The thing about Carmack in the 90s... There was a lot of research going on around 3d graphics. Companies like SGI and Pixar were building specialized workstations for doing vector operations for 3d rendering. 3d was a thing. Game consoles with specialized 3d hardware would launch in 1994 with the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation (in Japan only for one year)

What Carmack did was basically get a 3d game running on existing COMMODITY hardware. The 386 chip that most people used for their excel spreadsheets did not do floating point operations well, so Carmack figured out how to do everything using integers.

May 1992 -> Wolfenstein 3d releases December 1993 -> Doom releases December 1994 -> Sony Playstation launches in Japan June 1996 -> Quake releases

So Wolfenstein and Doom were actually not really 3d games, but rather 2.5 games (you can't have rooms below other rooms). The first 3d game here is actually Quake which also eventually also got hardware acceleration support.

Carmack was the master of doing the seeminly impossible on super constrained hardware on virtually impossible timelines. If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?

> If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?

Maybe. One aspect of Wolfenstein and Doom's popularity is that it was years ahead of everyone else technically on PC hardware. The other aspect is that they were genre defining titles that set the standards for gameplay design. I think Doom Deathmatch would have caught on in 1995, as there really were very few (just Command and Conquer?) standout PC network multiplayer games released between 1993 and 1995.

Hardware changes a lot in the time it takes to develop a game. When I read his plan files and interviews, I realized he seemed to spend a lot of time before developing the game thinking about what the next gen hardware was going to bring. Then design the best game they could think of whike targeting this not-yet-available hardware.

The world seems to have rewritten history, and forgotten Ultima Underworld, which shipped prior to Doom..

But also, he didn't do the technically hardest and most impressive part, Quake, on his own. IIUC he basically relied on Michael Abrash's help to get Quake done (in any reasonable amount of time).

> So Wolfenstein and Doom were actually not really 3d games, but rather 2.5 games (you can't have rooms below other rooms). The first 3d game here is actually Quake

Ultima Underworld is a true 3D game from 1992. An incredibly impressive game, in more ways than one.

If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?

I think so, because the thing about DOOM is, it was an insanely good game. Yes, it pioneered fullscreen real-time perspective rendering on commodity hardware, instantly realigning the direction of much of the game industry, yadda yadda yadda, but at the end of the day it was a good-enough game for people to remember and respect even without considering the tech.

Minecraft would be a similar example. Minecraft looked like total ass, and games with similar rendering technology could have been (and were) made years earlier, but Minecraft was also good. And that was enough.