it felt like it was just too much.'Ī particular sticking point for Romero was wanting to do more in the 3D, first person space - an area id had previous experience in with the likes of Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D. The idea of immediately making another Keen. 'Out of those 13 games, four of them were Commander Keen games. 'At the beginning of '92, we had just come out of a year where we made 13 games,' says Romero. id Software made four of these side-scrolling platformers for MS-DOS in very quick succession between 19, and studio co-founder John Romero tells us that the team was definitely ready for a change. The origins of Wolfenstein 3D, a gloriously violent game that paved the way for the even more gloriously violent Doom, can be found in a somewhat more cutesy series of titles: the Commander Keen series. The story of Wolfenstein 3D’s development makes for a fascinating time capsule of those early days of game development - a milestone in gaming history that underlines just how much the industry has grown over the decades since.īut that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit. In the age of years-long development cycles, it seems miraculous that Wolfenstein 3D, a game that spawned the modern-day FPS as we know it, was developed by six people in just six months.
