Exactly! SGI machines were like the unobtainable holy grail for poor graphics programmers like me stuck on DOS PCs. It was “professional gear”, big league stuff … which is why I became obsessed about collecting them later in life :) And why it also seems almost absurd to use them as a game platform, I like the irony in that :)
And yes absolutely I was always getting disoriented and couldn’t play much of descent at the time, and I never liked fast action games very much anyway… but mechanically this freedom of movement makes it very interesting as a programming exercise :)
As for the level visuals, all the credit goes to dstar who made the awesome models and textures, and designed the level from scratch.