Entry 01: Games before 2000 - Id Software and 3d graphics

Nostalgia is a mans best friend, if your best friend is a highschool sports star who can’t get over how good he use to be, and seeing him brings a smile to your face but sends you into a spiral of regret and sorrow. Moving on, the 90’s still feel like they were ten years ago with its kickass cartoons, people in spandex fighting giant monsters , floppy disks and dial up internet connections but in reality the 90’s ended nearly twenty years ago and our favourite medium for entertainment has come a long way since then.

May 1992 Id Software released Wolfenstein 3d for MS-DOS. This was a breakout hit for Id Software and the gameplay inspired their next release DOOM (E1M1 At Doom’s Gate plays in head) in 1993. These two games were pioneers of gaming in this era making Id a household name (well at least in the tech rooms of college campuses) and created the ‘DOOM clone’ genre which includes such classics as Duke Nukem 3d, Shadow Warrior and Star Wars: Dark Forces.
Eventually the Doom Clone became the genre we refer to as the First Person Shooter.

Assuming anyone reading this has played or at least seen a first person shooter, you would understand that perspective and a 3d world would be necessary for the most important feature of the genre, looking through the protagonists eyes. And thus the limited technology of the time would have made creating this a very painful experience, how ever the programmers at Id lead by John Carmack (praise be unto him) used a technique called ray casting to make Wolfenstein 3d appear 3d and another much more complicated technique for DOOM which actually only work with 2d calculations, so that the old processors never actually calculate a z-axis in any of these games.

It wasn’t long after this when popular games began using actual 3d graphics, with the original Starfox being released in 1993 which used the Super FX chip to display polygons on the SNES and the original PlayStation releasing in 1994 (in Japan) bringing many games with 3d graphics before 2000, ultimately rendering John Carmacks Genius redundant, you know until he started building space ships, but we can still thank him for Call of Duty... um, I take that back.