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Doom
Doom is a legendary video game released in 1993, perhaps the most famous game of all time, the game that popularized the first person shooter genre and shocked by its at the time extremely advanced 3Dish graphics. It was made by Id Software, most notably by John Carmack (graphics + engine programmer) and John Romero (tool programmer + level designer). Doom is sadly proprietary, however its engine was later (1999) released as free (as in freedom) software under GPL which gave rise to many source ports. The assets remain non-free but a completely free alternative is offered by the Freedoom project that has created free as in freedom asset replacements for the game. Anarch is an official LRS game inspired by Doom, completely in the public domain.
{ Great books about Doom I can recommend: Masters of Doom (about the development) and Game Engine Black Book: Doom (details about the engine internals). ~drummyfish }
Partially thanks to the free release of the engine and its relatively suckless design (C language, software rendering, ...), Doom has been ported, both officially and unofficially, to a great number of platforms (e.g. Gameboy Advance, PS1, even SNES) and has become a kind of de facto standard benchmark for computer platforms -- you will often hear the phrase: "but does it run Doom?" Porting a Doom to any platform has become kind of a meme, someone allegedly even ported it to a pregnancy test (though it didn't actually run on the test, it was really just a display). { Still Anarch may be even more portable than Doom :) ~drummyfish }
The Doom engine was revolutionary and advanced (not only) video game graphics by a great leap, considering its predecessor Wolf3D was really primitive in comparison. Doom used a technique called BSP rendering that was able to render realtime 3D views of textured environments with distance fog and enemies and items represented by 2D billboards ("sprites"). No GPU acceleration was used, graphics was rendered purely with CPU (so called software rendering). This had its limitations, for example the camera could not tilt up and down and the levels could not have rooms above other rooms. For this reason some call Doom "pseudo 3D" or 2.5D rather than "true 3D". Nevertheless, though with limitations, Doom did present 3D views and internally it did work with 3D coordinates (for example the player or projectiles have 2D position plus height coordinate), despite some dumb YouTube videos saying otherwise. For this reason we prefer to call Doom a primitive 3D engine, but 3D nonetheless.
LOL someone created a Doom system monitor for Unix systems called psDooM where the monsters in game are the operating system processes and killing the monsters kills the processes.