In 1990, a group of programmers moonlighting at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana replicated the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 on a PC using John Carmack's adaptive tile refresh trick, sent it to Nintendo, and were politely rejected. That rejection birthed id Software. This episode follows John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack from borrowed company computers and Scott Miller's fake fan letters to Commander Keen, the shareware model that bypassed retail gatekeepers, and the founding of id in February 1991.

We break down the raycasting behind Wolfenstein 3D, the censorship that swapped blood for sweat and dogs for rats on the Super Nintendo, and the global phenomenon of Doom, which was installed on more computers than Windows 95. We look at the Columbine backlash and what Harvard, Secret Service and Department of Educati ...