If you know anything about the history of id Software, you know how 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D helped establish the company’s leadership in the burgeoning first-person shooter genre, leading directly to subsequent hits like Doom and Quake. But only the serious id Software nerds remember Catacomb 3D, id’s first-person adventure game that directly preceded and inspired work on Wolfenstein 3D.
Now, nearly 35 years after Catacomb 3D‘s initial release, id co-founder John Romero brought the company’s founding members together for an informative retrospective video on the creation of the oft-forgotten game. But the pioneering game—which included mouse support, color-coded keys, and shooting walls to find secrets—almost ended up being a gimmicky dead end for the company.
id Software’s founders look back at an oft-forgotten piece of gaming history
Texture maps and “undo” animation
Catacomb 3D was a follow-up to id’s earlier Catacomb, which was a simplified clone of the popular arcade hit Gauntlet. As such, the 3D game still has some of that “quarter eater” mentality that was not very fashionable in PC gaming at the time, as John Carmack remembered.
“It didn’t have the kind of overarching story and depth and the other things that people felt that the PC was better suited for,” Carmack said. “And we were still kind of striking out saying no, you know, action, fast, twitch, that still is a great viable gaming thing to do.”
Technologically, id wanted Catacomb 3D to build on the success of Hovertank One, a fast-paced first-person game the company had released a few months earlier. Catacomb 3D‘s major graphical breakthrough over Hovertank would be texture-mapped walls, a concept Carmack said he had been interested in since seeing a texture-mapped cube on the cover of his trusty copy of The Fundamentals of Computer Graphics.
If id wanted to update the flat-shaded walls of Hovertank One with texture maps for Catacomb 3D.
Romero said he heard about texture mapping from a conversation with Paul Neurath, who was using the technique successfully in his work on the yet-to-be-released Ultima Underworld. Romero said he told Carmack about Neurath’s success, leading Carmack to pause for a second and then reply with “Yeah, I think I can do that.”