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A comment on Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat. Parent comment

Re:Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy... by mewse-hn on Friday March 25, 2022 @04:23PM (#30806679)
id Software went independent after working for a company named Softdisk making a monthly floppy disk called "Gamer's Edge":

  Softdisk is most famous for being the former workplace of several of the founders of id Software, who worked on a short-lived game subscription product, Gamer's Edge. Gamer's Edge was a monthly[3] PC game disk started in 1990 by John Romero.
Having a monthly deadline making MS-DOS games on floppy is why they were so prolific at that point. None of the Cmdr Keen games are much different from each other, and there were 6 of them.
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Re:Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy... by to11mtm on Friday March 25, 2022 @05:07PM (#30807058)
The original 'trilogy' is a bit more distinct from the rest IMO; Yes the basic platforming concepts are the same, but I'd say Keen 3 and Keen 4 is a pretty substantial jump in style/features like swimming. (Also setting aside the odd duck of Keen Dreams).

Did anyone ever actually successfully buy just one episode? I mean, 10 year old me did from a different publisher (Epic Megagames), but they just sent the whole trilogy anyway.

But overall yes, a lot of those folks got good at churning out games, and part of that was understanding the value of good tooling.

The level editor used for Keen, called TEd (Tile Editor) was actually used for something like 30 different titles, both 2d and 2.5D, prettymuch up to the original Rise of the Triad..

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