id Software’s first true step into texture-mapped first-person shooters just got the spotlight it deserves, with John Romero reuniting the four founders to talk through the making of Catacomb 3-D and how close they came to never following that path at all. A new mini-doc on Romero’s channel gets into how Commander Keen was making around ten times the money of early FPS work like Catacomb 3-D, and why the “responsible” move would’ve been to just keep cranking out more 2D platformers.
Romero and John Carmack dig into how Catacomb 3-D pushed past Hovertank by using a trick to write multiple vertical columns of pixels at once, making those now-primitive texture-mapped walls possible on 1991 PC hardware without tanking performance. Carmack talks about staring at the texture-mapped cube on the cover of Foley & van Dam’s “Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics” for years, and then hearing about Ultima Underworld’s texture mapping from Paul Neurath before deciding, “I think I can do that.”
The video also highlights a couple of surprisingly modern design beats. Catacomb 3-D was the first id game to show player health as a progressively busted-up head, an idea Tom Hall pitched to avoid yet another boring HP bar, and it’s also credited as the first 3D first-person PC game to support mouse input at a time when most DOS users barely touched the thing.
You even get the D&D deep cut that the NPC Nemesis was based on a friend’s tabletop character, faithfully rendered as the “ugly balding man” he requested. Seeing the four old friends talk about Adrian Carmack nearly falling out of his chair when a troll jumps him in-game (a moment the team calls their first real proof that this new perspective could deliver a different kind of shock and immersion) is truly something special.
Despite Catacomb 3-D and Hovertank only netting about a few thousand dollars each (versus Keen’s far healthier returns) the team decided within an hour that night to stop chasing safe money and make Wolfenstein 3D instead. In other words, the FPS lineage starts not just with a technology bet, but with a pretty bonkers decision to walk away from a sure thing, all because a janky dungeon made one artist nearly fall out of his chair.
Source: John Romero’s YouTube via Games Radar
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