Decades later, John Romero looks back on the birth of the first-person shooter

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just launched Catacombs 3-D,raw looking, Colorful EGA A first-person shooter game that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person shooter games of the time. “When we started making our 3D games, they weren’t the only 3D games out there like ours,” Romero told Ars in a recent interview. “They were walking at a steady pace, going through a maze, doing 90-degree turns, that kind of thing.”

despite of Catacombs 3-DAs technology advanced in first-person shooters, Romero recalls that the id team followed up its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running game. Commander Kane 2D platform game series. But as the process progressed, Romero told Ars that something wasn’t right

“Within two weeks, [I was up] At one in the morning I said to myself: Guys, we shouldn’t play this game [Keen]”This is not the future,” he said. The future gets better at what we just did catacomb.’ …And everyone was immediately like, ‘Yes, you know, you’re right.’ This is the new thing, we haven’t seen it yet, and we can do it, so why not do it?

The team started working on Wolfenstein 3D That very night, Romero said. The rest is history.

Go for speed

What did he put? Catacombs 3-D Aside from other first-person gaming experiences at the time, Romero said, “Our speed — the speed of the game was crucial for us to get that huge distinction. Everyone was trying to create a proper 3D world — six degrees of freedom or representation that was Really detailed, and for us, the way we went about it was a simple, high-speed demo with good gameplay that would set them apart from everyone else.”

This focus on speed extended to ID’s development process, which Romero said was unrecognizable compared to even low-budget indie games today. The team didn’t bother writing design documents outlining important ideas in advance, for example, because Romero said “the design doc was right next to us; the creative director was… Games weren’t big at the time, so it was easy for us to say: ‘” “This is what we make it” and “It will be this way.” And then we all work on our own thing.”

Early ID designers didn’t even use basic development tools like version control systems, Romero said. Instead, development was largely split between different developers; Romero remembers programming games alongside John Carmack: “The files I would be working on, he wouldn’t touch them, and I wouldn’t touch his files.” “I just put the files he needs on my transfer floppy disk, and it’s okay for him to copy everything from there and replace what he has because it’s just my files, and vice versa. If the hard drive crashes for some reason, we can rebuild the source from anyone’s copies of what He got it.”