John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of the game held.
In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software Catacombs 3-Drude looking, EGA Color It was still a revolutionary first-person shooter compared to other first-person games of the time. “When we started making 3D games, the 3D games that were out there didn’t look anything like our games,” Romero told Ars in a recent interview. “They were all about walking through mazes in tandem and doing 90-degree turns and stuff like that.”
in spite of Catacombs 3-DBut technological advances in first-person perspective meant that Romero remembers the team at id starting work on the next entry in the long-running series after its release. Commander Keen It’s a series of 2D platform games. But as the process progressed, Romero told Ars that something felt a bit off.
“Within two weeks, [I was up] At 1am, “Hey guys, play this game. [Keen]“This is not the future. The future will be better because of what we do now. Catacombs‘ And everyone was immediately like, ‘Yeah, you’re right. It’s new, we’ve never seen it before, and we can do it, so why not do it?'”
The team started working Wolfenstein 3D “That night,” Romero said, and the rest is history.
Pursuing speed
What to configure Catacombs 3-D Romero said that setting it apart from other first-person gaming experiments at the time was “the biggest strength of our game and its successors was its speed. The speed of the game was really important to us as a big differentiator. Everyone else was trying to make full-blown 3D worlds — six degrees of freedom, super detailed — and our goal was fast, simple rendering with great gameplay. Those were our pillars, and we stuck to them. That was the real differentiator from everyone else.”
That obsession with speed extended to id’s development process, which Romero says was almost unrecognizable from today’s low-budget indie games. For example, the team didn’t bother to create blueprints outlining key ideas up front. Romero says, “Because the blueprints were right next to us, and the creative director was in charge. Games weren’t that big back then, so it was easy to say, ‘This is what we’re making,’ or ‘This is how things will look,’ and then we all just went about our own thing.”
Romero says that early id designers didn’t even use basic development tools like version control systems. Instead, development was highly compartmentalized among the various developers. “He doesn’t touch the files that I work on, and I don’t touch his files,” Romero recalls of programming games with John Carmack. “I’d put only the files he needed on my transfer floppy disk, and I didn’t care if he copied everything from there and overwrote my files, because it was only my files, and vice versa. If the hard drive crashed for some reason, I could reconstruct the source from someone else’s copy.”