Gaming: Id Software's Second Fps Only Brought In $5,000, And The Studio...
In celebration of the 35th anniversary of Doom developer id Software's founding, co-founder John Romero has released a video retrospective on one of id's most unsung games: Catacomb 3-D.
The video featured Romero's own recollections, as well as those of id vets Tom Hall, John Carmack, and Adrian Carmack—no relation on those last two, by the way. I only found that out embarrassingly recently.
id began work on Catacomb 3-D in October 1991, after completing Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter. This was during the studio's brief stint in Madison, Wisconsin after leaving Shreveport, Louisiana, but before settling in Texas for good.
Catacomb 3-D was part of a deal id had with its founders' former employer, Softdisk. Some of id's first games—made in blisteringly fast two-month development cycles until Wolfenstein 3-D—were distributed in Gamer's Edge, a monthly, subscription-based demo disk of games put out by the software company. Similar to shareware, it's a distribution model that sounds like it came from another universe looking back from 2026.
Catacomb 3-D wasn't id's first FPS, but it included major advances over Hovertank One. While the crew continued to hone its art and design, John Carmack was experimenting with texture mapping, an aspect of 3D graphics we take for granted today, but which could only run on expensive Silicon Graphics workstations before games like Catacomb and Ultima Underworld made it work on far less powerful consumer hardware.
Speaking of things we take for granted, "FPS" wasn't even a proper genre at this point: id's early FPSes were often compared to top-down, arcade-style shooters. John Carmack called it "basically a quarter-eater still, put onto the PC" in the video, but also characterized Catacomb as id planting its game design flag.
"It didn't have the overarching story and depth that people felt the PC was better suited for," said Carmack. "And we were still kinda striking out and saying: 'No. Action, fast twitch, that still is a great, viable gaming thing to do.'
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"We just had this one, new, super novel new perspective, literally, by putting it in 3D."
Tom Hall noted that id opted for first-person in its early 3D games partly due to technical limitations. "It was very costly to draw large things on-screen—don't want to slow down the game," said Hall. But like other design coups in gaming, this technical con
Source: PC Gamer
