John Romero’s account of the early first-person shooter is less a claim to have invented the genre than a story about recognizing a promising direction. In an interview with Kyle Orland for Ars Technica, the id Software co-founder recalls how Catacomb 3-D led the team toward Wolfenstein 3D—and how Doom’s openness helped players become creators.
How Catacomb 3-D led to Wolfenstein 3D
Romero recalls that id released Catacomb 3-D in late 1991. The team then started work on another Commander Keen game, but he soon concluded they were moving in the wrong direction. Within two weeks, he says, he argued that they should build on Catacomb’s first-person action instead. His colleagues agreed, and work on Wolfenstein 3D began that night.
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That account makes Wolfenstein 3D a deliberate continuation of an idea the team had just explored—not a project that appeared in isolation. Romero’s recollection also describes a creative pivot: the developers chose to improve a format they found promising rather than return to a familiar series.
What Romero says defined the design
For Romero, the central ingredients were simple rendering that ran at high speed and gameplay that felt good. The team tried features such as searching bodies and hiding them, he recalls, but removed them when they distracted from the fast, run-and-gun experience. The game’s identity took shape through those decisions about what to leave out as much as through what to add.
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He describes the team’s guiding principle this way: “We were making games that we wanted to play.” Romero says focus and speed were among the pillars that set the games apart. This was not a claim that every early shooter followed the same formula; it was his explanation of the choices that mattered to his team.
A small team, working with limited tools
Romero says the early developers did not use version control. They kept their work separated and exchanged files on floppy disks. He contrasts that process with the additional room to experiment he remembers having after the team moved beyond its Softdisk-era constraints. Even with more freedom, his account emphasizes restraint: extra features were not automatically improvements if they weakened the core game.
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Why Doom made room for players to create
Romero says fans trying to modify Wolfenstein 3D showed how difficult its compressed files made level creation. The team responded in Doom by making its WAD and level formats accessible to players. “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,” he told Orland.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →The point, in Romero’s telling, was to reduce the distance between an idea and a playable result. He says a Doom room could be made and run quickly, while the fuller 3D process in Quake took longer. His reference to doing it in “ten seconds” is an illustration of the fast creation-and-test loop he valued, not an independently measured comparison.
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Romero summarizes the appeal for creators as: “People who are content creators want to make something and see it within seconds.” The contrast he draws is about iteration time: when it is easy to build a space and try it, players can experiment more readily. He also describes the team as having completed its “10,000 hours” of learning game design; that is a colloquial expression of experience, not a verified measurement.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Romero’s view of retro shooters today
Romero sees contemporary retro shooters as combining older visual styles with newer design sensibilities. He speculates that the aesthetic returns on a roughly 30-year cycle, but presents that as an impression rather than a finding backed by trend data.
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He also offers a personal view on why battle royale games can appeal to inexperienced shooter players: surviving longer may give them more time to learn than a highly punishing competitive match does. That is Romero’s interpretation of player experience, not a universal rule about which games are most welcoming.
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Was Wolfenstein 3D the first FPS?
Romero’s recollections illuminate how Catacomb 3-D and Wolfenstein 3D fit into id Software’s development, but this interview alone does not establish which game was the first first-person shooter. It is best read as a retrospective on the team’s creative decisions and the influence of its work, not as a definitive history of the genre’s origins.
For readers who want more of Romero’s own life story, the Ars article names his autobiography, Doom Guy: Life in First Person. The interview does not establish current formats, prices, or retailer availability.
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