Catacomb Games: Play the series that pioneered the first-person shooter genre

This looks only marginally worse than Wolfenstein 3D. Animation is very fluid. In some ways better because enemies are more varied. Where does Wolf 3D popularity come from, then? Was it notorious because some newspaper wrote about it? Was it because you were shooting humans?

Softdisk plays a pretty pivotal role in pc gaming history. Sure, shareware and forum downloads over Hayes and Volksmodems was a distribution channel, but I also recall the excitement when a new copy of Softdisk showed up. The publishing arm, same name, outlasted the magazine and gave a platform to some amazing games.

Pretty good stuff coming from the tech wastelands of north Louisiana in the 80s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softdisk

What is a first-person shooter? I's a game in which you have a camera viewport onto a world. Your own character is not visible; you are looking from he eye of that character. Moreover, you have some projectile-hurling weapon that throws "into the screen" direction.

The first-person shooter games were tank games like Battlezone (Atari, 1980).

Catacombs probably pioneered the first-person-shooter that takes place in a 2.5D labyrinth with ray-cast textures.

That itself was preceded by third-person-in-2.5-D-maze shooters like Xybots (Atari, 1987) which could almost be first-person with small modifications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xybots

Also by first-person "dungeon crawler" games like Dungeonmaster (1988).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahxsMeZDPgE

Supposedly, this doesn't use "raycasting" like Wolfenstein-3D does, rather another, faster algorithm was used, which does not produce a correct result in every case. The perspective calculations do not appear to be correct either. Looks wonky while turning.

Remember playing this as a kid on my 256 PC. Good memories and I appreciate seeing this open sourced

I somehow completely missed these growing up in the 90s. Maybe they were eclipsed due to the success of Wolfenstein 3D. 12 year old me would have loved this. I still love the aesthetics.

I recently checked out Catacomb 3D when I stumbled across the name while reading Fabien Sanglard's book on the software architecture of Wolfenstein 3D (which I can recommend wholeheartedly)

That, and Hovertank 3D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertank_3D

Fascinating. I remember playing these with a much older cousin when I was very young (maybe around 4-5) but I always thought that these games were a result of the FPS boom, inspired by Doom/Wolfenstein and such, rather than the Pioneers.

(When I was that young, I much preferred Ken's Labyrinth and Blake Stone for whatever reason)

“Other game assets such as art, maps, music, and sound are not included in the open source release.“

Doom didn’t release the maps when they went open source, but the graphics/music assets here seem like the most interesting part. Are they for sale somewhere?

I remember learning about how Wolfenstein worked using ray-tracing and being absolutely mind blown upon discovering that in reality, those games were just 2D top down shooters shown in fake-3D.

It goes to show how creative we can get.

The two Johns are credited for making these games, but, based on the graphics, it would appear Adrian Carmack did the artwork for this series.

"Pioneered" is relative. I was playing 3D Monster Maze [0] in the early 80s, on a ZX81, which had a lightning-fast 3MHz Z80 processor and a whole 1 KB of RAM [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKvd0zPfBE4 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81