Looking Back At Catacomb 3d, The Game That Led To Wolfens…
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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 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 -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.”
Carmack said getting a “fully general” version of texture-mapped surfaces working was limited at the time to high-end SGI workstations and the . But he said he was able to develop “a simplification of that and could still go kind of fast” on the home PCs of the time. That was in part thanks to an EGA graphics trick that lets programmers write multiple columns of graphics data at a time.
“When the walls are really tall, you can slap down as many as eight pixels at a time in some cases,” Carmack said.
Sample gameplay from Catacomb 3D showing the game’s texture-mapped surfaces.
The decision to go for a first-person viewpoint in Catacombs 3D, rather than an over-the-shoulder third-person system, was largely because “it was very costly to draw large things [the player character] on screen,” id co-founder Tom Hall says in the video. But the first-person perspective also helped simplify aiming and added a real sense of immersion, he added. “This is me,” Hall said of the impact. “It really changes how you feel about things.”
Hall also reminisced about drawing extremely simplistic “6-year-old child-drawings” to sketch out his concept for Catacomb 3D‘s characters, then giving them to Adrian Carmack for conversion into “majestic art pieces that stand the test of time.” Carmack, for his part, says he would “try to interpret [Hall’s drawings] as best I could” for the game’s 16-color, 320×200 resolution framework.
Adrian Carmack also recalled working in DOS’s DeluxePaint II and not having access to any good animation software at the time. As such, he would end up using the drawing software’s undo command to flip back and forth between two different “frames” of animation quickly, to see how the movement would look in the final product. “If you use the undo key [that], you learn really rapidly that you need to often,” Carmack quipped in the video.
No longer keen on more Commander Keen
While id’s decision to lean into fast, action-oriented first-person games might seem obvious in retrospect, the video reveals that it was far from an easy decision. Catacomb 3D earned the team just $5,000 (about $11,750 in December 2025 dollars) through a contract to deliver bi-monthly games for Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge magazine-on-a-disk. Each episode of the Commander Keen series of run-and-gun 2D games, on the other hand, was still earning “10 times that amount” at the time, Romero said.
That made sticking with Commander Keen seem the “obvious business decision,” Romero says in the video. The team even started work on a seventh Commander Keen game—with parallax scrolling and full VGA color support—right after Catacomb 3D‘s release. At the time, it felt Catacomb 3D might be “just a weird gimmick thing that we did for a little bit because we wanted to play with a different technology,” as John Carmack put it.
A tech demo shows early work on Commander Keen 7 that was abandoned in favor of Wolfenstein 3D.
That feeling started to fade away, Carmack said, after his brother Adrian had an “almost falling out of his seat” moment while pivoting toward an in-game troll in Catacomb 3D. “It automatically sucked you in,” Adrian Carmack said of the feeling. “You’re trying to look behind walls, doors, whatever… you get a pop-out that, and it was just one of the craziest things in a video game I had ever seen.”
That kind of reaction from one of their own eventually convinced the team to abandon two weeks of work on Keen 7 to focus on what would become Wolfenstein 3D. “It kind of felt that’s where the future was going,” Carmack said in the video. “[We wanted to] “take it to some place that it wouldn’t happen staying in the existing conservative [lane].”
“Within two weeks, [I was up] at one in the morning and I’m just , ‘Guys, we need to not make this game [Keen],’” Romero told Ars in 2024. “‘This is not the future. The future is getting better at what we just did with Catacomb.’ … And everyone was immediately was , ‘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?’”
Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.