Lovingly reproduced from the Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D by Fabien Sanglard.
ID: The Team That Built It in Four Months
Lovingly reproduced from the Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D by Fabien Sanglard.
Before there was id Software, there was a demo nobody asked for.
In early 1990, a group of programmers at a software company called Softdisk had built something extraordinary: a smooth side-scrolling engine for the PC that could rival a Nintendo NES. To prove it, they worked a full weekend and cloned Super Mario Bros. 3. They called themselves "Ideas from the Deep" and sent the demo to Nintendo.
Nintendo was impressed. Nintendo also said no. Their intellectual property wasn't going anywhere near a PC.
The rejection stung, but it also confirmed something: these four people had both the talent and the drive to do something bigger than writing games for a subscription software service. On February 1st, 1991, they left Softdisk and founded their own company. They named it id Software.
The founding team: John Carmack (21, programmer), John Romero (23, programmer), Adrian Carmack (22, artist), and Tom Hall (28, creative director).
Moving Fast
They didn't waste time. Using the scrolling technology developed for the Mario demo, they shipped Commander Keen Episodes 1, 2, and 3 in December 1990, followed by Episodes 4 and 5 in December 1991. Three-dimensional technology started surfacing during 1991: Hovertank One placed the player inside a tank driving through colored-wall mazes, and Catacomb 3-D introduced textured walls and a first-person perspective. Both were made for Softdisk to honor their existing contract.
By November 1991, that contract was finished. Their next game would be their own. Four more people joined: Jay Wilbur (business), Kevin Cloud (artist), Bobby Prince (composer), and Jason Blochowiak (programmer). Eight people total.
The game was called Wolfenstein 3D. Development started in January 1992. It shipped four months later.
Where They Worked
Following the memories of Tom Hall and Jason Blochowiak, the team relocated from Shreveport, Louisiana to Madison, Wisconsin in September 1991. They set up in a two-story apartment at The Pines complex, 2622 High Ridge Trail. Most of the team lived nearby. John Carmack lived directly above the office, on the second floor of the same building. Since he didn't particularly care about the commute, this seemed fine to him.
The workspace was four people crammed into one room. The upper floor held a SNES with many games of F-Zero, and a Dungeons and Dragons area that readers of "Masters of Doom" will recognize. Networking was done first by floppy disk transfer, then by a Novell Netware system the team bought for $7,000. There was no version control system. They would go all the way to Quake 3 without one.
Everyone worked on the best PC money could buy: a 386-DX at 33MHz with 4MB of RAM.
How They Coded
Development used Borland C++ 3.1, though the language was plain C. John Carmack wrote the runtime engine. John Romero built the tools: TED5 (the map editor), IGRAB (the asset packer), and MUSE (the sound packer). Jason Blochowiak wrote several key subsystems including the input manager, page manager, sound manager, and user manager.
Carmack's approach to debugging was creative. Because the VGA in Mode 13h and the old MDA monochrome text mode mapped to different RAM addresses, it was possible to run two graphics cards simultaneously in one PC: one running the game, the other running Borland's debugger in text mode on a separate amber monitor.
The Art
All graphic assets were drawn by Adrian Carmack using Deluxe Paint, an industry standard tool for pixel art. The VGA is a palette-based system: instead of specifying colors directly as red/green/blue values, each pixel stores an index into a table of 256 colors. Adrian had to first decide which 256 colors would be in the palette, then draw everything using only those colors. The whole game uses a single palette.
All assets were drawn by hand with a mouse at the same 320x200 resolution the game would run at, because the VGA stretches the framebuffer when displaying it, and assets drawn at a different resolution would look distorted in-game.
The Maps
Maps were created in TED5, a tile editor originally built for Commander Keen and improved over the years. It was versatile enough to handle both side-scrollers and top-down games, and since the Wolf3D maps were essentially tile grids, the tool adapted easily. The team had used it for years, so there was no learning curve.
Map creation was fast. According to "Masters of Doom," it was taking the team roughly one day to finish a complete level. When the publisher Apogee realized this, they immediately proposed expanding the game from three episodes to six. The additional 30 levels would take only 15 days of design work. id agreed.
John Romero and Tom Hall did the bulk of the map design. Bobby Prince contributed maps E6M2 and E6M3.
The Music
Bobby Prince composed all the music using Cakewalk on a PC for initial arrangement, then Sequencer Plus Gold (SPG) by Voyetra to program the OPL instrument banks for the AdLib synthesizer. The resulting format was IMF (id Music Format), a proprietary id Software format consisting of raw machine commands with delays, sent directly to the Yamaha YM3812 FM chip on the AdLib and Sound Blaster cards.
Prince was asked to use only channels 1 through 8 of the 9-channel OPL2 synthesizer, leaving channel 0 free at all times for sound effect playback.
All voice samples in the game (the German shouts, the "Mein Leben" death cry) were recorded by John Romero and Tom Hall, doing their best German accent impressions. Tom Hall's "guten tag" is apparently recognizable if you listen carefully.
Shipping It
At 4am on May 5th, 1992, the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D was uploaded to Software Creations' BBS server via a phone line to Massachusetts. The shareware model meant the first episode was free to copy and distribute; the remaining five episodes cost $50.
The total size of all assets was 1,204KB. Everything was compressed to 645KB to fit on a single 720KB floppy disk. The six-episode full version fit on two disks.
The executable itself was only 94KB on disk, thanks to LZEXE compression. Decompressed, it was about 280KB, with 64KB of that dedicated to the signon screen alone.
Three years later, in 1993, GT Interactive picked up the game for retail release, giving it a box and an official hint manual written by Tom Hall and Kevin Cloud. In 1995 it came out on CD-ROM. By then, id Software was already several games ahead.