id Software's second FPS only brought in $5,000, and the studio might not have made Wolfenstein and Doom if the game hadn't made a dev fall out of his chair: 'That was just one of the craziest things in a videogame I'd ever seen'

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.'

"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 constraint resulted in something special.

"We could have done it over the player's shoulder and stuff," said Hall. "But it made it really easy to aim if something's just in the center, and it's very simple, and it's fast to draw. It also increases the player immersion, like 'this is me.'"

Romero revealed that id only made $5,000 on Catacomb 3-D through its Gamer's Edge deal⁠—approaching $12,000 in today's money, but that's still not a great paycheck for two months of work by six people. Commander Keen was more profitable and popular, so id launched into development of Commander Keen 7 at the beginning of 1992, shortly after Catacomb 3-D was completed.

But the team was beginning to realize that they had stumbled on something transformative, that immersion Tom Hall mentioned. Johns Carmack and Romero both point to an incident with Artist Adrian Carmack as a bit of a eureka moment.

"One of my more cherished memories of making Catacomb was Adrian almost falling out of the seat when he turned around right in the face of a troll. This is where we could tell we're starting to get it," said Carmack. "This is the future of gaming, rather than looking at the little sprites moving around on the screen and maybe getting tense. But it was the sense of shock. That was the first moment that locked into my mind that we were really onto something in this new genre and style of play."

"It just automatically sucked you in visually. You couldn't help it," Adrian Carmack recalled. "That's just what your eyes and your mind did.

"That was just one of the craziest things in a videogame I'd ever seen. We definitely knew that we'd found a new game style, a new game type."

id abandoned development on Commander Keen 7 after just two weeks, never to return to the series. "One night, we talked about how Catacomb 3D was just the beginning of a new way to play games, and that the future was 3D," said Romero. "Within an hour, we had decided what our next game would be: Wolfenstein 3-D, the grandfather of first person shooters."

By Romero's reckoning, Catacomb was a critical step on the path to Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake⁠—the FPS genre, as well as 3D graphics and design writ large, as we know them. "This all began with Catacomb 3-D," Romero concluded.

Romero Games is offering a classic-style, PC big box reissue of Catacomb 3-D on its website alongside other goodies like the big box release of Sigil or Romero's game dev memoir, Doom Guy. And after a Microsoft-induced scare, John and Brenda Romero's studio sounds like it's back on track to release its long-awaited next gen FPS.