30 Years Since id Software’s Birth That Powered MS-DOS Gaming Legends
On this day — February 1, 1991 — a pivotal moment in PC gaming history quietly occurred: the programmers John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack formally founded id Software, the company that would go on to define a generation of MS-DOS games with titles like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom.
Before id Software became a worldwide influence, its core team cut their teeth in Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge series — including the MS-DOS shooter Slordax: The Unknown Enemy, completed in late 1990 — but February 1, 1991 marked the day they struck out on their own, establishing a development house that would radically reshape the first-person shooter genre and PC gaming culture throughout the 1990s.
At the time, MS-DOS was the dominant platform for PC games, and id Software’s innovations in smooth scrolling, VGA graphics, and shareware distribution helped push the IBM-compatible PC from an also-ran platform into a leading home gaming machine. Celebrating this anniversary gives retro gamers reason to revisit the Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D shareware episodes, the latter of which helped codify the FPS template on MS-DOS systems.
Before id Software became a worldwide influence, its core team cut their teeth in Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge series — including the MS-DOS shooter Slordax: The Unknown Enemy, completed in late 1990 — but February 1, 1991 marked the day they struck out on their own, establishing a development house that would radically reshape the first-person shooter genre and PC gaming culture throughout the 1990s.
At the time, MS-DOS was the dominant platform for PC games, and id Software’s innovations in smooth scrolling, VGA graphics, and shareware distribution helped push the IBM-compatible PC from an also-ran platform into a leading home gaming machine. Celebrating this anniversary gives retro gamers reason to revisit the Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D shareware episodes, the latter of which helped codify the FPS template on MS-DOS systems.
