#Id Software - IMissIt.com

Video Games 1990–1991

Commander Keen

Billy Blaze, age eight, in a football helmet and red sneakers, pogo-sticking across Mars in the 1990 shareware platformer that gave the PC the smooth, console-style scrolling it had never managed. The team that made it at night on borrowed Softdisk computers used the royalty checks to found id Software.

Video Games 1993–1999

Doom

The shooter that defined the genre, released by id Software as shareware in 1993 and instantly crashing the network when thousands tried to download it at once. Fast, brutal, moddable to the extreme, and the game that turned "fragging" into a verb — by late 1995 it was estimated to be on more computers than Windows 95.

Video Games 1996–1999

Quake

id Software followed Doom by throwing out the second dimension entirely: Quake was true real-time 3D, drenched in a Nine Inch Nails soundscape, and built to be torn apart by its players — who invented rocket jumps and whole art forms inside it, and turned internet deathmatch into a culture.

Video Games 1992–1994

Wolfenstein 3D

May 1992: Apogee uploads id Software's free first episode to the bulletin boards and the PC learns to run and gun in first person. Escape Castle Wolfenstein as B.J. Blazkowicz, shoot everything in a uniform, find the hidden Pac-Man level, order the rest by mail. The "grandfather of 3D shooters" and the game that proved shareware was a business.