While id’s decision to lean into fast, action-oriented first-person games might seem obvious in retrospect, the video reveals that it was far from an easy decision. Catacomb 3D earned the team just $5,000 (about $11,750 in December 2025 dollars) through a contract to deliver bi-monthly games for Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge magazine-on-a-disk. Each episode of the Commander Keen series of run-and-gun 2D games, on the other hand, was still earning “10 times that amount” at the time, Romero said.
That made sticking with Commander Keen seem like the “obvious business decision,” Romero says in the video. The team even started work on a seventh Commander Keen game—with parallax scrolling and full VGA color support—right after Catacomb 3D‘s release. At the time, it felt like Catacomb 3D might be “just like a weird gimmick thing that we did for a little bit because we wanted to play with a different technology,” as John Carmack put it.
A tech demo shows early work on Commander Keen 7 that was abandoned in favor of Wolfenstein 3D.
That feeling started to fade away, Carmack said, after his brother Adrian had an “almost falling out of his seat” moment while pivoting toward an in-game troll in Catacomb 3D. “It automatically sucked you in,” Adrian Carmack said of the feeling. “You’re trying to look behind walls, doors, whatever… you get a pop-out like that, and it was just one of the craziest things in a video game I had ever seen.”
That kind of reaction from one of their own eventually convinced the team to abandon two weeks of work on Keen 7 to focus on what would become Wolfenstein 3D. “It kind of felt that’s where the future was going,” Carmack said in the video. “[We wanted to] “take it to some place that it wouldn’t happen staying in the existing conservative [lane].”
“Within two weeks, [I was up] at one in the morning and I’m just like, ‘Guys, we need to not make this game [Keen],’” Romero told Ars in 2024. “‘This is not the future. The future is getting better at what we just did with Catacomb.’ … And everyone was immediately was like, ‘Yeah, you know, you’re right. That is the new thing, and we haven’t seen it, and we can do it, so why aren’t we doing it?’”
For our C:ArsGames series, we look at the controls conundrum of early 3D.
The graphical updates to Tomb Raider are modest but effective. Credit: Aspyr
For a lot of the games I’ve written about in the C:ArsGames series, I’ve come to the conclusion that the games hold up pretty well, despite their age—Master of Orion II, Jill of the Jungle, and Wing Commander Privateer, for example. Each of those have flaws that show now more than ever, but I still had a blast revisiting each of them.
This time I’d like to write about one that I think doesn’t hold up quite as well for me: For the first time in almost 30 years, I revisited the original Tomb Raider via 2024’s Tomb Raider I-III Remastered collection.
You might be thinking this is going to be a dunk on the work done on the remaster, but that’s not the case, because the core issue with playing 1996’s Tomb Raider in 2026 is actually unsolvable, no matter how much care is put into a remaster.
The age of tank controls
Tomb Raider was part of the first wave of multiplatform games with fully 3D gameplay, releasing the same year as similarly groundbreaking 3D titles Super Mario 64 and Quake. I think you could make a pretty compelling case that most of the modern AAA games industry can trace its lineage in some way back to those three titles.
Because it was the beginning of mass-market 3D games (yes, I know other, more niche 3D games existed before), there were no established best practices for things like the controls or the camera.
Tomb Raider opted for a modality that was common for a few years before it was replaced by clearly better solutions: what we now call “tank controls,” where forward or back moves the character forward or back, but hitting left or right turns the character on its axis in place without moving.
The way it works is naturally intuitive enough, which is part of why it was so popular early on. But the industry has moved on because it’s frustratingly sluggish and clunky. I loved Tomb Raider‘s level design and atmosphere, and the designers did about as good a job as they could designing around the limitations of the controls for most of the combat sequences. But ultimately, there was enough combat that the sluggishness of this input method significantly detracted from my enjoyment.
In 1996, I had little to compare it to, and the novelty of these vertically stacked 3D levels played from a third-person perspective was powerful enough that I had no complaints. But after 30 years of new ideas and iteration, the industry’s designers have solved all the problems this game has with controls.
That’s why the studio behind the remaster tried including an alternative modern control scheme. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for Tomb Raider at all.
Prince of Persia and grids
When work started on the original Tomb Raider, its developers are said to have had a specific cocktail of influences in mind: They wanted to combine the truly 3D navigable environments they had seen in the groundbreaking Ultima Underworld and the polygonal characters from Virtua Fighter, with gameplay inspired by the 1989 Jordan Mechner classic Prince of Persia.
If you’ve played Prince of Persia, you know the platforming in that game is both precise and challenging. To make jumps, you had to carefully position yourself before launching—one step forward, one step back, until you reached the perfect starting point.
The same goes for Tomb Raider. In fact, the entire game—all the puzzles, layouts, and platforming challenges—adheres to a strict grid system. Players can predict exactly how far protagonist Lara Croft will jump based on where they are on that grid. They can count steps to position themselves, and it’s basically required if you want to consistently navigate the game’s complex and precise jumping sequences without frustration.
Using the game’s original tank controls, you could step forward or backward in predictable ways, or side step, jump to the side, jump forward, jump backward, and so on, with specific numbers of presses on the arrow keys. The entire game was built around this principle.
As frustrating as tank controls are to a modern player, there was an exquisite elegance to this.
The remaster’s modern controls option works more like Tomb Raider Legends from the 2000s, and it’s that general approach that has become standard in almost all modern third-person 3D games.
They feel so much nicer and more responsive to a modern player who has been trained on that for the past two decades, even if that player is someone like me who did play the original games with tank controls back in the day. That short window of three to five years of muscle memory and comfort based on tank controls has been completely overwritten by more than 20 years with what the modern control scheme offers.
Unfortunately, the flexible modern controls lose almost all connection to that elegant grid system. What used to be a precise process—for example, “X steps forward, X steps to the left, then a backflip from exactly this spot”—is now a guessing game of feeling things out. And the platforming sequences aren’t designed with that in mind. As a result, the combat feels a lot better with modern controls, but just about everything else is much more frustrating than before.
Embracing Tomb Raider
I’m not the first to observe this about the remaster; reviewers and Reddit dwellers debated this at length when this release happened two years ago. But I hadn’t gotten to playing the remasters—or revisiting Tomb Raider at all since the ’90s—until I decided to try it out for C:ArsGames.
Tomb Raider is still worth revisiting, but it is frustrating to leave behind 20 years of muscle memory to return to a previous paradigm that ended up being an evolutionary dead end.
The more time you put into it, the more natural the tank controls feel, but without the wow factor of groundbreaking new 3D gameplay, it’s harder to put up with.
Tellingly, Tomb Raider has already gotten a complete remake (distinct from this remaster) once, and another one is coming. Both radically reinvent the gameplay and seem to turn away from the grid system that made the original what it was. Many modern players won’t put up with the tank controls, but not being willing to embrace those means you simply can’t experience Tomb Raider as it was originally intended.
And again, I’m not knocking the work done on this remaster. Fittingly, it was made by Aspyr, the same studio that ported the original games to the Mac in the ’90s. (For a few years, they absolutely dominated the Mac game market with their Windows-to-Mac ports.) They’re still porting games to Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android today—notably, they did all the Civilization VI ports—as well as remasters of classics for modern platforms.
There’s no version of the modern controls that would truly work from this game, so it’s not an execution issue, and I actually think that Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is possibly Aspyr’s most well-crafted work.
The remaster includes the ability to flip between classic graphics and a more contemporary look that I think does a great job of walking the line between honoring the ’90s original and looking nice to 2020s eyes. They even hired Timur “XProger” Gagiev, a developer known for work on Tomb Raider open source engine OpenLara, to be the remaster’s technical director.
The Tomb Raider franchise is about to enter a new era (controversially) under Embracer Group and Amazon Games; it remains to be seen whether it will be a good one. But if you want to go back to where it all started, I recommend grabbing this remaster (available on GOG and other storefronts, as well as on consoles) instead of playing the original release. Just stick with the tank controls, and I hope you adapt back to them more easily than I did!
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Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.
After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.
“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.
The new comments follow similar sentiments relayed by Linus Sebastian on a recent episode of his WAN Show podcast. Sebastian said that, when talking to Valve representatives at a preview event, he suggested that a heavily subsidized price point would make the Steam Machine hardware into “a more meaningful product.” But when he suggested that he was imagining a console-style price in the range of $500, “nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn’t great.”
Forget about $500
Based on these comments, we could start estimating a potential Steam Machine price range by speccing out a comparable desktop machine. That would likely require building around a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU and Radeon RX 7600 GPU, which would probably push the overall build into the $700-plus range. That would make the Steam Machine competitive with the pricey PS5 Pro, even though some estimates price out the actual internal Steam Machine components in the $400 to $500 range.
I love 4X games. I’ve tried other strategy game genres, but frankly, they don’t stick if they’re not first and foremost 4X games—at the heart of it, it must be about exploring, expanding, exploiting, and yes, exterminating.
I suspect that the first 4X game most people played was some entry in the Civilization franchise—though certainly, a select few played precursors dating back to text-based games in the 1970s.
But for me, the title that kicked off my obsession was Master of Orion II (MOO2)—a game that has you develop and build up planets across a simple galaxy map, researching speculative future technologies, and ultimately wiping out your opponents and claiming dominion over the known universe. (There are other victory conditions too, but that one is the most fun.)
There is something satisfying about making a couple thousand small choices that all add up to that galaxy map gradually changing color in your favor until the final cut scene plays, declaring you the true Master of Orion.
The games I love the most are the ones where you make decisions that compound over many, many hours to a long-term payoff. I’ll take that over games with bite-sized, contained challenges and short play times any day. The deeper and longer the experience, the better the payoff can be. To me, that’s ultimately what makes 4X games great. MOO2 is no exception.
I needed this validation. Credit: Samuel Axon
Nostalgic but flawed
That said, it’s not a perfect game. It benefited from the lessons it could learn from more than a decade of 4X games before it, and its designers were clearly thinking about how to make it balanced and fun.
They just missed the mark sometimes. For example, a big part of the game is choosing perks that customize your empire from before the first turn. One of those perks is called “Creative,” which allows you to learn multiple technologies at once rather than one at a time. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone consciously declining to choose that perk unless they’re looking to make things a lot harder for themselves.
Julian LeFay, the man often credited as “the father of The Elder Scrolls,” has died at the age of 59, his creative partners announced this week.
“It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that we inform our community of the passing of Julian LeFay, our beloved Technical Director and co-founder of Once Lost Games,” his colleagues wrote in a Bluesky post.
LeFay spent most of the 1990s at Bethesda Softworks, culminating in his work on The Elder Scrolls series into the late ’90s.
His career didn’t start with The Elder Scrolls, though. Beginning in 1988, LeFay made music for the Amiga hack-and-slash game Sword of Sodan as well as the NES game Where’s Waldo, and he did design and programming work on titles like Wayne Gretzky Hockey, the DOS version of Dragon’s Lair, and two DOS games based on the Terminator movie franchise.
In the early ’90s, he joined fellow Bethesda developers Ted Peterson and Vijay Lakshman on an Ultima Underworld-inspired RPG that would come to be called The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Though famed creative director Todd Howard has helmed the franchise since its third entry, The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall were chiefly spearheaded by LeFay. One of the gods of The Elder Scrolls universe was named after LeFay, and the setting was inspired by the literature and tabletop role-playing games LeFay and Peterson enjoyed.
Sony’s game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company.
A PlayStation account will “become optional” for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Sony hasn’t lost hope that players will still go ahead and use a PlayStation account, though, as it’s tying several benefits to signing in.
Logging in with PlayStation will be required to access trophies, the PlayStation equivalent of achievements. (Steam achievements appear to be supported regardless.) It will also allow friend management, provided you have social contacts on the PlayStation Network.
Additionally, Sony is providing some small in-game rewards to each title that are available if you log in with its account system. You’ll get early unlocks of the Spider-Man 2099 Black Suit and the Miles Morales 2099 Suit in Spider-Man 2, for example—or the Nora Valiant outfit in Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Some of these rewards are available via other means within the games, such as the Armor of the Black Bear set for Kratos in Ragnarok.
Four out of five game developers are currently working on a project for the PC, a sizable increase from 66 percent of developers a year ago. That’s according to Informa’s latest State of the Game Industry survey, which partnered with Omdia to ask over 3,000 game industry professionals about their work in advance of March’s Game Developers Conference.
The 80 percent of developers working on PC projects in this year’s survey is by far the highest mark for any platform dating back to at least 2018, when 60 percent of surveyed developers were working on a PC game. In the years since, the ratio of game developers working on the PC has hovered between 56 and 66 percent before this year’s unexpected jump. The number of game developers saying they were interested in the PC as a platform also increased substantially, from 62 percent last year to 74 percent this year.
While the PC has long been the most popular platform in this survey, the sudden jump in the last year was rather large.
Credit: Kyle Orland / Informa
While the PC has long been the most popular platform in this survey, the sudden jump in the last year was rather large. Credit: Kyle Orland / Informa
The PC has long been the most popular platform for developers to work on in the annual State of the Game Industry survey, easily outpacing consoles and mobile platforms that generally see active work from anywhere between 12 to 36 percent of developer respondents, depending on the year. In its report, Informa notes this surge as a “passion for PC development explod[ing]” among developers, and mentions that while “PC has consistently been the platform of choice… this year saw its dominance increase even more.”
The increasing popularity of PC gaming among developers is also reflected in the number of individual game releases on Steam, which topped out at a record of 18,974 individual titles for 2024, according to SteamDB. That record number was up over 32 percent from 2023, which was up from just under 16 percent from 2022 (though many Steam games each year were “Limited Games” that failed to meet Valve’s minimum engagement metrics for Badges and Trading Cards).
The number of annual Steam releases also points to increasing interest in the platform.
The number of annual Steam releases also points to increasing interest in the platform. Credit: SteamDB
The Steam Deck effect?
While it’s hard to pinpoint a single reason for the sudden surge in the popularity of PC game development, Informa speculates that it’s “connected to the rising popularity of Valve’s Steam Deck.” While Valve has only officially acknowledged “multiple millions” in sales for the portable hardware, GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless estimated that between 3 million and 4 million Steam Deck units had been sold by October 2023, up significantly from reports of 1 million Deck shipments in October 2022.
Enlarge/ The same gorgeous vistas return in the Riven remake.
Samuel Axon
A remake of Riven: The Sequel to Myst launched this week, made by the original game’s developers. It strikes a fascinating balance between re-creation and reinvention, and based on a couple of hours of playing it, it’s a resounding success.
Myst was the classic most people remembered fondly from the early CD-ROM era, but for me, its sequel, Riven, was the highlight. After that, the sequels declined in quality. The sophomore effort was the apex.
It was certainly more ambitious than Myst. Instead of a handful of tightly packed theme park worlds, it offered a singular, cohesive one that felt lived in and steeped in history in a way that Myst couldn’t quite match.
A worthy presentation
That was thanks to outstanding art direction but also to its iconic musical score.
For the most part, the remake nails both of those things. While the original game resembled the first Myst in that you had to click to scroll between static images to explore the game’s world, the new one follows the 2020 Myst remake (and 2000’s oft-forgotten realMyst) in giving the player full movement, akin to contemporary first-person puzzle games like Portal, The Witness, or The Talos Principle. Since it’s easy to re-create a lot of the original camera angles this way, it might have been cool if there had been an option to control the game as you did originally, but I can see why that wasn’t a priority.
Enlarge/ The environments are just as atmospheric and detailed as they used to be.
Samuel Axon
It just so happens that today’s graphics hardware does an outstanding job of replicating previously static visuals in full 3D. (There’s even VR support, though I haven’t tried it yet.) And the music is just as good as it used to be.
There are only two downsides on the presentation front. First, I’ve heard that folks running on older machines may struggle to achieve satisfactory fidelity and performance. I played it on both an M1 Max MacBook Pro and a Windows 11 desktop with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. The MacBook Pro ran the game at maxed-out settings at the laptop’s native resolution at around 30 frames per second. The desktop did the same at 4K at 120 fps. But those are both high-end, recent-ish machines, so your mileage may vary.
Second, the full-motion video performances in the original game have been replaced with full 3D, video game-looking characters. It’s a necessary concession, but I feel some of the character was lost. They did a pretty good job matching the motions of the original videos, though.
The original’s FMV performances have been replaced by respectable but still video game-ish 3D models.
Enlarge/ Blast away all the guilt you want in PowerWash Simulator, but there’s no need to feel dirty in the real world about your backlog.
Getty Images
Gaming news site PCGamesN has a web tool, SteamIDFinder, that can do a neat trick. If you buy PC games on Steam and have your user profile set to make your gaming details public, you can enter your numeric user ID into it and see a bunch of stats. One set of stats is dedicated to the total value of the games listed as unplayed; you can share this page as an image linking to your “Pile of Shame,” which includes the total “Value” of your Steam collection and unplayed games.
Example findings from SteamIDFinder, from someone who likely has hundreds of games from Humble Bundles and other deals in their library.
SteamIDFinder
Using data from what it claims are the roughly 10 percent of 73 million Steam accounts in its database set to Public, PCGamesN extrapolates $1.9 billion in unplayed games, multiplies it by 10, and casually suggests that there are $19 billion in unplayed games hanging around. That is “more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius,” the site notes.
That is a very loose “$19 billion”
“Multiply by 10” is already a pretty soft science, but the numbers are worth digging into further. For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen “Pile of Shame” profiles. An informal poll of Ars Technica co-workers and friends with notable Steam libraries suggests that games purchased at full price make up a tiny fraction of the games in our backlogs. Games acquired through package deals, like the Humble Bundle, or during one of Steam’s annual or one-time sales, are a big part of most people’s Steam catalogs, I’d reckon.
Step 1 to seeing your unplayed collection: Click the three-vertical-bar icon next to your Steam library to filter, choose “Games,” then “Group by Collection” …
Andrew Cunningham
… And pick “Unplayed” as a Play State filter.
Andrew Cunningham
Then there’s what counts as “Unplayed.” Clicking on the filtering tool next to my Steam library and choosing “Unplayed” suggests that I have 54 titles out of 173 total that I have never cracked open. My own manual count of my library is closer to 45. Steam and I disagree on whether I’ve launched and played Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition (I definitely did and was definitely overwhelmed), Mountain, and SteamWorld Dig. And Steam is definitely not counting games that you buy through Steam, mod in some way, and then launch directly through a Windows executable. I’m certain I’ve played some TIE Fighter: Total Conversion, just not through Valve’s channels. One Ars editor played Half-Life 2 multiple times from 2004–2007, but Steam says they’ve never played it, because it didn’t start counting gameplay hours until March 2009.
Even if they’re not dedicated tools, Steam libraries sometimes end up with little bits of game that you didn’t ask for and might never play, like Half-Life Deathmatch: Source. I have quite a few Star Wars games that I never intend to launch, because they were part of a bundle that got me Jedi Knight and Jedi Outcast for cheaper than either game cost on its own.
What “shame” really looks like
Curious as to what people’s backlogs look like, I asked friends and co-workers to run their own numbers after checking them for errors and oddities. Here’s the Ars list:
Kevin Purdy: 173 games, 45 unplayed (26 percent)
Lee Hutchinson: 361 games, 109 unplayed (30 percent)
Andrew Cunningham: 172 games, 79 unplayed (46 percent)
Friends who did a check ended up at 25 percent, 40 percent, and 52 percent. So nobody I could easily poll had fewer than 25 percent of their games unplayed, and those with higher numbers tended to have bought into bundles, sales, add-ons, and other entry generators. And nobody thought their dollar value total made any sense at all, given the full-price math.
Back in 2014, Kyle Orland went deep on Steam statistics. Among games released since Steam started tracking hour counts in March 2009, 26 percent had never been played at that point, while another 19 percent had only been played for an hour or less. That’s roughly 45 percent of games having been played for an essentially token amount of time.
There is a much larger point to argue here, too: You do not have to feel “shame” about giving too much money to people making games, especially smaller games, if you do not want to. This applies to even broader understandings of “Unplayed,” like checking out an intro level or two. Sometimes playing a game for a little bit and deciding it’s not something you want to put dozens more hours into is worth it, whether or not you go for the refund.
If you’ve looked up your own stats and feel surprised, you can keep your unplayed games as a dedicated collection in Steam, and it might inspire you to check out the most intriguing left-behinds. Or, like me, filter that list further by the games that are Steam Deck Verified and bring them on your next trip.
You can usually make additional money more easily than additional life. Nobody is going to inherit your Steam library (probably), so it’s not really worth anything anyway. Play what interests you when you have the time, and if your unplayed count helps you stave off your worst sale impulse buys or rediscover lost gems, so be it. There are neat tricks, but there is no real math—and no real shame.
“Early Access” was once a novel, quirky thing, giving a select set of Steam PC games a way to involve enthusiastic fans in pre-alpha-level play-testing and feedback. Now loads of games launch in various forms of Early Access, in a wide variety of readiness. It’s been a boon for games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which came a long way across years of Early Access.
Early Access, and the “Advanced Access” provided for complete games by major publishers for “Deluxe Editions” and the like, has also been a boon to freeloaders. Craven types could play a game for hours and hours, then demand a refund within the standard two hours of play, 14 days after the purchase window of the game’s “official” release. Steam-maker Valve has noticed and, as of Tuesday night, updated its refund policy.
“Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period,” reads the update. In other words: Playtime is playtime now, so if you’ve played more than two hours of a game in any state, you don’t get a refund. That closes at least one way that people could, with time-crunched effort, play and enjoy games for free in either Early or Advanced access.
Not that it’s a complete win for either developers or cautious buyers. Steam refunds are a tricky matter for developers, especially those smaller in size. The two-hour playtime window can give people a decent idea of how a game runs, what it’s like, and whether it’s clicking with a certain player. But some games enter Early Access in very rough shape or have features that later get dropped. Some games pack their most appealing elements into the early game. And some indie games are intended to provide an experience that’s much closer to two hours than 40 or 80, still giving players a faceless way to grab back some cash.
Steam’s approach to refunds remains an imperfect science, full of quirky stories and examples of why it exists. But it has moved toward a more unified and at least understandable policy now.
