LogInDoom, Wolfenstein 3D, Catacomb 3-D – the studio was there at the right time.
id Software
There are hardly any gamers who don't know id Software and its cult titles, and while Doom is probably the most famous one, we shouldn't forget about Catacomb 3-D, Wolfenstein 3D, and other gems.
But what made this specific company's games so popular? One of id Software's developers, John Romero, has an idea.
Back when it was working on another Commander Keen game, Romero felt it didn't feel right.
"Guys we need to not make this game [Keen]," he told the team (via Ars Technica). "'This is not the future. The future is getting better at what we just did with Catacomb [3-D].' ... And everyone was immediately like, 'Yeah, you know, you're right. That is the new thing, and we haven't seen it, and we can do it, so why aren't we doing it?'"
They started working on Wolfenstein 3D that very night, according to Romero, and we know where it went from there.
What set Catacomb 3-D and Wolfenstein 3D apart from other first-person games "was our speed – the speed of the game was critical to us having that massive differentiation. Everyone else was trying to do a world that was proper 3D – six degrees of freedom or representation that was really detailed. And for us, the way that we were going to go was a simple rendering at a high speed with good gameplay. Those were our pillars, and we stuck with them, and that's what really differentiated them from everyone else."
id Software
In order to chase the completion, id didn't bother with writing design documents, for example, they just had the idea and their creative director. The development process was compartmentalized, with Romero and John Carmack doing their respective parts and then building on what the other wrote. Games were not as big and complicated then, so it worked surprisingly well for the studio.
Wolfenstein 3D "was the first time where we felt we had no limit on time," said Romero, so the team could experiment. To release it quickly, id ignored the publisher's suggestion to increase the game's size from 30 to 60 levels. However, they listened to its advice to drop the EGA graphics standard in favor of more colorful VGA monitors.
"We were making games that we wanted to play," Romero recalled. "We weren't worried about audience. We were the audience. We played every game on all the systems back then. We were consumers, and we knew what we wanted to make. We made so many games that we were past our learning years of how to make game designs. We were at the point where the 10,000 hours was over. Way, way over."
With players trying to mod Wolfenstein, id changed its development approach toward opening its next game, and, to cut the long story short, we now play Doom on anything we can and can't imagine.
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