[justanother]

Fun little story, at Kansasfest 1992 (the Apple II conference that persists today) I was incredibly young but was roaming the dorms at night between various groups hacking on stuff and begging for underage-beers, when I heard some chatter about some people who had developed an interesting 3D game and promptly received over $800KUSD in shareware fees in just a month, enabling the purchase of fast cars. I ran into those people and saw a brief demonstration of Wolf3D on a plasma-screen laptop, it looked mighty fancy.

The next day, I saw Carmack stick his head into a computer lab where and friend and I were hacking on something, and I said "Hey John! I really liked Wraith! I just beat it!" (Wraith was an 8-bit tiled 2D adventure game that he had released). He smiled and said "Oh, I've gotten a bit better since Wraith..."

Of course by that time, he was about to release Doom. Not to belittle the ray-casting problem of determining which 2D tiles to hide and show in those adventure games, but he had indeed gotten a bit better.