Looking back at Catacomb 3D, the game that led to Wolfenstein 3D

"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 like 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 like Catacomb 3D might be "just like 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."

"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 like that, and it was just one of the craziest things in a video game I had ever seen.""

Catacomb 3D generated only $5,000 from a Softdisk Gamer's Edge contract while Commander Keen episodes earned roughly ten times that amount. The team initially viewed continuing Commander Keen as the obvious business choice and began work on a seventh Keen with parallax scrolling and full VGA color support. A visceral reaction from Adrian Carmack to an in-game troll revealed the immersive power of the 3D technology. That response convinced the team to abandon two weeks of Keen 7 work and redirect efforts to the first-person project that evolved into Wolfenstein 3D. Leadership concluded the first-person direction represented the future.

Read at Ars Technica