendering) whilst still maintaining the same level-based limitations, as we can see with DOOM 64.

Quake released the day before Super Mario 64.

Those 48 hours were likely the peak of video gaming. Certainly they have yet to be equaled.

Most people would call DOOM a 3D game. Its popularity spelt the end of 2D games which is why people bring it up.

It doesn't matter that it's raycast with billboard sprites, it was first-person-perspective with pixel-perfect lit texture-mapped wall and floor rendering with lifts and stairs. 3D enough.

As a Marathon fanatic, it killed me that the game didn’t get more love. I recall watching a Doom game and someone shot a rocket at a player above them. The path of the rocket was bizarre and being baffled that this was ‘good’.

It was a fun era to live through as the progress was so quick.

Hey, Mario 64 isn't "real 3d". It is just a projection of 3d coordinates to 2d triangles on a 2d screen.

If we're going that hard, I would argue anything that's not viewed stereoscopically by definition cannot be 3D.