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Credit: id Software game page on Steam
35 years ago today, Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons – Episode 1: Stranded on Mars was released. This DOS game may have been somewhat lost in the sands of time, overshadowed by great PC gaming achievements that were soon to follow, but its success was important because it led directly to the creation of id Software. You know, the people behind it Wolfenstein 3D, Fate, and other groundbreaking 3D FPS titles.
The theme topic of this first one Commander Keen title isn’t really important. What was groundbreaking at the time was John Carmack’s development of smooth scrolling on PCs – something that was a challenge in the age of the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA). This side-scrolling motor was originally designed for a Super Mario Bros. 3 port to PC, but Nintendo didn’t bite, leading to the release of this brand new gaming IP as a technology vehicle/showcase.
You can still buy it, or try the game online via DOSBox.
Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons – Episode 1: Stranded on Mars used Carmack’s ‘adaptive Tile Refresh’ EGA engine to good effect and, released via the Apogee shareware model, was an instant success. Wikipedia notes that Apogee’s monthly revenue was about $7,000 per month when they started Commander Keenbut this title grossed $30,000 in the first two weeks of release, and within six months was regularly generating revenues of $60,000 per month.
The huge success of this first title gave John Carmack and fellow developers like John Romero the confidence to quit their day jobs at Softdisk and create Ideas from the Deep. That company would soon be transformed into the legendary id Software.
After this stratospheric success with a 2D side-scroller platform adventure trilogy (1990 and 1991), the development team quickly embraced the possibilities of 3D rendering in software that only the most modern processors could offer. In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D would burst onto the scene to establish id Software as a genre-creating game development powerhouse. A year later, Fate was released.
These early, ambitious and popular 3D FPS games emerged during an era of rapid change in PC hardware: the move from 486 to Pentium. The overwhelming popularity and novelty of 3D gaming at the time was such that the PC would crush the diverse home computing scene and give rise to dedicated 3D graphics cards such as the legendary 3dfx Voodoo series, followed by ATI 3D Rage, nVidia RIVA 128 and PowerVR hardware.
After slipstreaming the boom in the PC 3D gaming industry, Nvidia would release the “first GPU,” the GeForce 256, in the late 1990s. It was no coincidence that one of the first games to use the first Direct3D 7 compatible accelerator with hardware transformation and lighting would be Earthquake III Arenaby id Software.
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