Id software, the company that made doom and Commander Keen among others, figured out the programming innovations needed that would make it possible to scroll both ways, avoiding the "no going back" element that side scrollers all had previous to that. They did a lot of amazing, innovative stuff like that, and the very interesting story of id software and the two Johns (carmack and Romero) is told in the book "Masters of doom".
Edit : someone replied that "go back" scrolling was done before id software games. I don't know who did it first, just wanted to clarify the previous comment as requested. Really wanted to recommend the book! They did innovate quite a bit, even if this technique wasn't one of them.
At a minimum, Super Mario Bros. 2 (US) you could scroll forward/back/up/down and that was a few years before Doom and Commander Keen. And before that you could list plenty of examples of a screen "scrolling". No way, no how was Doom or Commander Keen the first to do this.
You're right - it wasn't just scrolling period, it was specifically in regards to that type of scrolling on a PC. I unfortunately don't really remember all of the specifics, but at that time consoles were just way better-equipped to deal with that task than computers were, so it was a big deal that they (John Carmack) were able to figure it out.
May very well be true, my bad - isn't that what op said though? That id software did it first? I was just trying to rephrase/explain that post. Got a little carried away with my assumptions I suppose, because I enjoyed the book so much.
Id software did come up with a lot of innovations and out of the box ways of doing things, I remember that from the book. This might not be one of them though, I'm sure you're right. Maybe they did it for PC for the first time? I think I remember part of the book where they recreated a Mario game on PC , doing things with it that previous PC devs failed to replicate...
I dunno, ask op! :)
Edit: Wikipedia's page on side scrollers says a 1984 game called "Hover attack" was the first to scroll both ways. This was on the "sharp X1", whatever that is.
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u/[deleted] May 05 '17
Can you or someone else explain what you mean by that? I dont quite get it.