Classic shooters, playable in your browser

Between 1992 and 1995, one genre paid for the entire shareware business model. id Software gave away the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D and then DOOM, Apogee did the same with Blake Stone, and the calculation was that a first-person shooter is the hardest kind of game to describe and the easiest to be sold by. It worked well enough that the free episodes are still legally free thirty years later, which is why most of this page exists.

Two of these are not shareware at all. Freedoom is a from-scratch replacement for DOOM's data files under a BSD licence, so the whole thing — engine and content — is free. Tyrian 2000 was released as freeware by its own authors, all of it, no episode split.

Where to start

DOOM — The one that has to be here. Boots to the title screen in about two and a half seconds from a cold cache, which is faster than most pages that merely describe DOOM.
Freedoom — If the licensing question bothers you, play this instead: same engine, entirely free replacement art and levels, and a genuinely good game in its own right rather than a curiosity.
Blake Stone — Apogee's answer to Wolfenstein, with an interesting wrinkle — it has informants you can choose not to shoot, which was novel in 1993. Menus are keyboard-driven.
Tyrian 2000 — Not a first-person shooter at all but the best-looking game on this page: a vertical scroller with a genuine ship-upgrade economy, released as freeware in full by its authors.
Raptor — The other Apogee scroller, and the one that most rewards spending money in its between-mission shop rather than hoarding it.

What runs, and how

Every shooter here is the original DOS binary running under DOSBox compiled to WebAssembly — not a remake, not a source port with modern textures. What you get is what shipped on the disk, at the resolution it shipped at.

That has one practical consequence worth knowing before you click. DOOM and Freedoom have working mouse look; we verified it against the games' own configuration and shipped a DEFAULT.CFG that enables it, because vanilla DOOM ships with use_mouse 0 and would otherwise ignore the mouse entirely. The rest are keyboard games, and the pages say so. Blake Stone's menus in particular are keyboard-only by design — that is the game, not the emulator.

Shareware, honestly

Where a game is a shareware episode, it is labelled as one and the page says which episode you get and what the full version added. We would rather lose the click than have someone finish episode one expecting the game to continue. Titles marked FREE are free in full: engine and assets both, nothing held back.

Other categories: Classic shooters · Side-scrolling platformers · The Windows desktop classics · Card games · every game and guide

Frequently asked questions

Is playing DOOM here legal?

Yes. What is hosted is the shareware episode id Software released for free distribution, which has never been withdrawn. The commercial episodes are not here and are not linked.

Why does the mouse not work in some of these?

Because it did not work in the original either. Most DOS shooters other than DOOM shipped with mouse support off or absent. Where a game offers no way to enable it, a click sends that game's fire key instead, so clicking still does the obvious thing.

Do my saves survive closing the tab?

Yes, for the games that have their own save system — saves are written to browser storage and restored the next time you open the page. Fifteen of the DOS titles on the site also support resuming mid-level, not just from their own save menus.