The Bates 4000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yjjHzifL8

Yeah, I had a pretty new PC (my first one after heavy-heartedly switching from the beloved Amiga to the despised PC) when Doom was released, and all my friends would come over to play because it could run it full screen (older 386 and weaker 486 CPUs were not fast enough, so you had to reduce the size of the game screen and play with an ugly static border around it). Then just a few years later I installed the Quake demo and all I got to see was an error message. The PC had a pretty exotic IBM "Blue Lightning" CPU which was a "486SX3", i.e. it ran at 75 MHz internally, 25 MHz externally, and didn't have a built-in FPU - which was a requirement for Quake. So I realized it was time to upgrade to a Pentium CPU...

You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique.

And in some cases games have gone backwards, this video comparing Arkham Knight to Gotham Knights being a prime example:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2L3hVUPSDGc

For comparison, a little over a month from now will be GTA 5's 10 year anniversary, and GTA 6 is still nonexistent. Who thinks the technology leap between 5 and 6 will be anything remotely like the difference between Wolf3D and Quake 3?

But also, only a few years after Wolf3D we got Toy Story in 1995, the first major CGI full feature film. Six years later in 2001 we got The Spirits Within, the first attempted full-feature photorealistic film (it hasn't aged well and it bankrupted the company at a cost of $137 million at the time). And now we live in an age where realtime graphics look better than pre-rendered CGI films from 20 years ago... which also includes Lord of the Rings come to think of it.

Fun fact, Doom was actually developed on a NeXTStation, so with a Unix based OS (and predecessor to modern day macOS).

>> And somehow they managed this incredible pace of software development without modern tools like git, or probably any kind of revision control system even...

It's not that hard when one guy is writing the rendering code, another doing game logic, one doing artwork, one level design, and one doing sound. Nobody is really stepping on anyone's toes.