No longer crazy about more Leader Keen

While id’s choice to lean into quickly, action-oriented first-person video games may appear apparent in retrospection, the video exposes that it was far from a simple choice. Catacomb 3D made the group simply $5,000 (about $11,750 in December 2025 dollars) through an agreement to provide bi-monthly video games for Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge magazine-on-a-disk. Each episode of the Leader Keen series of run-and-gun 2D video games, on the other hand, was still making “10 times that quantity” at the time, Romero stated.

That made sticking with Leader Keen look like the “apparent company choice,” Romero states in the video. The group even began deal with a seventh Leader Keen video game– with parallax scrolling and complete VGA color assistance– right after Catacomb 3D‘s release. At the time, it seemed like Catacomb 3D may be “much like a strange trick thing that we provided for a bit due to the fact that we wished to have fun with a various innovation,” as John Carmack put it.

That sensation began to disappear, Carmack stated, after his bro Adrian had an” nearly falling out of his seat”minute while rotating towards an in-game giant in Catacomb 3D“It immediately drew you in,” Adrian Carmack stated of the sensation. “You’re attempting to look behind walls, doors, whatever … you get a pop-out like that, and it was simply among the craziest things in a computer game I had actually ever seen.”

That sort of response from among their own ultimately encouraged the group to desert 2 weeks of deal with Eager 7 to concentrate on what would end up being Wolfenstein 3D“It sort of felt that’s where the future was going,” Carmack stated in the video.”[We wanted to] “take it to some location that it would not occur remaining in the existing conservative [lane]”

“Within 2 weeks, [I was up] at one in the early morning and I’m much like, ‘Guys, we require to not make this video game [Eager],'” Romero informed Ars in 2024. “‘This is not the future. The future is improving at what we simply made with Catacomb‘ … And everybody was instantly was like, ‘Yeah, you understand, you’re. That is the brand-new thing, and we have not seen it, and we can do it, so why aren’t we doing it?'”