If you are of a certain age, and occupy that certain point on the nerd spectrum, you’re probably familiar with Commander Keen.
Commander Keen was one of the first major games created by the team that would later become id Software, the company responsible for Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake. Those games did more than sell a lot of copies. They helped turn the first-person shooter into one of the most dominant genres in video games, with Wolfenstein playing the role of the elder statesman.
But one part of that history is less well known. A legal dispute between id’s founders and their former employer, Softdisk, may have helped create the conditions that eventually produced Wolfenstein. This is a story about employee moonlighting, company computers, and a very unusual contractual settlement that may have helped shape our entire childhood. Read on for more information.
In 1990, John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall were working at Softdisk. Softdisk published collections of programs and games through subscription products, including a PC gaming service called Gamer’s Edge.
The future id team developed games for Softdisk during the day. After hours though, they had considerably larger ambitions.
At the time, the PC was not considered a particularly good platform for fast action games. Nintendo consoles could scroll colorful environments smoothly across the screen. PCs generally couldn’t.
John Carmack developed a programming technique that allowed a PC to redraw only the parts of the screen that were changing, rather than redrawing the entire screen during every frame – whether in the player’s view, or not. That made smooth side-scrolling possible on ordinary PC hardware of the day and became the technological foundation for Commander Keen.
The team partnered with Apogee Software to distribute the game using an early version of what we might now call the “freemium model,” except it involved 9600 baud dial-up modems, bulletin board systems, floppy disks, and checks sent through the mail. (Nerds, say it with me, “it was called Shareware!”)
Apogee distributed the first episode for free. Players who were sufficiently hooked could buy the remaining episodes directly from the company. The approach avoided the cost and gatekeeping of traditional retail distribution, while turning the free episode into an advertisement that players were encouraged to copy and share.
It worked.
Commander Keen became a commercial success and gave the team a realistic path out of Softdisk.
There was, however, one teensy tiny little problem. The team hadn’t developed Commander Keen on their own computers.
According to historical accounts, they used Softdisk’s computers and at least some company time to create Commander Keen. When confronted, Carmack reportedly admitted that they had been using Softdisk’s computers and writing their own games during company time.
This is the point where every employment lawyer reading the story begins quietly rubbing their temples.
The public history doesn’t give us enough information to know exactly which intellectual property, employment, or contractual claims Softdisk could have proven. But the basic facts gave the company plenty of leverage. These were Softdisk employees using Softdisk equipment, and apparently some Softdisk time, to create a product for another publisher while planning to leave and compete.
The practical lesson is simple: don’t build your startup on your employer’s computer or during the workday!!!!
Softdisk threatened legal action. After several weeks of negotiation though, the parties reached an agreement. The id Software team would produce one new game for Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge service every two months. From the id team’s perspective, that obligation probably felt like the price of getting out. They had to keep making games for the employer they had just left, on a demanding schedule, while also trying to build their own business. But the deal also had an unintended benefit.
The Softdisk games gave the team a regular home for smaller projects and forced them to keep developing, testing, and shipping new ideas. Not every experiment had to become the next Commander Keen. It just had to become the next game due to Softdisk.
While fulfilling those obligations, the team created Hovertank 3D.
Unlike Commander Keen, Hovertank put the player inside a 3D environment. Carmack used raycasting, simplified walls, and scaled two-dimensional sprites to keep the game moving quickly despite the limits of PC hardware at the time. The walls were not texture-mapped, and the game was primitive compared with what came next. But the engine proved that fast first-person action could work on a PC.
The next major step was Catacomb 3D, also created for Softdisk.
Catacomb added texture-mapped walls and placed the player’s hand directly on the screen, which made it feel more like the player was physically inside the game. The technology, and the experience of using it, was getting closer to Wolfenstein.
Once the obligations to Softdisk ended, the Id team took what they had learned from those experiments and applied it to Wolfenstein 3D.
The result was not the first game ever played from a first-person perspective, but it was the game that brought the first-person shooter into the mainstream and created a model that countless later games would follow. Most notably, in this particular family tree, DOOM and Quake.
There is, of course, a useful legal and business lesson buried in all of this.
Softdisk could have pursued a scorched-earth fight focused entirely on ownership, damages, or stopping their departing employees from competing. Instead, it converted its legal leverage into a production obligation.
The arrangement was presumably meant to compensate Softdisk and preserve its supply of games. But it also gave id deadlines, customers, and a reason to keep experimenting.
Hovertank and Catacomb might otherwise have remained prototypes, postponed side projects, or ideas that never made it beyond the team’s computers. Instead, they had to become finished products.
The Softdisk dispute didn’t single-handedly create Wolfenstein. The Carmacks, Romero , and Hall, still supplied the technical skill, design judgment, artwork, and many hours of labor needed to build it.
But the dispute helped shape the environment in which those abilities developed.
The contract that constrained id also forced the company to practice.
And the contractual leftovers from an employment dispute became part of the technological path to Wolfenstein, DOOM, Quake, and an entire category of popular culture.
So, yes, protect your intellectual property. Use written employment and invention assignment agreements. Pay attention to what employees are developing with company resources.
But remember that legal remedies can have consequences beyond the four corners of the agreement.
And seriously: don’t build Commander Keen on your employer’s computer.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. For the real ones out there – did Apogee sound familiar? It should have. Apogee adopted the tradename 3d Realms and was responsible for….you guessed it…Duke Nukem. Don’t worry, we have a blog post on that one too.