Catacomb

Game information

Also known as:	Catacombs
Developers:	John Carmack Tom Hall
Publisher:	Softdisk Publishing
Category:	Shooter
Year:	1990
More details:	MobyGames Wikipedia
Violence:	This game includes violence
Part of group:	Catacomb games
DOSBox:	Supported (show details)

Play this game online

You can play Catacomb on this website so you don't need to download and install the game on your computer. We recommend to use Google Chrome when playing DOS games online.

Download from this site

Instruction/comment

Catacomb was published by Softdisk on a Gamer's Edge Sampler Disk along with Dangerous Dave by John Romero. The entire disk is free to distribute as long as its contents are unaltered.

Screenshots

Description (by MobyGames)

If you look too hard for a plot you might strain yourself; in what was pretty par for the course at the time, you guide a projectile-firing hero (nuanced shot types: little, big, and Really Big) through 10 levels in the DOS version or 15 levels in the Apple II and Apple IIgs versions (30 more in its look-alike sequel The Catacomb) of twisty, monster-filled mazes in what might critically be reduced to a pretty diluted Gauntlet derivative: advance through stages, avoid getting killed, rack up points and offensive bonuses.

The game is mostly of interest for historical value: its preoccupation with secret passages (here revealed by being shot) and an unprecedented "strafe" functionality hint at what lay ahead for its crew, for when you extrude the maze into three dimensions and shift from third-person to a first-person perspective, what you end up with is Catacomb 3-D... from which it is (and was, as it turns out for wunderkind Carmack), only a hop, skip and a jump to Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

Rating

What do you think of this game? Please rate it below on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest score.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10

Game screenshot

"In terms of multiplayer, Descent was the first game to work well over the Internet."
Matt Toschlog (Outrage)