Catacomb 3D: How the Forgotten Game Created the FPS Genre

Most people who care about gaming history know the story. It's 1992, id Software releases Wolfenstein 3D, and the first-person shooter genre explodes into existence. Doom follows. Then Quake. The trajectory is clean, inevitable, and mostly told without mentioning what came before.

But there's a game almost nobody remembers now. A game that was released mere months before Wolfenstein 3D, a game that id Software's own founders nearly abandoned. That game was Catacomb 3D, and it contained basically every foundational idea that would define the entire FPS genre for decades to come.

The problem was simple: it made the company almost nothing. While the Commander Keen series was pulling in massive royalties from Softdisk—10 times what Catacomb 3D earned—the team faced a choice. Stick with what made money, or chase what fascinated them. They chose the latter, and nearly 35 years later, John Romero brought the original team together to explain exactly why that decision mattered.

What makes this retrospective so valuable isn't just nostalgia. It's a window into how game design decisions get made when the future is genuinely unclear. Nobody at id Software was certain that 3D action games would be the future of PC gaming. The industry consensus at the time was different. Yet something about Catacomb 3D's design—something fundamentally about the feeling of moving through 3D space from a first-person perspective—was so compelling that it changed everything.

This is the story of a game that almost didn't happen, created by a team that had better financial reasons to do something else, that contained technology thought to be exclusive to expensive workstations, and that nobody plays anymore but everyone still uses.

The Catacomb Legacy: From Gauntlet Clone to 3D Pioneer

Understanding Catacomb 3D requires understanding its predecessor, simply called Catacomb. If you'd played Gauntlet in the arcade during the early 1980s, you'd immediately recognize Catacomb's DNA. It was a dungeon crawler with a top-down perspective, hordes of enemies, power-ups scattered throughout the level, and a relentless pace designed to eat quarters.

The original Catacomb arrived in 1989 as id Software's entry into this space. For a PC game at the time, it was pretty good. It was fast, it was fun, and it proved that arcade-style action could work on home computers. But there was a problem that John Carmack and the team couldn't ignore: the PC's reputation was growing in a different direction.

PC gaming was becoming synonymous with depth. Games like Ultima and Wizardry had established that home computer gamers wanted complex stories, character development, inventory systems, and worlds to explore at their own pace. The quarter-eater mentality of arcade games—that pure, distilled action stripped of everything else—didn't match how people were thinking about PC gaming in the late 1980s.

Yet Carmack and Romero believed in action games. They believed twitch gameplay, fast reflexes, and immediate feedback were valid and valuable. They just needed to prove it in a way that fit the PC's strengths.

Hovertank One, released in 1991, was their first attempt. It was a first-person perspective tank game with a simple premise: drive around, shoot enemies, don't die. For its time, it was remarkable. The perspective alone made it feel different from everything else on PC. You weren't controlling an avatar from above. You were inside the world, looking out.

But Hovertank had limitations. The graphics were primitive even by early 1990s standards. The walls were flat, untextured, just solid colors. The enemies were flat sprites sliding across the screen. It felt more like a technical proof of concept than a complete game, which, in many ways, it was.

Catacomb 3D took that foundation and added the piece that would change everything: texture mapping.

Texture Mapping: The Technology That Shouldn't Have Been Possible

Texture mapping sounds like a simple concept now. You take a 2D image and wrap it around a 3D surface, and the computer calculates how it should look from any angle. Every game engine from the past 20 years does this billions of times per second without breaking a sweat.

In 1991, it was considered impossible on consumer hardware.

Texture mapping had existed in academic computer graphics for years. SGI workstations could do it. High-end graphics stations used in professional visualization could do it. But those machines cost tens of thousands of dollars. The idea that a 286 or 386 computer, the kind sitting in someone's home or small office, could render textured 3D surfaces in real time was laughable.

John Carmack didn't find it laughable. He found it interesting.

According to the retrospective, Carmack had been fascinated by texture mapping since seeing it in The Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, a textbook that became almost mythical in id Software lore. He'd been turning the problem over in his head, thinking about whether there was a way to simplify the algorithms enough that they could run on consumer CPCs.

The inspiration came from an unexpected source. John Romero had been talking with Paul Neurath, who was working on Ultima Underworld at the time. Neurath's team was doing texture mapping, and it was working. Romero mentioned this to Carmack, and Carmack's response was casual in a way that only someone with his confidence could manage: "Yeah, I think I can do that."

What Carmack ended up doing was a masterclass in constrained problem-solving. He couldn't do what SGI workstations did. But he didn't need to. He needed something that was "a simplification of that and could still go kind of fast" on the hardware of 1991.

Part of the solution was technical brilliance. Carmack leveraged an EGA graphics trick that allowed writing multiple columns of pixel data simultaneously. When walls were rendered tall enough, the system could write up to eight pixels at a time. It doesn't sound like much, but in a rasterization pipeline operating under severe constraints, it was the difference between 15 frames per second and playable performance.

The rest of the solution was artistic compromise. Catacomb 3D's textures weren't high resolution. They were small, repeated patterns. The color palette was limited. The resolution was 320x 200 in 16 colors. By modern standards, it looks like a cartoon. In 1991, it looked like the future.

What made it remarkable wasn't that the textures looked beautiful. They didn't. What made it remarkable was that it proved texture mapping didn't have to be the exclusive domain of workstations. It could be done on a PC. The entire trajectory of 3D graphics changed because Carmack figured out how to do less.

The First-Person Perspective: Why You Mattered More Than Your Avatar

Catacomb 3D had another crucial design decision: it committed entirely to the first-person perspective. You didn't see your character. You were your character. Your view was their view.

This wasn't an arbitrary choice. It was a consequence of hardware limitations and a stroke of design genius wrapped together.

According to Tom Hall, one of id Software's co-founders, rendering large sprites on screen was expensive. Drawing a convincing player character from multiple angles, animating it smoothly, and keeping performance acceptable was a technical burden the team couldn't easily justify. So they made a virtue of necessity: remove the character entirely and put the player's eye where their head would be.

But something unexpected happened. The moment that constraint got implemented, the game became more immersive.

Hall's description of the impact is telling. "This is me," he said about how the first-person perspective changed the experience. "It really changes how you feel about things."

That's not marketing language. That's the description of someone genuinely surprised by how much perspective matters. When you're looking through the protagonist's eyes, you're not controlling them. You become them. Your reflexes are their reflexes. Your fear of a troll jumping out from behind a wall is immediate and visceral in a way that would be impossible if you were watching a character on screen.

This insight wasn't new. Games had used first-person perspective before. But Catacomb 3D married the first-person perspective to a believable 3D world moving in real time, and the combination was intoxicating.

The technical implications rippled forward. Aiming became simpler. Sight lines became clear. The illusion of presence became stronger. Everything about how you interacted with the game world aligned with how you would naturally want to interact with it if you were actually there.

It's almost impossible to overstate how much this mattered. The first-person perspective became the default for action games not because it was cheaper to render (by the time graphics got cheaper, alternatives were cheaper still), but because it was better. It felt better. And Catacomb 3D proved that feeling.

The Art of Limitations: Adrian Carmack and Creativity Under Constraint

When John Carmack was working on the technical foundation of Catacomb 3D, his brother Adrian faced a different problem. He needed to create the visual world: the enemies, the decorations, the atmosphere. He needed to do it using a color palette that would make a modern designer weep, at a resolution that was tiny by today's standards.

Adrian Carmack's process was more constrained than his brother's, yet somehow more creative. The character designs started with Tom Hall drawing extremely simplistic sketches. Hall was not a professional artist. His drawings looked, by his own description, like "extremely simplistic 6-year-old child-like drawings." Stick figures with exaggerated features. Barely recognizable as characters.

Adrian took those sketches and transformed them. He would work in Deluxe Paint II, a painting software designed for digital art on Amiga and Atari computers but also used on PCs. Without sophisticated animation software, he had to innovate. He would draw multiple frames of animation, then use Deluxe Paint's undo command to flip back and forth between them, watching the movement play out in rapid succession.

It sounds primitive, and it was. But it's worth understanding why this mattered. Adrian Carmack was seeing his animation in context, in real time, within the game engine. He could immediately see if a troll's movement looked right, if an attack animation felt threatening, if a death animation had enough impact. Iteration happened at the speed of thought.

Adrian later remarked that if you use the undo key like this, "you learn really rapidly that you need to save often." It's a deadpan observation, but it hints at the creative friction of the process. You're working at the edge of what the tools allow. The constant danger of losing work focuses your mind in a way that more forgiving tools might not.

The visual results held up. The characters Adrian created for Catacomb 3D are still recognizable decades later. The troll is a troll. The mage is clearly a mage. The wizard boss is unmistakably a threat. None of this is accidental. It's the result of someone working within severe constraints and making every pixel count.

Catacomb 3D's Defining Features: Innovation Under Pressure

When you strip away the nostalgia and the historical significance, Catacomb 3D was fundamentally about solving design problems with new or newly applied solutions. Some of these features seem basic now. Others remain relevant today.

Mouse support was one of them. This might sound quaint, but in 1991, having a game that assumed you had a mouse, that was designed around mouse control, was not standard. Many PC games still relied on keyboard only. Catacomb 3D assumed you'd want to use a mouse to look around, and the game was built around that assumption. It wasn't bolted on afterward. Your interaction model was fundamentally built on this device being present.

Color-coded keys were another innovation. Doors required specific colored keys to open, and the game had a visual system for communicating which keys you had. This sounds obvious now, but inventory systems and visual feedback for puzzle requirements weren't standard in action games at the time.

The secret walls mechanic deserves special attention because it reveals something about Catacomb 3D's design philosophy. To find secrets, you had to shoot the walls. Not all walls. Specific walls that didn't look that different from other walls. This mechanic is simple, but it serves multiple purposes. It encourages exploration. It rewards curiosity. It turns walls from permanent obstacles into potential hiding places. It's a small thing, but it changes how you think about the environment.

The enemy designs in Catacomb 3D also showed a design maturity that belied the team's relative inexperience with 3D games. Enemies had distinct visual silhouettes. You could identify a threat type from a distance. Their attack patterns had tells. Fighting them required reading their behavior and responding appropriately. It's the foundation of what would become standard enemy design in games, but Catacomb 3D did it from scratch.

None of these features were revolutionary on their own. Together, they formed a cohesive whole. A player picking up Catacomb 3D in 1991 would immediately understand how to interact with it, what was expected of them, and how to succeed.

The Financial Reality: Why Catacomb 3D Almost Killed the FPS Genre

Here's the uncomfortable truth about Catacomb 3D that often gets glossed over in retrospectives: it was a financial failure.

Id Software at the time had a contract with Softdisk, a company that produced Gamer's Edge, a magazine distributed on floppy disk that came with new games every two weeks. The company would pay id Software

Meanwhile, the Commander Keen series was printing money. Each Commander Keen episode was earning "10 times that amount," according to Romero. That's

From a pure business perspective, the decision was obvious. Keep making Commander Keen games. Stop wasting time on 3D experiments. The team even started work on Commander Keen 7, complete with parallax scrolling and full VGA color support. This was the sensible choice. This was the choice that kept the company solvent and its employees paid.

But something was pulling in the other direction.

John Carmack described Catacomb 3D as "just like a weird gimmick thing that we did for a little bit because we wanted to play with a different technology." That's how it felt at the time. A detour. An interesting side project. Not the future.

The shift happened during development of Keen 7. Adrian Carmack was playing Catacomb 3D, and something changed. A troll appeared around a corner, and Adrian reacted physically. His description is vivid: "It automatically sucked you in. 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."

This wasn't praise. This was shock. This was the moment of recognition that something fundamental had changed about how video games could feel.

Romero described his own moment of clarity differently. After working on Keen 7 for two weeks, Romero said he was up at one in the morning and told his team: "Guys, we need to not make this game. This is not the future."

Two weeks of work on Keen 7 was abandoned. The team shifted focus entirely to what would become Wolfenstein 3D. Romero didn't describe this as a strategic decision or a market analysis. He described it as an instinct. "It kind of felt that's where the future was going," Carmack said. The team wanted to "take it to some place that it wouldn't happen staying in the existing conservative lane."

What's remarkable about this pivot is that it was nearly wrong. If Adrian Carmack hadn't had that particular moment playing the troll encounter, if the shift from Keen 7 to 3D development had taken a few weeks longer, if someone had pushed back harder on the financial logic, Catacomb 3D might have remained a weird detour. The FPS genre might not have happened on the timeline it did. The entire trajectory of gaming could have been different.

Wolfenstein 3D: When the Detour Became the Destination

The team's instinct proved correct, though probably not for the reasons they expected.

Wolfenstein 3D released in May 1992. It was faster than Catacomb 3D. It looked better. It had a compelling historical setting, even if the setting was more inspired by the name than by historical accuracy. It had a clearer artistic vision and a stronger sense of purpose.

But fundamentally, it was Catacomb 3D with better art, better level design, and better marketing. The core technology was the same. The first-person perspective was the same. The mouse controls were the same. The basic enemy AI was the same.

What Wolfenstein 3D did was validate Catacomb 3D's thesis: people loved 3D action games. The commercial success was immediate and overwhelming. Within months, Wolfenstein 3D defined the conversation around PC gaming. Everyone wanted a 3D action game. Everyone wanted a Wolfenstein 3D clone.

Id Software became the gold standard for fast, smooth, technically impressive first-person games. Doom followed in 1993 and defined violence in games for a generation. Quake came in 1996 and proved that 3D games could be even faster and more technically sophisticated.

But Catacomb 3D was where it started. Catacomb 3D was where the team learned that first-person perspective in a moving 3D world was special. Where they learned that texture mapping was possible on consumer hardware. Where they learned that secret walls and exploration mattered. Where Adrian Carmack learned that a troll jumping out from behind a wall could be one of the craziest things in a video game.

The game almost never happened, made almost no money, and almost nobody remembers it. Yet it contains the seed of an entire genre.

The Lost Lessons of Catacomb 3D

One of the stranger aspects of the Catacomb 3D retrospective is what it reveals about institutional memory in the games industry. Catacomb 3D was significant enough that the people who made it still wanted to talk about it, still found value in explaining it, three and a half decades later.

Yet the game itself is almost impossible to find. It's not on modern storefronts. It runs poorly on modern computers. Most people interested in gaming history have never played it. They know Wolfenstein 3D. They know Doom. They might know Hovertank One because it's part of the origin story. But Catacomb 3D is in that awkward space between being historically significant and being practically forgotten.

This matters because there are lessons embedded in Catacomb 3D that could probably be learned again and forgotten again without anyone noticing.

One lesson is about constraints driving creativity. Every aspect of Catacomb 3D that worked happened because the team was working within limitations. The limited color palette meant Adrian had to make characters instantly recognizable with minimal detail. The hardware limitations meant Carmack had to find clever ways to render texture-mapped walls efficiently. The first-person perspective wasn't chosen because it was the best possible design choice. It was chosen partly because it was the most efficient way to avoid drawing complex character animations.

Those constraints didn't result in an inferior product. They resulted in a product that felt cohesive and intentional. Everything in the game existed because it needed to, not because there was time or resources for excess.

Another lesson is about trusting your instincts when the data points in another direction. The financial case for abandoning Catacomb 3D was clear. The revenue figures were indefensible. A rational spreadsheet would have said "keep making Keen games." But the team trusted their gut feeling that the future was elsewhere, and they were right.

That doesn't mean instinct always wins. But it suggests that when your team is unified around a feeling—when multiple people are independently recognizing that something has changed—it's worth taking seriously even if the financial metrics don't support it yet.

A third lesson is about the role of accidents and serendipity in major developments. The texture mapping in Catacomb 3D existed because Carmack had read a computer graphics textbook years earlier and was thinking about the problem. It existed because Romero happened to talk to Paul Neurath about Ultima Underworld. It existed because Carmack was confident enough to think he could solve a problem that was supposedly only solvable with expensive workstations.

These connections weren't inevitable. Shift any one of them, and the timeline changes. That troll encounter that convinced Adrian Carmack might never have happened if the level design was slightly different. The moment of clarity that hit Romero at one in the morning might never have come if the team hadn't been frustrated enough with Keen 7.

The Technical Achievement That Disappeared Into Invisibility

Texture mapping is invisible now. It's so fundamental to how 3D graphics work that you don't think about it. You see a brick wall in a game, and you don't marvel at the fact that a 2D image of bricks has been wrapped around 3D geometry. You just see a brick wall.

But there's something worth understanding about Carmack's solution to the texture mapping problem. He didn't solve it by making computers faster or by finding a perfect algorithm. He solved it by understanding that perfection wasn't necessary. You could compress the problem, constrain it, simplify it, and still get results that were good enough.

That approach echoes forward through everything Carmack would do afterward. Doom's engine was faster than the competition not because it did more, but because it did exactly what was needed and cut away everything else. Quake's 3D engine made similar choices. The pattern repeats: elegance through constraint, speed through simplification.

Catacomb 3D was where Carmack first proved this philosophy could work on a large scale. It's a lesson that most modern game development has forgotten. Modern engines are feature-complete, powerful enough to handle almost any requirement. That power comes at a cost: complexity, memory usage, difficulty of implementation. Games that run at 60 or 120 frames per second on modern hardware often could be running at 10 times that speed if they were constrained by similar hardware limits.

Would that be better? Probably not. The constraints of 1991 weren't ideal. They were just what existed. But they did force a kind of design purity that can be hard to achieve when you have unlimited resources.

Why Catacomb 3D Matters More Than Most People Realize

The standard history of the FPS genre gives all the credit to Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein 3D was bigger, faster, more polished, more commercially successful. It deserves credit. But giving all the credit to Wolfenstein 3D is like giving all the credit to a specific book in a series for inventing the genre when the first book in the series did the actual innovation.

Catacomb 3D proved that first-person 3D games could exist on consumer hardware. It proved that the perspective was compelling enough to be more than a technical curiosity. It proved that players would understand and enjoy the interaction model instinctively. It proved that the genre could work.

Wolfenstein 3D proved the genre could be commercially successful. It proved the concept could scale, could be polished, could reach millions of people. Those are valuable proofs. But they're different proofs.

Without Catacomb 3D, the FPS genre might have happened anyway eventually. But it wouldn't have happened the same way, wouldn't have happened on the same timeline, might not have happened through id Software. The shape of gaming over the next three decades would be different.

And yet, almost nobody plays Catacomb 3D. Almost nobody remembers it. It exists mostly as a footnote in longer stories about more famous games.

Part of this is just the passage of time. Games are ephemeral in a way that books or films aren't. They're tied to specific hardware, specific operating systems, specific contexts. A game that required a 386 processor and an EGA graphics card to play properly is not something the general public can casually revisit. Even with emulation, the experience isn't quite right. You're playing a version of history, not history itself.

But part of it is also that Catacomb 3D was genuinely rough around the edges compared to Wolfenstein 3D. If you're going to play a classic 1990s first-person game, you'd rather play Wolfenstein 3D. It's more fun, more polished, more complete as an experience. From a practical standpoint, there's no reason to play Catacomb 3D instead.

Yet from a historical standpoint, there's every reason to understand it. Catacomb 3D is the moment when someone first asked "what if we could do this?" and figured out the answer. That moment matters, even if the game itself is no longer particularly playable.

The Retrospective as Historical Record

The decision to bring the original team together to discuss Catacomb 3D's creation is interesting partly because it's unusual. Games get retrospectives all the time. But they typically focus on commercially important games: Doom, Mario 64, Final Fantasy VII. The truly forgotten games rarely get official attention, especially not from the people who made them.

The fact that Romero, Carmack, Hall, and Adrian Carmack took time to discuss Catacomb 3D suggests something. It suggests that the people involved recognized its historical importance even if the public hadn't. It suggests that the team's memory of the creative process remained clear enough to be worth sharing.

What comes through in the retrospective is genuine affection for the game. Not nostalgia in the sense of "this was good at the time." More like the affection you'd have for a project that surprised you, that taught you something, that changed the trajectory of your career.

Romero's description of the moment he realized the team needed to abandon Keen 7 carries the weight of someone recalling a genuine shift in perspective. Carmack's observation about Adrian's reaction to the troll encounter carries the tone of someone reliving the exact moment the future became visible.

These aren't the reflections of people looking back at a successful product and congratulating themselves. They're reflections of people looking back at a moment when something clicked, when the path forward became clear, when they realized they were about to change an entire genre of games.

The Invisible Infrastructure of Modern Gaming

If you play any 3D game made in the last 30 years, you're using technology pioneered in Catacomb 3D. The perspective. The mouse controls. The way walls have texture. The concept of secrets hidden in the environment. The fundamental design principles of enemy encounters. The architecture of the game engine itself.

None of this is directly copied from Catacomb 3D. By the time modern games were made, the field had advanced enormously. Carmack and the team at id moved on to more sophisticated approaches. The graphics got better. The technology got more complex. The design sophistication increased.

But the foundational ideas are there. Catacomb 3D didn't just create a game. It created the entire conceptual and technical framework that would define how interactive 3D worlds would work for decades.

That's the kind of impact that disappears into invisibility. You don't think about it. You just use it. And the game that made it possible fades into history.

What Catacomb 3D Teaches About Risk and Instinct

The most interesting aspect of the Catacomb 3D story isn't the technology. It isn't the art. It isn't even the game itself. It's the decision that the team made to abandon a profitable line of work to pursue something uncertain.

That decision wasn't made because the financial data supported it. The data clearly supported sticking with Keen. The decision was made because something about working on Catacomb 3D felt right. Because the creative possibility was more compelling than the revenue certainty.

That's a harder decision to make than it sounds, especially for a small company that needed the income. There were probably arguments. There were probably moments of doubt. There was probably discussion about whether they were making a mistake, throwing away money and opportunity on an unproven concept.

But they did it anyway. And they were right.

That doesn't mean that following your instincts always works out. Most of the time, following your instincts against all data is called "bad decision-making." But sometimes, when the instinct is shared by multiple people, when it comes from genuine creative excitement rather than ego, when it's supported by something real even if you can't articulate exactly what that something is, it works.

Catacomb 3D is a case study in that kind of decision-making. Not a foolproof guide—there's no such thing—but evidence that sometimes the future belongs to people willing to bet on something that feels right even when the numbers say otherwise.

Legacy and Disappearance: The Strange Fate of Catacomb 3D

Catacomb 3D's disappearance from public memory is ironic because its technology remained central to gaming for decades. The texture mapping approach that Carmack pioneered didn't immediately become standard—hardware got better, and eventually you could just do the full version of texture mapping. But the philosophy of constrained elegance that produced it echoed through every Carmack engine that followed.

The first-person perspective became so standard for action games that the novelty of it is hard to explain to someone who grew up with Halo and Call of Duty. But that perspective had to be invented first. Someone had to decide that removing the player character from view and putting their eye in the world was the right approach. Catacomb 3D was where that decision got made and validated.

The secret walls became a standard game design feature, so common that you might not even realize it's a discrete design choice. But that idea had to come from somewhere. It came from Catacomb 3D.

Yet the game itself is basically unavailable. Playing it requires emulation or source ports (fan-made versions that run on modern systems). The original commercial version isn't sold anywhere. It's not part of major digital storefronts. Most people interested in gaming history can't easily play it.

This is the strange fate of truly foundational games. If you invent something that becomes so fundamental that it's invisible, the game you invented becomes invisible too. Your invention survives as infrastructure. The artifact that first demonstrated the invention becomes a historical curiosity.

It's not unfair exactly. Catacomb 3D did its job. It proved the concept. It influenced the games that would become famous. From a historical perspective, that might be enough.

But from a personal perspective—from the perspective of someone who worked on it, who spent time on it, who created it—there's probably something bittersweet about being remembered as a step on the way to something else. You're not remembered for what you made. You're remembered for what it led to.

The Broader Context: Why Catacomb 3D Happened When It Did

Catacomb 3D couldn't have happened 10 years earlier. The hardware didn't exist. The technology wasn't understood well enough. The cultural conditions weren't right.

It couldn't have happened much later either. By the mid-1990s, 3D was becoming standard, and the window for a small team to invent an entire category was closing.

Catacomb 3D happened in that specific moment when 3D graphics were theoretically possible on consumer hardware but nobody had figured out how to do it yet. When action games were still considered viable on PC despite the platform's reputation for deeper, slower gameplay. When a small team could still move fast enough to innovate and ship before the opportunity disappeared.

That specific moment was very brief. It lasted maybe 18 months before Doom made it clear that 3D was the future and everyone rushed to follow.

Id Software got there first, not through perfect planning or market analysis, but through a combination of technical skill, creative instinct, and being in the right place with the right tools and the right team at exactly the right moment.

Catacomb 3D was their attempt. It was rough. It wasn't commercially successful. But it worked. And because it worked, they made Wolfenstein 3D. And because Wolfenstein 3D worked, everything that followed happened differently.