Early ’90s animation tools were so primitive that Doom’s lead artist says he pretty much did the whole thing with ’the undo key'
Adrian Carmack, co-founder of id Software and lead artist on Doom, recently revealed the surprisingly rudimentary state of animation tools in the early 1990s during a YouTube conversation with Jesse Petrilla. According to Carmack, the animation software available at the time was so primitive that he essentially relied on the undo key as his primary tool to create the classic 1993 first-person shooter’s animations.
Carmack noted that artists frequently had to create their own tools to compensate for software limitations. This necessity fostered creative problem-solving and forced developers to work within significant constraints. Despite these technical hurdles, the resulting animations became iconic and helped establish Doom as a landmark title that defined the first-person shooter genre.
This revelation underscores how early video game developers operated under restrictions that would seem impossible by modern standards. Artists and programmers exhibited remarkable ingenuity to achieve their creative vision with minimal resources and tools. The fact that Doom achieved its legendary status despite—or perhaps because of—these limitations demonstrates that technical constraints don’t necessarily hinder artistic achievement. Rather, they often require different approaches to problem-solving and force developers to maximize efficiency in their workflows.