{"id":1273852,"date":"2026-03-14T08:11:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T08:11:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fzg7fnZqoTBENydaWK5zWd"},"modified":"2026-03-14T08:11:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T08:11:15","slug":"fps-legend-john-romero-says-wolfenstein-3d-was-the-first-game-id-software-took-its-time-with%e2%81%a0-a-luxurious-4-month-development-instead-of-just-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/fps-legend-john-romero-says-wolfenstein-3d-was-the-first-game-id-software-took-its-time-with%e2%81%a0-a-luxurious-4-month-development-instead-of-just-2\/","title":{"rendered":"FPS legend John Romero says Wolfenstein 3D was the first game id Software took its time with\u2060\u2014a luxurious 4-month development instead of just 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In a recent appearance on Nightdive Studios’ Deep Dive podcast<\/a>, Doom designer John Romero talked about the ways id Software casually revolutionized PC gaming in the early ’90s, all on a blistering release schedule where “taking their time” meant cranking out an all-time classic faster than most hero shooters are able to add a new character.<\/p>\n

“We had a technology that no one had yet on the PC, that had been sitting there, ready to be taken advantage of,” Romero said of id’s early days and the juice behind Commander Keen, its first game. “The PC shipped in August of 1981, and it’s September of ’90, and in nine years, no one has done what John [Carmack] did in just a few hours at night.”<\/p>\n

That particular technology, the beginning of Carmack’s programming legend, was fast-scrolling 2D graphics for platformers. Though such capability is taken for granted today, PC platformers before Keen weren’t able to keep up with the specialized hardware powering console platformers.<\/p>\n

Famously, id pitched Nintendo on a port of Super Mario 3<\/a>, only making Keen after the publisher’s rejection. Romero credited this coup, in part, to Carmack reading programmer and future id employee Michael Abrash’s book, Power Graphics Programming<\/a>. In 1991 alone, id released three Commander Keen sequels, Wolfenstein precursor Catacomb 3D, and a host of other games.<\/p>\n

“Wolfenstein was the first time that we were able to say, ‘We’re gonna take as long as it takes to make a game,'” Said Romero. “Before that, it was always two months. We were making games for two months for like, a year and a half. So finally it’s like, no more time limit, we do it as well as we can, and it took us\u2060\u2014to upload the shareware version of Wolfenstein\u2060\u2014it took us four months.”<\/p>\n

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