Author's Note: "Living the Dream" was written for inclusion with the Catacomb 3-D collector's boxes released from Romero Games. It has been reprinted here with permission.
One of the first things, although not the very first, players noticed about Catacomb 3-D wasn’t its texture-mapped walls, although those were significant for reasons that will become clear later. Press Control to fire, and your disembodied hand rose from the center of the screen to cast a fireball dead ahead. “I really liked the hand, which is actually my hand,” Adrian Carmack told me when I interviewed him for the FPS: First Person Shooter documentary.
Today, disembodied hands holding big fucking guns in first-person shooters (or fireballs) is taken for granted. It’s the de facto view, a sign that you inhabit a body and see the game world through your eyes. In Catacomb 3-D, it was a novel idea and the first of its kind. The idea of having the hand present didn’t involve much debate, said John Carmack in our documentary interview. “It felt right to have something up there that serves dual purposes: It’s both an indicator of what your current weapon is, and it's showing you the center of the screen as a partial aiming help.”
There were other practical reasons for depicting a hand rather than, say, the full view of your character. “It was a hand because drawing a third-person view of the back of the character would have been too much,” John Romero says. “Computers back then were too slow, so we thought the hand was enough to let the player know they're casting spells, and those spells are coming out of this area right in front of them.”
Seeing your weapon in FPS games grew out of Catacomb 3-D, as did the trappings around the mechanic. “It took a while for us to have the debates about whether you have an actual aiming dot or reticle on there, and there were arguments about, is it more realistic if you don't have that even though it's more frustrating for people to aim?” John Carmack said. “Some of those debates continue to rage to this day.”
Your fireballs could be powered up, too, increasing the potency of your attacks and the feeling of inhabiting the robed form of a powerful spellcaster. “I also like the game mechanic of it,” Adrian Carmack said, “where you hold down your mouse button for more power. It’s actually a pretty fun game.”
The heart of the matter is this: For all the freshness around that hand as a game mechanic, it marked another first for the genre—the first time that players felt like they were playing a character rather than a nameless, faceless vehicle or nonentity good for nothing other than the projectiles it could fire. You could think of Catacomb 3-D as a sort of first-person fantasy RPG shooter, with players cast in the role of an adventurer exploring gloomy, dank dungeons. It was a game of many fresh ideas, including those wall textures, but one of id’s competitors almost got there first.
Released in November 1991, Catacomb 3-D was but one game in a development maelstrom during that quarter of the year. The four id co-founders—John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack—met at Softdisk, a subscription magazine that came with software users could install on their PCs. Romero spun up Gamer’s Edge as a game disk, and the id crew routinely pounded out a game every one to two months. John Carmack had been hired to work on Gamer’s Edge on the merit of Tennis, his game that depicted a remarkably realistic simulation of the sport considering it ran on the Apple II. One game he’d submitted to Softdisk beforehand was Catacomb. That foundation helped the id guys hit the ground running. “By the time that we started working on Catacomb 3-D, which was the beginning of October 1991, we had already made… I'd say three Catacomb games, maybe four if you want to count every single one,” John Romero told me.
All those Catacomb games were born of necessity. “When Carmack came into the Gamer’s Edge department, we needed to make two games in one month for a disk,” Romero said. “For both of us, the only way we're going to do this that fast is by taking games we've written already and basically porting or rewriting them for the PC, because we're both Apple II programmers. So I picked a game called Dangerous Dave and he picked Catacomb. Then he made more levels for it and he called it Catacomb II.”
The guys had a lot more going on than porting Apple II games to the PC. By the time they started Catacomb 3-D, they were knee-deep in their second Commander Keen trilogy of platformers for Apogee Software and wrapping up another groundbreaking 3D game. “Three games were being made at the same time: Catacomb 3-D, Keen 6, and Keen 5,” Romero says. “Adrian’s cranking on tiles”—the building blocks of Keen’s levels—“and I’m making Keen levels. Tom, after he was done with the levels for Catacomb, he jumped on Keen levels as well.”
“We were all stoked just to be making a living making games,” Hall says. “We worked 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. It was exhilarating, and we were all friends hanging out, making games, and living the dream.”
A fantasy adventure based on their favorite extracurricular activity seemed the perfect candidate for a game. “We did Hovertank and we were considering doing the tank thing again, but we had all been playing D&D together,” Tom Hall told me in our FPS documentary interviews. “And I thought, Let's do a game in that world. You're a magician just casting stuff.”
“It was as close to D&D as we could get,” Romero said.
There was another, more pragmatic reason for making a 3D version of Catacomb. “When you're coming up with ideas at a really high speed, it's easier if you're going to base it on a current IP that you own versus a brand-new IP,” Romero explained. “So because we were going to do something tougher in 3D, we decided, let's use an IP that we made already, and Catacomb just seemed like the game to do. It made it easier creatively for us to just put the monsters that were in that game, and just do 3D versions of them. We knew what the levels looked like. We just had to make textures.”
If the hand was among the first things players noticed when they booted Catacomb 3-D, textures were the very first. It was a milestone for John Carmack, who had been unable to pull off textured surfaces in Hovertank, the team’s previous—and first—3D first-person shooter. “He was up all the time. If he was awake, he was coding and eating,” Romero said of Carmack’s herculean effort building Hovertank’s three-dimensional world.
“That was the first game I'd ever seen where you can actually just freely move around a room and attack characters,” Adrian Carmack said of Hovertank. “Usually they were just step by step, slow and plodding. But that was technology at the time.”
John Carmack was well-equipped to tackle games like Hovertank and Catacomb 3-D. “I had done some early 3D work all the way back to when I was a teenager on the Apple II,” he told me. “I would make wireframe letters and slowly and tediously have the AppleSoft BASIC interpreter”—a way for the computer to translate code into an executable program—“transform those in three dimensions. So I could make a big letter and rotate it around.”
Despite its revolutionary technology, Hovertank was primitive in a key way. “The simplest thing that we did in Hovertank was the walls were still solid, flat, shaded, partially for performance reasons, and partially because I honestly still hadn't worked out some issues with perspective texture mapping,” John Carmack said. “That was obviously the next thing that I wanted to do with Catacomb 3-D.”
Carmack and the others wanted Catacomb 3-D’s dungeons to feel like dungeons: stone walls, moss creeping over barriers, blood splatters on stone. Texture mapping became one of the industry’s must-have features, and it originated with a phone call.
Romero was chatting with Paul Neurath of Looking Glass Studios, the developer that would go on to make classics such as System Shock and Thief. At the time of Romero and Neurath’s call, Looking Glass was working on Ultima Underworld, a 3D, first-person take on Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s fantasy realm. The id guys were still working on 2D titles.
Romero’s and Neurath’s conversation began as a chance for the two friends to catch up. “We both worked together at Origin Systems,” said Romero. “I worked on this game that was called Space Rogue at Origin, and it was a 3D space exploration game. You’re a space pirate, and when you landed on a planet, then it was the Ultima style: You could get out and talk to people. I called him up just to say, ‘Hey, how’s it going? What’s the latest?’ And he said, ‘We're working on a really cool game, and we're using a really cool new technique called texture mapping.” And I'm like, ‘What is that?’”
Wrapping up the conversation, Romero knew what they had to do. “After he got off the phone,” said Adrian Carmack, “he turned around and looked at John Carmack and explained it to him. He asked, ‘Can you do that?’ John Carmack said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ So the plan was, we would do Hovertank first, because that was a month's worth of work—it's funny now to think about being able to do a game in a month—and then we will do a follow-up game that would hopefully have texture-mapped walls.”
“They were still making Ultima Underworld for a whole year while we did nothing with texture mapping,” Romero said. “Then we made Catacomb 3-D with texture mapping half a year before they released Ultima Underworld.”
John Carmack had the perfect tool for the job: Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, a book by Andries Van Dam and James Foley. It covered virtually every trick and technique having to do with concepts and applications of computer graphics, which came in handy for both of id’s first 3D games. “I like to say that people nowadays have no idea what it was like, in terms of gathering information back then in the ‘80s and ‘90s, where today everything is at the tip of your fingers on the internet. And it's such an amazing thing,” Carmack said.
He purchased Computer Graphics from a university bookstore around the time he was 18. “It was very much academic and CAD oriented, but it had the basic information about transforms and clipping and line drawing and things like that. It’s a big, fat book, and that was my bible for years where I just read it and read it and read it. And I didn't understand everything that was in it, but it was enough to give me some directions to explore. That was what I used to create Hovertank. I remember pushing hard through it and not quite making it in time: things were still glitchy, and things were not quite working as well as they should, and going a little over time and budget.”
Tom Hall’s notes mapping out a general level flow. (Image courtesy of Tom Hall.)
Once again armed with his bible, Carmack rolled from Hovertank right over to Catacomb 3-D. He knew ahead of time that what he wanted to accomplish was possible on the PC, which gave him confidence. “My bible that I had, the Foley and Van Dam graphics book, the cover and the color plates were filled with things that had texture-mapped graphics created on million-dollar systems. So, it was always there in the sense that we wanted to do this; it was a matter of working out the specific technical hacks that would let us do it.”
Think of a plain brown box like the kind you’d use to mail something to a friend. Now imagine applying colorful wrapping paper—that’s texture mapping in a nutshell. Adrian Carmack, the artist on Catacomb 3-D, could paint textures that could apply to any surface. Flat, single-colored walls were a thing of the past.
Adrian also had a blast making monsters for the game, all of which were selected by Tom Hall from John Carmack’s 2D Catacomb game. “I really liked the first-person perspective,” Adrian said. “I studied a little of how to draw the Marvel way, so I was looking at how comic book artists design and draw superheroes and their dynamic perspectives.”
Influence for the monsters came from two likely sources. “Catacomb 3-D was based heavily on the 2D game, and both were heavily influenced by D&D and specifically by Carmack's D&D world,” Hall says of John Carmack’s campaign the guys played when they weren’t making games. Petton Everhail, the player’s character and the high wizard of Thoria, and the evil lich Grelminar, hail from the team’s campaign. (One aspect of Petton’s design stood out to Hall as especially fun: “Making up the death meter was fun—the image of Petton slowly revealing a skull as you take damage. Once fully revealed, yer dead, buddy!”)
If you played both Catacomb 3-D and Ultima Underworld, you might be wondering why the devs at Looking Glass included texture-mapped floors and ceilings in addition to walls, but Catacomb didn’t. The answer came down to hardware. “There was not enough rendering speed,” says Romero. “That's why Wolfenstein didn't have any texture-mapped floors or ceilings, either. By the time we got to making Doom, we could then do floors and ceilings.”
You might notice that Ultima Underworld’s view screen—the area where the action unfolds—is smaller than that of Catacomb 3-D and Doom. A smaller view screen meant less of the screen to refresh, easing some of the burden of processing. Even then, Ultima Underworld’s fully texture-mapped world caused it to move slower than id’s games. That’s okay in a first-person RPG, but not a fast-paced shooter. (Later id games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake let you squeeze performance out of your machine by shrinking your view screen. Same fast-paced gameplay, but not as taxing on older hardware.)
At its core, Catacomb 3-D is a maze game, like Hovertank before it and Wolfenstein 3D after. For Tom Hall, the key to designing entertaining mazes was to decide on a flow and then spice up those flows to keep players guessing what they’d find around every corner. “I sketched them out and tried things in the TED5 editor,” he says. TED was a custom level editor designed by Romero. “His role in early id was mostly the tool and game coder, since we started from basically nothing and desperately needed tools to make data quickly as a small team,” Hall says of Romero, “but he was obviously a prolific, amazing game designer too. We all constantly talked over the designs of games, tweaks to how they played. And we all just sensibly did what needed doing.”
Starting with the original Catacomb as a base helped expedite Catacomb 3-D’s levels to a point. “Since we were translating a design, and Romero's tool was so powerful, it was great to try things in the editor and just play them,” says Hall. “3D was so new, and it was all on a grid, so there would be a lot of re-doing a sketch rather than proving it out in the actual game.”
Catacomb 3-D’s mazes aren’t just orthogonal corridors and pretty textures. Some walls can be blasted open to reveal new rooms and hidden treasure. “Bringing the concept of destructible walls to 3D required care and trial and error,” Hall says. Destructible walls was one of many ways to keep the mazes interesting. “The process involved always trying to make new shapes and flows so each level felt as different as possible,” Hall continues. “When doing level design, I am big on landmarks and sense of space.”
For Hall, and for the rest of the team, all the games in development happened in a blur. “I forget how long the whole process took as we were just developing at 110 percent speed. It was a process of create, play, refine until the play of each felt right and interesting. We all played and tested, as we were mostly our own quality assurance testers. Keen 5 and 6 were always on my mind, as Keen's my baby, so I wasn't distracted for too long. Also, Catacomb 3-D was such an early, sparse design—we were just game-after-game solving the problem of inventing a new genre—so for what it was back then, it was fast and loose.”
Solving that problem was a thrill for Hall, who also captained the design of levels on Hovertank and split the mazes in Wolfenstein 3D with Romero. “It was amazing and an honor to design the very first first-person shooter levels, whether you consider that to be Hovertank, Catacomb 3-D, or Wolfenstein 3D. That was a completely new problem and design language that needed inventing. Some things worked, some needed refinement. But that's the process of game development and learning your craft, especially in a new, unexplored design space.”
Catacomb 3-D achieved another first in 2024. For the first time, it’s receiving the big box release it deserves (there was a boxed release in 1993 that’s best left to history). It’s important when viewed through the lens of historical significance, and it’s still a blast to play today.
John Carmack and John Romero agree. “I think I went an additional week over even further with Catacomb 3-D,” Carmack said, relative to the time it took him to write Hovertank. “Neither one of those got to the absolute sort of rock-solid perfection that I was very proud of in our later games. But we still got them out under the gun with really high time pressure, and they were fun.”
“John basically improved all this 3D programming on Catacomb 3-D, and that was also a two-month game,” Romero said, “and it was the first texture-mapped FPS.”
It was also an important building block for what came next. “We tried textured walls, and that was in EGA,” said Tom Hall. Short for Enhanced Graphics Adapter, EGA was a display standard introduced in 1984 by IBM. Most software was compatible with EGA by the time Catacomb 3-D made its way to subscribers in November ’91, rendered at 320x200 resolution and using 16 colors.
“It is really cool to see it as a boxed product, getting the tangible legacy it deserves,” Hall says. “We all made this cool game together, and now it will have a place on the shelf like all the games we've loved to handle and pore over—the Wizardry series, the Ultimas, and more. It is so cool of John and Brenda and Romero Games to preserve the legacy of these historic games, and really do them up right. Kudos!”
Even before Catacomb and the other games were finished, the guys were already thinking about what new games to make. The next step technologically—among other goals they set for themselves—was to figure out how to do texture mapping on the newer-, higher-res VGA (Video Graphics Array) display standard.
“We took that step for Wolfenstein 3D,” Hall said.
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replyDavid Craddock posted a new article, Living the Dream: The Making of Catacomb 3-D
