Much respect for John Romero (and John Carmack as well)!
I wish one day I could put such a team together, like they did.
This is a really inspiring talk. Enjoy.
did you ever check Eidolon on the C64 (see below)?
it's some kind of underground cave first person shooter thing from 85.
maybe not the first fps type but quite impressive looking (not the usual flat poly stuff) so quite wicked result for a machine with less than 1MHz power.
When Wolfenstein came out most people already had a 66MHz or faster machine so it's kind of logic that things looked a bit better
That looks pretty advance for such a machine, but I'm not really familiar with the C64.
Back in 1989, my father had a ZX Spectrum where I used to play space-invaders at the age of 6, but my first gaming machines were an NES and a PC (Intel 8086 - 640K RAM - 40MB HDD - Hercules Graphics Adapter - MS-DOS 3.22).
yes, it's quite advanced. it's like a primitive raycasting engine.
when you look closely at what you see in the distance you can see stuff appear that are coming from behind the corners or gates.
so it's keeping depth in mind and it's freedirectional horizontally where most games back then were fixed to 90° angles.