The thing about Carmack in the 90s...
There was a lot of research going on around 3d graphics. Companies like SGI and Pixar were building specialized workstations for doing vector operations for 3d rendering. 3d was a thing. Game consoles with specialized 3d hardware would launch in 1994 with the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation (in Japan only for one year)
What Carmack did was basically get a 3d game running on existing COMMODITY hardware. The 386 chip that most people used for their excel spreadsheets did not do floating point operations well, so Carmack figured out how to do everything using integers.
May 1992 -> Wolfenstein 3d releases
December 1993 -> Doom releases
December 1994 -> Sony Playstation launches in Japan
June 1996 -> Quake releases
So Wolfenstein and Doom were actually not really 3d games, but rather 2.5 games (you can't have rooms below other rooms). The first 3d game here is actually Quake which also eventually also got hardware acceleration support.
Carmack was the master of doing the seeminly impossible on super constrained hardware on virtually impossible timelines. If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?
What Carmack did was basically get a 3d game running on existing COMMODITY hardware. The 386 chip that most people used for their excel spreadsheets did not do floating point operations well, so Carmack figured out how to do everything using integers.
May 1992 -> Wolfenstein 3d releases December 1993 -> Doom releases December 1994 -> Sony Playstation launches in Japan June 1996 -> Quake releases
So Wolfenstein and Doom were actually not really 3d games, but rather 2.5 games (you can't have rooms below other rooms). The first 3d game here is actually Quake which also eventually also got hardware acceleration support.
Carmack was the master of doing the seeminly impossible on super constrained hardware on virtually impossible timelines. If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?