On the 35th anniversary of id Software, the founders look back on an often-forgotten game without which we would not have Doom and Wolfenstein today.
When you think of the birth of first-person shooters, names like Wolfenstein 3D or Doom usually come to mind. But the actual precursor appeared in November 1991 and was called Catacomb 3-D.
To mark the 35th anniversary of the legendary studio id Software, John Romero has now released a retrospective video in which he, together with veterans Tom Hall, John Carmack, and Adrian Carmack, sheds light on the history of this inconspicuous but revolutionary title.
The developers reveal how close the game came to becoming one of today’s classic shooters – because financially, the project was anything but a blockbuster.
A financial disaster against Commander Keen
In November 1991, id Software was at a crossroads. The team had just completed Catacomb 3-D, a commissioned work for their former employer Softdisk and its floppy disk magazine “Gamer’s Edge.” The figures Romero now puts on the table are sobering:
The team earned just $5,000 from the game—and that was for three months of work.
By comparison, the Commander Keen platformer series was the studio’s absolute cash cow at the time, earning ten times as much. From a purely business perspective, the situation was crystal clear for the team at the time: experimenting with 3D is nice, but gamers want 2D platformers.
“The reviews for the game were incredible. Everyone loved Commander Keen. Why shouldn’t we just keep doing that?” – John Romero
Consequently, the team immediately began working on Commander Keen 7 in early 1992. They even built tech demos with parallax scrolling and VGA graphics. The future of shooters was essentially buried before it had even begun.
The moment the chair wobbled
But during the development of Catacomb 3-D, something happened that burned itself into John Carmack’s memory. It was the moment that proved that 3D was more than just a technical gimmick. It was about immersion.
John Carmack recalls a test run by artist Adrian Carmack (no, they are not related):
“One of my most cherished memories of Catacomb is how Adrian almost fell out of his seat when he turned around in the game and looked directly into the face of a troll.”
For him, this moment of physical shock was proof: “This is the future of gaming. That instinctive feeling, instead of just looking at little sprites moving across a screen.“
Adrian Carmack describes the experience even more dramatically in the video:
”It just sucked you in visually. […] It was one of the craziest things I had ever seen in a video game.”
A textbook technological revolution
Catacomb 3-D was a huge technical risk: Inspired by a graphics textbook that John Carmack had seen years earlier, the team applied textures to 3D walls for the first time – something that had previously seemed reserved for expensive workstations.
The title also laid the foundations for gameplay features that we take for granted today. It was the first 3D shooter to support the mouse – at that time an absolutely exotic input device for action games.
There was even room for humor: the character you have to rescue in the game was based on D&D player Izzy, a friend of John Carmack. When Adrian Carmack asked him to describe his character, he expected a heroic knight.
Instead, Izzy described an “ugly bald man.” . His only line of dialogue in the game, when you rescue him, is: “Hi, I’m Nemesis. Do you have a towel?”
The decision was made in an hour
Despite the financial failure of Catacomb 3-D, the team couldn’t let go of the idea of this new type of immersion. They worked on Commander Keen 7 for only two weeks before throwing in the towel.
“One evening, we talked about how Catacomb 3-D was just the beginning of a new way of playing and that the future lay in 3D. Within an hour, we had decided what our next game would be: Wolfenstein 3-D.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Without the financial flop of Catacomb and Adrian Carmack’s nearly overturned office chair, we might have spent the 90s jumping on colorful aliens in 2D worlds with a pogo stick instead of fighting off hordes of demons on Mars with a shotgun.
