Romero: id Software’s Catacomb 3‑D earned $5,000 and helped lead to Wolfenstein, Doom

In a video retrospective released to mark id Software co‑founder John Romero’s celebration of the studio’s 35th anniversary, Romero highlighted Catacomb 3‑D as an undersung early id game and discussed its origins and impact. Romero says id began work on Catacomb 3‑D in October 1991 after finishing Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter, during a brief stint in Madison, Wisconsin.

Catacomb 3‑D was made as part of a deal with Softdisk and was distributed in the Gamer’s Edge subscription demo disk. Romero revealed id only made $5,000 from Catacomb 3‑D through the Gamer’s Edge deal — a sum the article notes is approaching $12,000 in today’s money — even though the team of six had produced it in a short development cycle.

Several id veterans in the video put the game in context: John Carmack called it “basically a quarter‑eater still, put onto the PC” but said Catacomb planted the studio’s design flag, while Tom Hall noted id used first‑person partly because technical limits made it faster to draw and more immersive.

Romero and Carmack pointed to a moment when artist Adrian Carmack literally fell out of his chair at encountering a troll as proof the team had stumbled on a new, immersive style: Adrian called it “one of the craziest things in a videogame I’d ever seen,” and the episode helped convince the team they were onto something.

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