Indisputably an industry touchstone, Quake was one of many first-person shooters released during the genre's golden age of the 1990s. To further illustrate the era's creativity and innovation, I spoke with developers of other shooters to learn about their contributions—and in many cases, how id Software's work served as their foundation and influence.

New Directions

By 1993, Apogee founder Scott Miller had settled into his role as publishing impresario. His relationship with external development teams was clearly defined. Miller cut checks to get startups off the ground, published their software by giving away a chunk of the game for free according his shareware distribution model, and recruited a few friends to answer tech support questions. Occasionally he weighed in with design and tech suggestions, such as recommending to id Software that they upgrade Wolfenstein 3D from EGA to VGA graphics, a boost from 16 simultaneous colors displayed on the screen to as many as 256.

The arrangement had proved fruitful. "Whereas Commander Keen was making us $20,000 a month, Wolfenstein 3D was making $200,000 a month," Miller said. "Apogee and id split everything 50/50. After a year of making $200,000 a month, Apogee and id were rolling in the money, enjoying good times."

Shortly after Wolfenstein 3D was released in late 1992, id Software's John Romero called Miller to deliver industry-altering news. They planned to strike out on their own for their next game, a first-person shooter they were calling Doom. The two parties had differing points of view on the reasons for the split.

Apogee's first internal development team. Their first project: Rise of the Triad. Top row, from left to right: Tom Hall, William Scarboro, Nolan Martin, Steven Hornback. Bottom row, from left to right: Mark Dochtermann, Scott Miller, Tim Neveu. (Photo credit: archive.kontek.net.)

In mid-1992, id had staffed up its team to a then-unprecedented size of six. Romero and John Carmack wrote code, Tom Hall headed up design, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud painted pixels, and Jay Wilbur handled business concerns. Cloud also took an interest in the business end of development, and ran a series of tests on Apogee unbeknownst to Miller.

"Kevin was always on top of the biz stuff," Romero said. "He wanted to make sure nothing would go wrong. He would make phone calls to Apogee's order line, pretending he wanted to order the game. He had a timer, and was counting how long it took them to pick up the phone. Too often, it took forever for the phone to get picked up."

Romero claimed a source inside Apogee had confided that the guys who were supposed to be staffing phones waged epic rubber-band fights and joked around instead of answering calls. Their ordering system was allegedly archaic to boot: scribbled orders impaled on spikes, like receipts at a diner.

"Scott didn't like the fact that I was telling him what to do with his company," Romero continued. "He didn't improve [support and order processes], didn't do anything different. After four months, we told him, 'Nothing has improved. We're going to go out on our own with our next game and handle it ourselves.'"

According to Miller, he and his business partner, George Broussard, had expected id to leave the nest sooner or later. The guys at id were sharp, and had the resources to hire a call center and order fulfillment operation that measured up to their standards. The time had come for Apogee to expand its publishing portfolio.

"George and I decided that we didn't know if id would always want to work with us," explained Miller, "so at some point we should start our own internal development team using our money. It was at that same time that Apogee shifted from being strictly a publisher, funding and co-designing third-party games, to also being a developer ourselves."

Atari's Missile Command (Atari 5200 console version shown).

Despite id's accusations, the two parties remained on good terms. Miller suggested to Romero that while id built new tech for Doom, Apogee would form an in-house team to develop Wolfenstein 3, a sequel to Spear of Destiny, itself a follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D.

Id agreed, and Miller and Broussard commenced recruiting. Their first developer was a relatively inexperienced programmer with a passion for games. Another hire was one they knew quite well, and had been partly responsible for catapulting Apogee and id Software to the top of sales charts.

Fall and Rise of the Triad

Like many 20-somethings in the early '90s, Mark Dochtermann knew he wanted to Do Something With Computers. He just didn't know what. His first inclination was to build electronic instruments. He dreamed big, sending resumes to Yamaha and Casio. They rejected him out of hand. Both companies were based in Japan and uninterested in hiring unproven westerners.

Dismayed, Dochtermann resumed his current hobby, learning how to write code. His girlfriend worked at a computer store and had applied her discount on a machine running a 386 processor—the latest-and-greatest in 1992. As he learned more about writing code, Dochtermann stretched his wings, tapping into VGA's Mode X graphics library to write a pixel-perfect version of Atari's Missile Command coin-op game. At night, he browsed the alt.games newsgroup to keep tabs on gaming news. Fortuitously, he stumbled on a newspaper ad that aligned with his burgeoning skill set.

"This company in Garland, Texas, was looking to hire a programmer for games," Dochtermann remembered.

Dochtermann copied his Missile Command clone onto a floppy disk and mailed it off to the address listed in the ad. Days later, he got a call from Scott Miller inviting him to fly out to Texas on Apogee's dime for a job interview. Dochtermann took a cab from the airport to his hotel room. Once settled, he went downstairs and exited the lobby to look for Miller, who was supposed to pick him up.

He didn't need long to spot his ride. Wearing stylish shades and a broad grin, Miller sat behind the wheel of a brand-new Datsun 280ZX. Dochtermann hopped into the passenger seat and Miller blasted off onto the freeway and straight on to Apogee. The office was in contrast to Miller's wheels. "The office was predominantly a call center," Dochtermann said. "It had tech support, accounting, shipping, packaging, and a webmaster, Joe Siegler."

The prequel to Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny bypassed shareware and went directly to retail. It was the second example, following Commander Keen, of a winning formula that id Software used through the original Quake: offer part of the first game in a new franchise as shareware, then charge full price for the sequel since it will be a known quantity.

Miller and George Broussard outlined their grand plan to Dochtermann. Apogee would continue to publish titles for third parties while bolstering an internal development team to create Wolfenstein 3. If hired, he would spearhead programming.

Not only did Dochtermann land the job, he received Miller's car keys. Apogee's founder invited him to joyride for a few hours and get the lay of the land in Garland. The reality of cruising around in a sports car with the wind in his hair almost measured up to the fantasy.

"I remember his car had this horrible alarm system," Dochtermann said, laughing. "I could drive it a little bit but then I'd have to stop, park it somewhere, lock the keys in, leave it, take the shuttle back to the airport. It was pretty funny. It was also cool that he was so trusting right off the bat. That was a good signal. So, I was the first in-house developer for Apogee Software. That's how I got into games."

Starting in 1993, Dochtermann bounced between Wolfenstein 3 and some of Apogee's ongoing third-party projects, such as the sci-fi-themed Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold first-person shooter. Gradually, other developers such as William Scarboro, a programmer who passed away from an asthma attack in August 2002, and artists Chuck Jones and Stephen Hornback, who died of a heart attack in November 2016 at the age of 62, joined the team.

Hornback and Dochtermann were at opposite ends of the age spectrum at Apogee. Where Dochtermann was fresh-faced and green-eyed, Hornback brought age and experience to the team. "He was the anchor for the group. Older, more mature then the rest of us noobs," Jones said in an obituary published on Shacknews. "He had an old-school approach but he got the job done consistently. He had an explosive laugh. Quiet one minute, then the guffaw."

"He was the first artist ever hired by Apogee internally, and moved to our Dallas-area offices," Miller said of Hornback in the obituary. "Before being hired, we worked with him as a contractor on numerous games, like Duke Nukem 2 and Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. In fact, I think it was Stephen who first suggested the name Cosmo, which I think was perfect for our cute green kid alien with suction cup hands."

Tom Hall, an ex-pat from id Software, rounded out Apogee's team. Hall's tenure at the Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen developer had come to a bitter end. "I had to fight to get creative ideas in, like non-bipedal creatures," said Hall, who had battled growing dissatisfaction while working on Doom. "Cacodemons and Flaming Skulls are in there because I fought for them. But the shutting-down started as I was hovered over by John Carmack for 'too many poly(gon)s.'"

Doom's Cacodemons.

Hall and Carmack had disagreed over aspects of Doom's technical and creative underpinnings. According to Hall, Carmack had wanted him to build simple levels comprised of straight lanes and rectangular buildings painted in drab shades of grays and browns. Carmack began monitoring Hall, dampening the normally bubbly designer's enthusiasm. He acquiesced, building levels on grids like Wolfenstein 3D's. One proclamation that Hall found particularly troubling was Carmack's insistence on building contiguous environments—seamless stages that formed a cohesive world rather than sets of discrete levels.

"I fought against one big world which Carmack wanted to do," Hall explained. "That was not the thing to innovate; people liked the completion feeling of levels since these games were new. We'd trained them for that with Wolfenstein. Romero and Carmack agreed though, so I designed a cool base for a month."

Hall had made the best of his marching orders. He designed a military base littered with grisly décor such as a chewed-off captain's hand that players would have to collect and hold up to scanners to unlock doors. Just when Hall was getting a feel for Doom's direction, Carmack declared that they were reverting to level-by-level progression. "What I had argued for was now announced as the right thing to do, like he was declaring it," Hall remembered. "So, I felt bad two ways: I saw it was the correct call initially, and [Carmack changing his mind] now threw out of a month of my work. That kind of broke me."

Hall was one of the company's founding fathers, but his word was carrying less weight. Every time he pitched ideas such as a moving track that transmitted sparkling orbs that harmed players if they ventured too close, Carmack shut him down, admonishing him to scale back on levels so the game would run fast. Romero seemed to be the only one able to stand up to him. When Carmack tried to force Romero to scale back his stages, Romero told him to make his engine faster.

The situation reached its breaking point when Hall's three co-founders—Carmack, Romero, and Adrian Carmack—confronted him and asked for his resignation. "In all these various ways, there was a butting of heads," Hall said. "And from his point of view, Carmack was trying to help, and not getting what he needed. Sometimes things just don't work out. The break, though traumatic, was a big relief. I was not happy. But we all did make some beautiful music together while it lasted."

id Spider Mastermind model created by Gregor Punchantz.

Hall found a group of kindred spirits at Apogee. The team was small, like id's, but much more freeform. When not plugging away on Wolfenstein 3, the guys would watch anime, hit up strip clubs, and go out to eat. Most importantly to Hall, Scott Miller and George Broussard allowed him a long leash. They had hired him to write the game's plot and set a direction for its levels and weapons, imposing few restrictions on his ideas. He even came up with its title, Wolfenstein 3: Rise of the Triad, starring a team of operatives who specialize in assassinating Nazis, just like Wolfenstein 3D's leading man William "B.J." Blazkowicz.

Midway through development, id threw up a roadblock when John Romero phoned and withdrew permission for Apogee to use the Wolfenstein license. "I was never really clear on their reasoning," Miller said. "My guess is that the game was taking longer than expected to make, and that they didn't want it coming out around the same time as Doom."

Miller bounced back quickly. They would drop the Wolfenstein name, scrap or retool assets to avoid any connection to id's shooter, and call their project Rise of the Triad.

The rest of the team was in accord. "Tom came up with the actual story of ROTT, as well as the name," Dochtermann said. "The thing you have to remember about the team back then was, we were four or five people and incredibly tight. There was no decision that didn't have a great deal of group consensus put into it. We worked seven days a week. It was all about the game. We had fun outside of that, but we worked hard and played hard. It was our life."

Gibs

Between a deep bank account and an array of development talents, Apogee's embryonic team had almost all the tools they needed to create a first-person shooter on par with id's finest. All they needed were costumes.

The team liked the feel of Wolfenstein 3D, but found its graphics too bright and colorful for their liking. Too cartoonish. For Doom, id Software had hired Gregor Punchantz, a sculptor famous for crafting models used in Hollywood blockbusters such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and RoboCop. Punchantz wrought elaborately detailed figures from a range of materials such as foam and steel. Developers or Hollywood directors could pose his figures in a number of ways so artists could photograph them and animate the images.

Apogee contracted Punchantz to create a few models for Rise of the Triad. All other characters, a corps of human guards, would be digitized reproductions of the game's developers. The team piled into a car and motored to an Army supply store, where they rented out uniforms and model weapons.

Creating Nazi soldiers wasn't as simple as slipping into a uniform and waving around a gun. "I built a standing turntable, which I believe was about five to six feet square," Dochtermann said. "It was two pieces of quarter-inch plywood and casters you'd put on something so you could turn it. I put casters on the bottom and top parts of the plywood, then I bolted the whole thing together to give us around eight or 16 rotations. We set up a camera, and this turned into a whole-office affair. Everyone in the office made it into the game."

ROTT's enemies were digitized versions of the development team.

To make the leap from flesh-and-blood developer to bytes-and-pixels game characters, each employee first got into costume and climbed atop the turntable to strike poses. All characters were animated as sprites, a two-dimensional cluster of pixels. Sprites are rendered parallel to the camera, so players only ever see one side of one-sided sprites such as trees, rocks, and bushes. Capturing developers from several angles enabled the artists to assign each character a sprite for any direction—facing players, turned slightly to one side, retreating straight ahead or at an angle—making characters feel more real.

Triad's overall visuals had a more realistic bent, as well. While still colorful, its palette was darker and dirtier than Wolfenstein 3D's. B.J. Blazkowicz, the archetype of the shooter genre's taciturn tough guy, was supplanted by a trio of agents tasked with battling cultists and Nazis in an old monastery.

Similarly, Rise of the Triad's tone took Wolfenstein's violence and cranked it up full blast. "We talked to Scott and George and said, 'Now that we're free from Wolfenstein, let's make the goriest game possible,'" Dochtermann remembered.

"It needed to differentiate itself from the other few shooters," Hall added. "So, in addition to the crazy story, we made crazy weapons and crazy power-ups and crazy over-the-top violence, inspired by anime and some kung-fu films. It was sort of a kitchen-sink, this-would-be-cool aggregation."

Even at the time of its release, Wolfenstein 3D's violence paled in comparison to the likes of Midway's Mortal Kombat. Players raced down corridors mowing down Nazis with progressively larger guns, but gore didn't spray the environment the way it did in Mortal Kombat, nor could players finish off enemies by ripping off heads complete with dangling spinal cords. Wolfenstein 3D seemed bloodier than it was thanks to technical decisions that enhanced the game's presentation. Guns weren't just big; they were deafeningly loud. When killed, zombies and Nazi soldiers didn't just drop to the ground; they screamed, moaned, spun around, collapsed in a pool of blood. But that blood was part of their sprite; it didn't leak, ooze, or splash.

With the exception of Adolph Hitler, death animations in Wolfenstein 3D were tame compared to the bloody showers of Rise of the Triad.

In comparison, killing enemies in Rise of the Triad was like upending a bucket of red paint over an industrial fan. "There was a new rating systems that had come out, the precursor to the ESRB," said Dochtermann. "It was called RSAC, for Recreational Software Advisory Council. We saw these parental ratings, and we said, 'Let's try to make something that hits every single one of the categories on RSAC.' That was our goal."

In December 1993, Doom armed players with a rocket launcher that reduced zombies to a neat mound of bloody chunks, or gibs. Like Wolfenstein's sprites, Doom's fallen enemies were all one piece. Bodies always erupted into the same number of gibs, and those gibs always settled into the same tidy pile. Dochtermann and Scarboro had other plans for Rise of the Triad's missile-based weapons.

"We knew that we wanted rockets in the game, and when we shot them out, we wanted players to basically explode into a pile of gibs that fly out," Dochtermann explained. "We ramped that up, putting on around 300 particles, 300 gibs to begin with. And it crashed the game. We said, 'Oh. That's a bug.' We ended up putting that in as a cheat code: '/EKG: engine-killing gibs."

Even at levels below "EKG," Triad's gore—which could be adjusted in the options menu for players who couldn't stomach the harsh virtual realities of waging war against Nazis and cults—was extreme. Enemies murdered by missiles exploded like a fireworks display, spewing blood and brains and body parts. Every so often, an eyeball would fly directly at the player, an effect that never failed to elicit cackles from the developers.

ROTT dialed gibs up to 11.

The Kitchen Sink

An integral part of Apogee's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to designing Rise of the Triad was equipping players with a full suite of weapons. Wolfenstein 3D had limited players to four: knife, pistol, Uzi, and chaingun. Triad gave them a baker's dozen divided into three groups: bullets, missiles, and magic.

While all weapons were rooted in WWII-era technology, reality was more a starting point and less a rule. All bullet-based weapons offered unlimited ammunition. Players could pick up two pistols and dual-wield them like an action hero in a John Woo film.

Missile weapons quickly became the darlings of Rise of the Triad's fans, and its developers. "Probably the one that really [defined] what the multiplayer experience would become was the drunk missile," Dochtermann said. "It shot five missiles, I believe, that came out of your gun. They had a timer on them, and for about three seconds, they would fan out in this random pattern away from you, up into the air, and at that point, they would heat-seek to any heat source they could find."

Dog(nose) mode activated.

Drunk missiles went through round after round of testing. The team wanted them to be both powerful and fast, yet not so dominant that a single missile would cause a target to erupt like a firecracker. More missiles seeking and hitting a target equaled more damage, as well as greater odds of greater gibs. Dialing in drunk missiles' speed was a delicate balancing act. The faster missiles flew, the faster players moved—never at a greater clip than the missiles themselves, yet speedily enough that they had a fighting chance of outrunning projectiles literally in hot pursuit—say, by ducking around a corner at the last second.

By the time Rise of the Triad shipped, players were zipping along at the equivalent of nearly 30 miles per hour.

"That kind of added to the comical nature of [the game's] deathmatch," Dochtermann said. "On some of the more popular levels, you'd be going down a corridor and see a player running by. Then one, two, three seconds later, you see this whole clump of missiles chasing him. It created really cool, really fun gameplay that didn't rely that much on skill. At that time in the industry and the [popularity] of deathmatch, it was just really fun."

"A lot of the crazy weapons were from William Scarboro's love of the crazy attacks in anime," said Hall. "They [were] wildly tactically different, like the Flamewall making you jump over it."

Some magical weapons riffed on the nascent shooter genre's tropes. In addition to a code that triggered god mode—invulnerability to all damage—there was dog mode, transforming players into canines and replacing gun muzzles with a muzzle. Players could run around biting their foes, or hold down the fire button to emit a deafening bark that vaporized nearby enemies.

Meanwhile, the Excalibat was a Louisville Slugger that the team digitized into a medieval weapon. Players could club enemies or knock away projectiles. "It was really hard to do but really satisfying. It was all timing," said Dochtermann. "Also, if you held down the button while wielding the bat, you'd hear an energy-building sound, and then it would shoot out an arc of flaming baseballs in a 45-degree swath that would cause mass destruction."

Tied for First

Although Rise of Triad is remembered for its over-the-top bloodshed and panoply of weapons, it has a number of more substantive claims to fame. The game experimented with verticality in a manner unsurpassed even by Doom's staircases and lifts, novelties at the time of its release. Triad took steps a step further by implementing jump pads, trampoline-like surfaces that rocketed players skyward.

More notably, Doom may have invented deathmatch, but it did not pack in maps built specifically for multiplayer. Players had to frag friends and strangers alike on the game's 27—updated to 36 in 1995's Ultimate Doom expansion—single-player levels, or download custom maps. Rise of the Triad and Bungie's Marathon, both released on December 21, 1994, offered something id's revolutionary shooter did not: Maps and modes engineered explicitly for multiplayer.

"Much of our design was trying to one-up id Software," said Miller. "ROTT didn't have a cutting-edge engine, so we had to innovate in a lot of other ways."

Deathmatch, a staple by late 1994, was only the tip of ROTT's gib-laden iceberg. In Score More, players earn more points for certain kills than others. Hunter strips one player of all weapons and challenges him or her to avoid other players for as long as possible, like a game of "it" in reverse. Players can even partake in a weapons-free game of Tag. Arguably ROTT's most revolutionary multiplayer type was Capture the Flag, the first instance of the mode in a first-person shooter.

No matter which multiplayer maps and modes players favored, Rise of the Triad permitted deep customization. Player health, traps, types of weapons, and other values could be adjusted or removed from play entirely, a level of in-game customization—that is to say, without user-created mods—only surpassed by Rare's Goldeneye 007 shooter on consoles three years later, and in Epic Games' Unreal on PC in 1998.

"Multiplayer deathmatch was great, and I wanted ours to be amazing," Hall said. "Tons of features and ways to play, and didn't want to be constrained by the nature of single-player level design. That way we could craft each environment to have the flow to make the intended multiplayer experience fun."

Rated G for Gibs.

Despite his games being in competition with Apogee's, John Romero enjoyed Rise of the Triad. "I thought it was a perfect Tom Hall game," he said. "It was wildly imaginative, it had different multiplayer modes—just fun stuff everywhere because Tom was so hilarious. To me, it was the first 3D game that Apogee published that set a blueprint for how complete Duke 3D needed to be. It had so much stuff in it because they loved that game so much, and when Duke 3D came out, it had every multiplayer feature. It was a fully fleshed-out game. They filled up ROTT with so much stuff, so when they did Duke 3D, they knew from their previous game, 'This is all the stuff we have to put in there.'"

While Rise of the Triad never reached the lofty heights of Doom, Scott Miller was content with its success. "Rise of the Triad was originally intended to be a new sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, but never a true competitor to Doom," Miller said. "However, it did some things pretty well, such as deathmatch taunts, looking up/down with a mouse, and some really radical weapon designs."

For months after ROTT's release, fan mail poured in. Dochtermann gleaned satisfaction from each and every letter. Apogee had done a fine job getting the game into as many hands as possible, even extrapolating from its shareware distribution model by offering a Site License, a purchase option that allowed players to distribute up to 10 copies of the game to friends. More copies in circulation meant more opportunities for online play.

"I know we sold quite a few of those, and a lot of our fan mail was about the love for the multiplayer mode of ROTT," Dochtermann said. "I think we would have been wise to have capitalized on that, but in retrospect, Duke Nukem 3D was coming, and I don't think we realized how big Duke would become."

The King

There's an asterisk next to the Rise of the Triad team's status as Apogee's first internal development team. While that group was the first to write a game within the company, Miller and Broussard had hired outside parties to create games that credited Apogee as both developer and publisher. Duke Nukem was one such.

Tan and muscular with blonde hair shaved in a military flat top, Duke Nukem was the brain child of Todd Replogle and Allen H. Blum III. Replogle and Blum's humble beginnings mirrored id Software's. Like Romero, Carmack, Hall, and the others, the duo had got their start working on a 2D platformer littered with enemies and items worth points.

From left to right: George Broussard, Scott Miller, Todd Replogle. (Image credit: 3D Realms.)

Following Duke Nukem's publication in 1991, Apogee partnered with Torus Games and Interceptor Entertainment to produce Duke Nukem 2: Escape From Alien Abductors! Touting similar gameplay as its predecessor and designed by Replogle, Duke 2 boasted a refined technical pedigree. Graphics were sharper and more colorful. Weapons were more advanced, such as a laser able to go through walls and a flamethrower capable of blasting players into the air. The audio received an upgrade, too, treating players with high-end cards such as the Sound Blaster 16 to explosions and thunderous weapon reports.

After Apogee shipped Prey, Miller and Broussard staffed up. Replogle and Blum came on board  full-time. The Rise of the Triad team bifurcated, with developers such as Tom Hall assigned to come up with concepts and designs for another first-person shooter called Prey while others, led Replogle and Blum, broke ground on a third Duke Nukem game, aptly titled Duke Nukem 3D.

"3D was where the industry was going, and after ROTT we wanted to continue with 3D development," said Miller.

Apogee doubled down on its investment in the third dimension. Setting aside the Apogee brand, Miller and Broussard registered a dba and became known as 3D Realms. Miller continued to scout for promising titles to publish, prioritizing teams working on 3D games such as Terminal Reality's Terminal Velocity. Even so, Duke Nukem 3D quickly became the crown jewel in 3D Realms' crown.

As with Rise of the Triad, 3D Realms did not intend for Duke Nukem 3D to challenge Doom, still the king of FPS mountain in 1995. Instead, Miller's and Broussard's strategy was to look for holes in id Software's pedigree, and fill them. "Duke's attitude and personality were so key to the game's success," explained Miller. "Id's philosophy was to make games with a main character that acted as an empty avatar, allowing the player to feel like it's them in the game, rather than playing as a defined character. And that's a valid approach. But to be different, we decided to have more fun with Duke, give him a personality, and add humor to the game."

To bring Duke to life, Broussard hired Jon St. John, a disc jockey with a deep, gravelly voice. Broussard directed St. John in the recording studio, feeding him iconic lines such as Bruce Campbell's "Hail to the king, baby," from the Evil Dead movie, and quips such as "Your face, your ass—what's the difference?" when players obliterated alien enemies.

Unlike Wolfenstein's and Doom's protagonists, who were fluent in grunt, Duke never stayed quiet for long. Certain events elicited a response from Duke, such as "I'm gonna rip off your head and shit down your neck" when the boss of Episode 2 appears, uttering a long sigh of relief when players empty their bladder in urinals or toilets, and entreat strippers to "Shake it, baby" after tipping them crisp green bills in strip clubs.

Giving Duke a voice seemed a superficial choice, but the character's one-liners had a transformative effect. Players felt connected to Duke in a way they had never bonded with id's monosyllabic protagonists.

"Even though Duke 3D only had about 100 short lines of dialogue, it was enough to make Duke one of the most popular game characters of the '90s," said Miller.

Attention to Detail

Duke Nukem 3D ran on Build, technology written by Ken Silverman for use by 3D Realms. Like Doom's id Tech 1 engine, Build was not true 3D. Like Doom, Build constructed virtual worlds on two-dimensional planes and populated them with characters crafted from pixels instead of polygons.

Also like Doom's tech, Build was incapable of performing seemingly simple functions such as placing one room overtop another. Actions such as climbing staircases or riding elevators were made possible thanks to trickery performed by expert level designers like Richard Gray, whose ingenious designs earned him the nickname "Levelord."

"I had my first level designing experience by using DEU [Doom Editing Utility] to remove a wall in the first level of Doom," said Gray, one of several level designers on Duke Nukem 3D alongside George Broussard, Allen Blum, Keith Schuler, and Randy Pitchford, who would go on to co-found Gearbox Software.

"I still remember removing the walldef[initions] and loading the edited E1M1 in Doom," Gray continued. "I was hooked. I then spent every waking moment making levels and putting them on CompuServe. These levels got me making contract levels for Q Studio's Blood, which in turn got me making levels for Duke Nukem 3D."

Once again, 3D Realms was one step behind id Software in terms of tech. Rise of the Triad had been made as a competitor to Wolfenstein 3D, only to be eclipsed by Doom. Likewise, Duke Nukem 3D came to fruition as id was knee-deep in Quake, slated to be the first true-3D first-person shooter. Nevertheless, many fans threw in with Duke thanks to the game's deceptively deep layers of interactive elements and realistic environments.

Duke 3D's opening stage, Hollywood Holocaust, designed by Allen Blum, is a masterclass in design. Set in the mean streets of Los Angeles, players hop over and on top of cars, and enter a functional cinema replete with video arcade, rest room, a warren of ventilation ducts, and a giant screen.

Players can activate an automap to pore over a top-down view, but on most levels the map winds up feeling extraneous. The verisimilitude stemming from Duke 3D's real streets, of stepping into a theater and taking a left to the bathroom or hooking right to go up to the projector room, facilitates intuitive navigation through most areas. Even the stages of the second episode, set on a lunar base, managed to fuse sprawling environments with easy-to-follow floorplans.

"Always, in every level, this was the goal, unless the aim was to intentionally be nonrealistic," said Gray, who designed the bulk of Duke 3D's third episode. "For me, that quote from Die Hard's Hans Gruber is perfectly fitting: 'I always enjoyed models as a boy. The exactness, the attention to every foreseeable detail... perfection.' I enjoyed making everything as realistic as possible."

A night out on the town in Duke Nukem 3D's first episode, L.A. Meltdown.

The attention to detail shown by Duke's designers extended to interactive elements. Toilets could be broken and drank from to regain health. Walking up to a billiards table and pressing the Use button caused balls to scatter. Busy signals chirped from payphones. Pressing the Use key before a mirror prompted Duke to admire his good looks. Vents could be kicked or blasted open, revealing a maze of tunnels that players could follow to caches of items or passages to otherwise inaccessible areas.

Cracks in walls tended to hold the most and best goodies. In Hollywood Holocaust, players who venture up to the projection room can operate the projector, dimming the lights in the theater below and kicking off a titillating picture on the big screen. Firing a rocket-propelled grenade at the telltale crack in the center of the screen opens up a hidden room containing a jetpack and several boxes of shotgun shells.

"Back then, destructible walls and such were not common," Gray said, "so often, adding these were the focus of an area, and that area was built around the player breaking the barrier. Other times, these breakable barriers were used for secrets or shortcuts."

"That first level was so well-paced, with the mirrors in the bathroom and the huge explosions in the hallway as you went into the theater," gushed John Romero. "Even being able to activate the projector and go behind the theater screen, and go into the bathroom and climb up into vents, and you could look through the window in the projector room and fire an RPG into the screen as it was animating, and having flying enemies—there was so much cool stuff on that first level. And if you had a jetpack and flew up, there was even more."

"My favorite two levels are the first two, simply because we polished those levels to extreme perfection knowing that they would be the levels that would make or break the game," Miller agreed. "For their time, they were simply jaw-dropping levels of pure perfection and fun."

Occupied.

Tools of the Trade

The RPG, short for rocket-propelled grenade, was only one in Duke's bag full of tricks. Taking cues from Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D balanced staple firearms—pistol, shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher—with more creative implements. Pipebombs had to be manually detonated, encouraging players to scatter them like birdseed and lie in wait until hapless enemies wandered into their veritable minefield. Laser tripbombs, especially effective in "Dukematch" sessions online, could be placed almost anywhere, leading crafty players to tuck them in areas where foes might not notice them, such as at ground level or in higher areas that players had to jump to reach.

"We tried to design weapons that added tactical gameplay value to the game, so that these crazier weapons had both pluses and minuses. We didn't want to make any all-powerful weapons like BFG in Doom," Miller explained. "The pipe bomb is a good example of a weapon with tactical implications, in that it's powerful but only goes a short distance. But, you can trigger it from far away, which leads to interesting ways to use it."

Other weapons likewise necessitated more work on the player's part to use effectively, but made pulling off a kill immeasurably more satisfying than using conventional weapons. The Shrink Ray shrinks players to the size of a mouse. Players who run over them initiate an animation of Duke's big black boot stomping them flat, leaving behind a puddle of blood that sticks to boots and generates trails of footprints that can be followed. However, pint-sized players who manage to stay out of harm's way will eventually grow back to full size, giving them another lease on life.

Pipebombs were one of Duke 3D's most tactical weapons, as well as one of the most tactical weapons in the FPS genre at the time.

The Freezethrower spews a stream of ice crystals that damage enemies until they are frozen solid. Follow up with any weapon to shatter them into cubes. Guns do the trick, but planting a kick right in their midsection and watching them break like glass is particularly gratifying.

"These new types of weapons, like the freezer gun, required a lot of playtesting to get them to feel and play well," Miller admitted. "That's where the real magic happens: playing the game a thousand times and relentlessly fine-tune every aspect of the gameplay. Weapons are the primary way to interact with [an FPS] game world, and therefore it's beyond important to have them look cool, feel right, sound awesome, shoot projectiles at the right speed, and deliver the right amount of damage or special effect, like shrinking an enemy. A lot of '90s-era FPS games didn't get the weapons right because it's really, really hard to fine-tune them, and when they're not done right, it's a mistake that can sink a game."

Intentional or not, Duke Nukem 3D was the first "Doom clone" to give id Software a significant challenge when the game launched in January 1996, nearly half a year before Quake. John Romero, in the midst of a seven-month-long crunch to finish Quake, recognized what Duke got right and id got wrong. He and his coworkers had the upper hand in technology. In terms of gameplay, Duke Nukem 3D was exactly the type of game he wanted to play, and to make.

The Shrink Ray let Duke bring enemies down to size.

"I thought Duke Nukem 3D was amazing. I love that game so much," Romero said. "I listened to the soundtrack to that game every day for years. And the game itself, I was just crazy nuts over it. I played through the whole thing multiple times. The humor was so funny, and the interactive environments and music worked so well together."

"It wasn't 3D, we all knew that. But it was interactive in a way we'd never seen," said PC Games editor-in-chief Rob Smith. "The opening level is probably one of the best designed of all time. The Bronco, the pool table, the movie theater. It didn't really matter what happened after that. As openings go, I'm not sure I could think of a better one."

For Scott Miller, Duke Nukem 3D upheld the old Apogee tagline: The Height of Gaming Excitement. John Carmack's Quake engine ran circles around Build, but in terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, Duke strafed circles around the latest in id's growing line of forgettable characters.

"It's so hard to push technology and create a cohesive, fun game, but during id Software's Beatles era—Wolf, Doom, Quake—no one did it better," Miller said. "But, at the same time, Quake's gameplay stayed true to id's style of minimalism, super focused on core gameplay and familiar weapons. Our approach was to do things no one else was doing."

Enjoying Rocket Jump? Click here to share your thoughts with other Shackers in the Chatty.