Catacomb 3-D Screenshot. Taken from MyAbandonware.
After long considerations, I just looked up at my Commander Keen & Wolfenstein 3D posts from this month and decided to wrap things up by talking about another id Software game... kind of. While first three games were developed by id Software (even before the company was formed, in fact), after Catacomb 3-D the series moved on without much of their involvement (besides the engine). Initially I thought that id carried on the ownership of the series after the gradual end of SoftDisk, but I did a poor job at (or rather haven't put any effort into) digging up the information and therefore was wrong.
Thankfully, I had all the job done for me already and really this post will serve as a compilation of publicly available information (as usual) about Catacomb series' current status and its story in recent years, which is both more happy and tragic than "lost" Commander Keen titles. That might seem a bit odd to some of you, but trust me: it'll make more sense later.
Fallen Keepers.
I'm going full cricle again as it's time to talk about Flak Rock Software again. Although I only briefly mentioned that company in "Missing Holidays of Commander Keen", it's more important to Catacomb series. That company was formed and (from what I understand) consisted of just one person, Richard Mandel. He acquried the rights to many of SoftDisk's games from them. While he unfortunately resold Keen Dreams, it seems like he had different plans for Catacomb franchise. Thanks to Braden "Blzut" Obrzut (who you may know as a creator of ECWolf source port) convinced Richard to release all source codes.
Unfortunately, Richard David Mandel passed away in 2017 after having a heart attack and that's how the story of Flak Rock Software ends. His family sold all the games' rights they had to several parties, like John Romero, Havoc, Piko Interactive and Ziggurat Interactive. As for the Catacomb franchise, it carried over to Jay Weisskopf Petacat (also known as jayschwa), who formed Catacomb Games and acts as current publisher of the series.
New Wizards.
And that's where we get to a positive note as Jay seems to be a pretty talented guy. You can learn from his personal website that jayschwa worked on various OpenGL game project at Recurse Center. One of his latest project in 2017 was a WebGL recreation of Catacomb 3-D. While it was never finished, CatacombWebGL ultimately led him to purchase the rights to the entire series: that's what the GitHub page says. On top of that, Jay stated there that he's working on "modernizing the original code base". Even though there doesn't seem to be any recent updates in regards to that, I would say that an eventual re-release of Catacomb 3-D is pretty much just a matter of time.
Until then, there are two option for experiencing 3D Catacomb games outside of DOSBox: ReflectionHLE & CatacombGL. The first one followes the path of Chocolate DOOM in its approach to supported games, which include Keen Dreams, Wolfenstein 3D with Spear of Destiny and Super 3D Noah's Ark on top of Catacomb ones. All thanks to id Software reusing Dreams code with some alterations across multiple of their games, so I guess you can say it was port's natural progression. Latter port is focused on utilizing OpenGL for improved visual representation of Catacomb games by offering players new features like proper widescreen and allowing to change field of view with frame rate. It's worth noting that both NY00123 and Arno are important to this story as they're the ones who brought up all the information presented in this "article". Thank you for everything you've done!
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