Hovertank 3D

The player drives a hovertank through the levels to locate the civilians that need to be rescued. There are enemies in the levels, including mutants and flying saucers equipped with tentacles. There is a timer that counts how long until the nuke is dropped. Once all civilians are collected, a portal appears somewhere in the level.

The player must find the portal to win. When victorious, the player receives their fee based on the number of people safely rescued.

Hovertank One is set during a nuclear war. In Hovertank One, the player controls Brick Sledge, a soldier of fortune hired by an organisation to rescue civilians from cities under the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The video game company id Software was founded on February 1st, 1991 by John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall. The four founders had an agreement with their former employer, software company Softdisk, to develop one game every two months for the Gamer's Edge PC game subscription service. In the first months of 1991 they developed the platform game Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, followed by the puzzle game Rescue Rover.

While the team was working on these games, programmer John Carmack was experimenting with 3D rendering. At that time 3D games already existed, with the space dogfight game Wing Commander being one of the favorites among the id Software crew. However, existing 3D games were noticeably slow and John Carmack preferred fast action games like Gauntlet. Therefore, Carmack's goal was to develop a game engine for a fast 3D action game.

The biography Masters of Doom claims that id Software "had invented a genre" when they released Hovertank One as the first fast-paced first-person shooter for the PC. However, it also acknowledges that the "big solid-colored walls" make the game visually less attractive when compared to Commander Keen. Website IGN describes Hovertank One as a game with a "unique, addictive design that still holds up today as an old school masterpiece".

The book DOOM Scarydarkfast criticizes the lack of wall textures and it considers the progression through the game as "much more sluggish" compared to later games from id Software. The book Shareware Heroes praises the speed of the 3D graphics, but also notes that the simplistic walls give the game a primitive look and feel. In his autobiography, game designer John Romero retrospectively considers Hovertank One an innovating game that "just didn't feel great". He feels that the tank gun lacks the responsiveness and realism of weapons from later id Software games.

Hovertank One marked the start of a new direction for id Software. Their shift towards 3D games with a first-person perspective would pave the way for their future success. In November 1991 they improved their 3D game engine with texture mapping for the first-person shooter Catacomb 3D. Further improvements to the game engine led in 1992 to the release of the critically and commercially successful first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D.

In retrospect, both Hovertank One and Catacomb 3D essentially served as experiments or prototypes for the game engine that was used in Wolfenstein 3D. For this reason, video game magazine PC Gamer highlighted Hovertank One in their historical overview of the first-person shooter genre.