Decades later, John Romero looks back at the birth of the first-person shooter

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. "When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours," Romero told Ars in a recent interview. "They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing."

Despite Catacomb 3-D's technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn't feel right.

"Within two weeks, [I was up] at one in the morning and I'm just like, 'Guys we need to not make this game [Keen],'" he said. "'This is not the future. The future is getting better at what we just did with Catacomb.' ... And everyone was immediately was like, '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?'"

The team started working on Wolfenstein 3D that very night, Romero said. And the rest is history.

Going for speed

What set Catacomb 3-D and its successors apart from other first-person gaming experiments of the time, Romero said, "was our speed—the speed of the game was critical to us having that massive differentiation. Everyone else was trying to do a world that was proper 3D—six degrees of freedom or representation that was really detailed. And for us, the way that we were going to go was a simple rendering at a high speed with good gameplay. Those were our pillars, and we stuck with them, and that's what really differentiated them from everyone else."

That focus on speed extended to id's development process, which Romero said was unrecognizable compared to even low-budget indie games of today. The team didn't bother writing out design documents laying out crucial ideas beforehand, for instance, because Romero said "the design doc was next to us; it was the creative director... The games weren't that big back then, so it was easy for us to say, 'this is what we're making' and 'things are going to be like this.' And then we all just work on our own thing."

John Carmack (left) and John Romero (second from right) pose with their id Software colleagues in the early '90s.

Credit: John Romero

The early id designers didn't even use basic development tools like version control systems, Romero said. Instead, development was highly compartmentalized between different developers; "the files that I'm going to work on, he doesn't touch, and I don't touch his files," Romero remembered of programming games alongside John Carmack. "I only put the files on my transfer floppy disk that he needs, and it's OK for him to copy everything off of there and overwrite what he has because it's only my files, and vice versa. If for some reason the hard drive crashed, we could rebuild the source from anyone's copies of what they've got."

During his pre-id time at Softdisk, Romero said he and his colleagues kept things agile and avoided the dreaded feature creep mainly due to extreme time pressures. No matter what, they had to get out a new game every two months to go with the next Gamer's Edge magazine. "We weren't trying to throw everything in, [because] we've got another game we can try right after it," he said. "Maybe we experiment with that one. So there's no reason to feel like you're cramming everything into one game."

The formation of id Software in 1991 meant that Wolfenstein 3D "was the first time where we felt we had no limit on time," Romero said. That meant the team could experiment with adding in features drawn from the original 2D Castle Wolfenstein, things like "searching dead soldiers, trying to search in open boxes and drag the soldiers out of visibility from other soldiers, and other stuff that was not just 'mow it down.'"

But Romero says those features were quickly removed since they got in the way of "this high-speed run-and-gun gameplay" that was emerging as the core of the game's appeal. "It's violating the game whose character is now coming through as we make it. You kind of find the game while you're making it. You have a plan, but then the game itself is kind of coming out of what we're making. We can keep on shaping it or forcing it in a certain direction or let it go where it's going."

One of the last steps necessary to get Wolfenstein 3D out quickly, Romero said, was ignoring the publisher's suggestion that they double the game's size from 30 to 60 levels. But Romero said the publisher did give them the smart advice to ditch the aging EGA graphics standard in favor of much more colorful VGA monitors. "You're a marketing guy, you know what's going on, we trust you, we will do that immediately," Romero recalled saying.

From WADs to boomer shooters

It'd be easy for Romero to say that they were chasing an obvious market desire for a new style of game when making Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But looking back, he said their motivations at the time were much simpler.

"We were making games that we wanted to play," he said. "We weren't worried about audience. We were the audience. We played every game on all the systems back then. We were consumers, and we knew what we wanted to make. We made so many games that we were past our learning years of how to make game designs. We were at the point where the 10,000 hours was over. Way, way over."

John Romero shows off his long hair at a GDC 2022 talk.

Credit: Sam Machkovech

That didn't mean the early id team ignored community feedback, though. Romero said that after Wolfenstein 3D's release, he quickly realized that "people were trying to mod Wolfenstein, and we had no idea until we saw people do it. And it was really hard for people to mod Wolfenstein because it was fully compressed in two different ways—just to make it smaller on disk, not because we were trying to stop people [from modding]."

"But when we saw the lengths people had to go to just to get access and make levels, it was like, we need to completely open the next game," Romero continued. "That's why Doom's WAD file formats were put out there, and our level formats were out there. That's what let people generate tons of content for Doom."

Romero said that looking back, he thinks Doom hit that sweet spot where players could create robust maps and content without getting bogged down in too many time-consuming details. "People who are content creators want to make something and see it within seconds. That's a payoff, and Doom allowed that. In ten seconds, I can make a room in Doom and run it. It's that fast, which is great. Anything past that point—like Quake is just ten times longer because it's full 3D, point sources for lighting, you have to run it through a process... it got to a complexity level."

Beyond quick WAD file creation, though, Romero expressed awe at what dedicated modders have been able to build on top of the now open source Doom engine over the decades. He specifically pointed to Selaco as a game that shows off just how far the updated GZDoom engine can be taken.

The ability to edit Doom maps quickly and simply was key to the game's long-term success, Romero said.

Credit: DoomWorld

"It feels like you're in Doom just because it's using that engine, but what you're seeing and hearing has nothing to do with Doom," he said. "Every pixel is new and all the sound and gameplay. It's like a tactical shooter but with Doom's pixels and that kind of art aesthetic."

Romero poses with a toy chainsaw at an event promoting his autobiography, Doom Guy.

Credit: Romero.com

Romero identified that "dated retro look"—combined with "newer design sensibilities" that have developed since the '90s"—as the key to the appeal of the somewhat derisively named "boomer shooter" genre. "That aesthetic is on its 30-year cycle; it is now the thing... I don't know what it is about a 30-year cycle—it's an interesting generational thing; I'm sure someone has done an analysis of it—but it is what people are feeling. It's the reason why vaporwave is so big now. There is this thing that is in the water, basically, and people like it."

To Romero, the nostalgia sets a certain player expectation for a boomer shooter, but then, "I have a surprise because I have this 30 years of design language improvement that I can put into a retro look and surprise people... that's what gets people excited—they get the surprise of some modern design but in a package that feels like it's from 1995," he said.

Beyond the boomer shooter, though, Romero said he admires how the battle royale genre has made the shooter more accessible for players who weren't raised on the tight corridors of Doom and its ilk.

"If someone who's not good at a shooter jumps into [a game like Counter-Strike], they're dead, mercilessly," Romero said. "It's not fun. But what is fun is 'I'm not that good, I'm gonna jump into a game that is a battle royale, and I get to play with other people who are really good, but I actually survive for five minutes. I find some stuff; maybe I shoot somebody and take them out. You're gonna get shot, but you had an experience; you learn something, and you jump in and do it again."