Back when you could 'download' or rather record 'games' from the radio onto cassette tape. One way online sharing? I guess you could directly share over the phone ;) (Phone sound quality was soo much better back then)

Sorry, what?

Wolfenstein had countless imitators. Here's a small, non-exhaustive list of Wolfenstein clones that came out before Doom:

• Corridor 7
• Blake Stone
• Ken's Labyrinth
• Super 3D Noah's Ark
• Nitemare 3D
• Catacomb Abyss
• Operation: Body Count
• Shadow Caster
• Rise of the Triad
• Spear of Destiny (Basically Wolfenstein 3D 2)

And it's no wonder it had so many imitators considering it's sales and reach. Wolfenstein sold about 150.000 registered copies plus over 1M shareware versions. Anything that sold into the 6 digits on PC was a smash hit at the time. The secret of Monkey Island, one of the best-selling PC games of the time, barely sold twice as much as Wolfenstein - and unlike Wolfenstein, had retail copies outside the US where the shareware model was very difficult.

I mean, there's a reason why Wolfenstein clone was a common term before DOOM came out, at which point it became a DOOM-like (or Doom clone. Depending on the region and country, some used clone while others used -like), and then after Duke Nukem 3D a Duke-like, and than came the Quake-like until it got settled into the term FPS (yes, it took that long for the term FPS to take off and onlyr eally settled in around the time of release of Half-Life!).

One reason why there were quite a few; but not "tons" of imitators: DOOM came out just 18 months later, by the time many of the games that got influenced by Wolfenstein actually came out, the genre was already called DOOM-like

And even before Wolfenstein, there had been some games that would be considered FPS nowadays. Catacomb 3D or Hovertank 3D, anyone? But those didn't make nearly the push for the genre that Wolfenstein did

Bolded: By that assessment, we would only have FPS, RPG, Action-adventure, beat'em up and Jump'n run (plus maybe the loosely-defined arcade genre), because everything else wouldn't have reached the threshold to become a genre by your metric. RTS? Action-RPG? Racing? Simulations? Sandbox? Fighting games? None of those had enough releases in a year or two to beat even Wolfenstein and it's clones, which by your own account wasn't enough to become a genre. So why ever would those ever have become a genre but Wolfenstein 3D is denied that honor despite inspiring more clones on it's own?

Such a narrow-minded phrase. And historically, factually wrong.

Videogames existed before Pong, be it on Mainframes like Tennis For Two (which predates Pong by 14 years!) or the Arcade cabinet Computer Space (which came out a year before Pong and was a derivative of Spacewar!, which came out 10 years earlier), Videogaming was well on it's way, if if Pong never had existed.

By the way: Spacewar! => First Shooter.

I'm going to ignore all of the factual errors in your first post to point out that your arguments in these two posts contradict themselves.  The first post argues how popular Wolfenstein 3D is, and the second post argues that popularity doesn't matter.  Were you actually trying to make a point and if so what is it?

Antarctic Adventure was a 1983 game from Konami where you played as a character in a 3D environment that ran and jumped over obstacles. Same with 1987's 3D Worldrunner. Sure, these games were sprite-based rather than polygonal, but is that really what makes a 3D platformer? And even if those didn't count, Alpha Waves came out in 1990 on Amiga. It wasn't necessarily a good game, but it meets the criteria.

The Vampire survivors clones or Bullet heavens/reverse bullet hel genre is popping off now. I particularly like Brotato, NERD Survivors and Army of Ruin but I hear Halls of torment, deep rock galactic survivors and 20 minutes til dawn are also up there, some say Halls of Torment is the best but it all started with Vampire survivors I do believe.

Go play CAVE games. Like a DoDonpachi. Anything from CAVE really. Some of their games took years to beat. One of the DoDonpachi games took 12 years before someone finally cleared it. Mushihimesama Futari is madness with bullets. Tho the first Bullet Hell game is credited to the fantastic Batsugun in 1993 from Toaplan who were one of the best of their era.  Truxton. Hellfire. Zero Wing. (All your base are belong to us) and a lot more. When they closed many of the staff formed CAVE and carved out a reputation as being one of the best to ever do it. They ran with the idea of bullet hell. Eventually making possibly the best game in the bullet hell genre. DoDonPachi Blissful Death Re:Incarnation

I'm not sure I'll be able to go back to bullet hell games after bullet heaven, I tried Nex Machina again recently and it all felt so wrong, lol.