id Software games

id Software is an American studio founded by a group of programmers and designers who had previously been making games for the Softdisk disk magazine. Within a few years they were the most influential company in the industry — not because they made the most games, but because each of the few they did make changed the rules.

It started with Commander Keen. Smooth side-scrolling was considered impossible on a PC at the time; consoles could do it, computers could not. id showed that it could be done, and in doing so made PC platformers viable at all.

Then came Wolfenstein 3D and after it Doom. First-person shooters had existed before, but this is where the genre found its pace, its sound, its levels with real height differences and enemies that fight each other. Doom also arrived with three things that decided its reach: it spread as shareware, so the first episode was free to everyone; it supported network play, and the word deathmatch entered the language from its own terminology; and it was built so that players could make their own levels. Fans have since produced more content for it than was ever made commercially.

For a retro collection id is exceptional in how well its titles age. The controls are precise, the pace is high and the level design stays legible thirty years on — Doom still plays without a single concession being asked for its age.

With Quake the studio moved to genuinely three-dimensional environments and launched online play in the form we know today. And because id later released the source code of its engines, its games now run virtually everywhere — from calculators to browsers.

What we have from them

Straight in the browser you can run Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom 2, Commander Keen 4 and the fantasy Heretic.