When Wolfenstein and Doom came out, they felt so impossibly advanced that Sweeney gave up on programming for six months, until Michael Abrash's articles demystified 3D graphics and showed him the techniques were actually simple enough to implement.

Sweeney describes the profound impact of id Software's Wolfenstein and Doom: they were so technically dazzling that he quit programming for six months, convinced he could never compete. Then Michael Abrash published articles explaining texture mapping and 3D rendering techniques, revealing the underlying simplicity, which gave Sweeney and the Epic team the confidence to build their own 3D engine. ✦ AI generated

Tim Sweeney · Lex Fridman · 2025-04-30 · original ↗

At first I was really depressed. I think because the wizardry of Doom especially was so incredible that I gave up on programming for like 6 months. I was like, I don't ever be able to compete with this. I have no idea what we're going to do. We just keep making 2D games and hope that the business goes on. But that was the nature of Carmack's wizardry. He had done things that were like not just one innovation leap ahead, but like a dozen simultaneously interplaying in a way that you couldn't pick them apart into their component pieces. But a funny thing happened. Michael Abrash, long-timer in computer graphics, wrote a book on the techniques for 3D graphics and texture mapping, and he wrote some articles in one of the programming magazines of the day and explained it and showed assembly code to do texture mapping, you know, drawing these 3D graphics on the screen. And it was actually really simple stuff. I was like, oh, I can do that. And so a bunch of us at Epic independently went off and started writing our own 3D graphics to figure it out.

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