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And of course I still interrupt writing with gaming, and find that getting my mind off the task at hand can actually help me focus better. Wolfenstein 3D begat games such as DOOM, DOOM II, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, modern takes on Wolfenstein, Serious Sam, Halo, Call of Duty, and many, many others.

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For the past ten years, most of my gaming has happened on Xbox consoles, so my run on the PC was about 12 years. For our first books together, we played DOOM-IdвЂ™s follow-up to Wolf-and over the intervening years IвЂ™ve moved from shooter to shooter as the technologies and platforms evolved. On a related note, when I started my writing career, my initial writing partner, Gary Brent, explained to me that he would intersperse his writing time with game playing time, and that he had played through Wolf 3D during the writing of his previous book. I resolved to build my own PC, which I wasnвЂ™t able to do until after we moved to Phoenix in 1993. This was the moment that I first took the PC seriously. (If you want to know more about John Carmack, Id Software, or the creation of Wolfenstein 3D, be sure to read Masters of Doom, which is a tremendous book.) And in doing so, he single-handedly made the PC a better gaming platform than the Amiga. He took the most horrible personal computing architecture available at the time and bent it to his will. The technical genius of John Carmack, who created the Wolfenstein game engine, must never be understated. Yes, the PS/1вЂ™s screen was also itself tiny. Yes, the sound game out of tinny single speaker. Which, again, was a horrifically low-end device.

So I raced home with the shareware disk to see whether it would work on my wifeвЂ™s PC.

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Wolf, like many games of the era, was distributed with a free shareware episode, and you could send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the publisher (Apogee) to get the full game (or, later, buy a retail version called Spear of Destiny). (With Dungeon Master, the action would move forward in chunks, not smoothly.) But it operated in real time, which was impossible at the time on the Amiga: You could move forward, back, left or right in real time and the game would just race along with you. It offered a first person view, which wasnвЂ™t hugely uncommon, as games like BardвЂ™s Tale and Dungeon Master provided a similar вЂњdown the hallwayвЂќ view. Wolfenstein 3D-вЂќWolfвЂќ among friends-offered higher resolution graphics than were possible on most mainstream Amigas of the day: Most US-based games ran at 320 x 200, where even my wifeвЂ™s PC was capable of 640 x 480 (VGA). I was mostly uninterested in the PC at the time, and from a gaming perspective, the only thing that worked well on these machines-was in fact better than the equivalent Amiga offerings-was flight simulators. At that time, of course, the writing was on the wall, the Amiga was going nowhere fast, and FinetasticвЂ™s owner Ritchie started stocking IBM compatible PCs as well. I used to spend a lot of time in a local computer shop called Finestastic Computers, based in Norwood, and a follow-on to an earlier local Amiga dealer called LCA Computers. In short, everything that was impossible on the PC. (That these are all Psygnosis titles is not coincidental.) They tended to utilize the AmigaвЂ™s strengths, with sprites, parallax scrolling, and tremendous music soundtracks and sound effects. And most of the Amiga games I cared about were fast-moving sideways scrollers like вЂњShadow of the Beast,вЂќ вЂњLeander,вЂќ вЂњAgonyвЂќ and other games youвЂ™ve never heard of. This was a very low-end machine, with a 6 processor and a grayscale VGA monitor.ДЄt the time, the Amiga scene was largely centered on вЂњdemos,вЂќ non-interactive extravaganzas designed to show off the computerвЂ™s graphical and audio prowess, and games, which of course achieved the same thing in interactive form. (The first hard drive I ever purchased fit inside this case, too: It was a 20 MB unit.) My wife had an IBM PS/1, mostly for WordPerfect. At the time, I was using an Amiga 500 with a personally-installed hardware switch that would let me jump between the classic AmigaDOS 1.3-which was compatible with all those great games from Europe-and the newer AmigaDOS 2.0. Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992, while my wife and I were still living in Massachusetts we moved to Phoenix about a year later. And they could do things that were then impossible on the Amiga. Suddenly, PCs were tremendous game machines.

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But what Id Software accomplished with Wolfenstein 3D changed everything. In the early 1990s, I was an Amiga diehard, convinced that my personal computer platform of choice was superior to expensive Macs and business-oriented IBM PCs.

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