WW2 #37: Wolfenstein 3D
The grandaddy of the modern shooter
This review was originally posted to Twitter on March 14, 2020.
Initial release: May 5, 1992
Platform: DOS, many, many ports
Developer: id Software
The first person shooter has a long and storied history. It’s ironic now that the Call of Duty series, originally a World War II shooter, would be the big FPS title dominating culture for so many years, when the genre owes its very existence to another World War II shooter: Wolfenstein 3D.
In fairness, Wolfenstein 3D is not literally the origin of the first person shooter. It’s not even the first game in first person — depending on who you ask, it’s either Maze War or Spasim, both of which were produced in the early 1970s. Nor is it the first shooter from id Software: Catacomb 3D and Hovertank 3D preceded it! But what Wolfenstein 3D is, is a major sea change in how first person games played and what kind of games the perspective was used for. First person RPGs like Dungeon Master were no longer “cool.” After Wolfenstein 3D came out, what was cool was flying around a level at breakneck speed and violently ending Nazi scum.
There’s a lot of history behind this game. The story of id Software is perhaps left to David Kushner’s seminal history Masters of Doom or John Romero’s biography Doom Guy: Life in First Person, but suffice it to say, Wolf3D owes its existence to programming god John Carmack never being satisfied with a game engine. Hovertank 3D and its successor Catacomb 3D had been iterative steps on what would later become a fully VGA, high-speed action shooter, something that had never been accomplished before. Even in Catacomb 3D you moved slowly; Wolfenstein 3D played like an arcade game. Of course, given its roots, that’s no surprise. Carmack and Romero were big fans of Silas Warner’s 1981 classic Castle Wolfenstein, and early in Wolfenstein 3D’s development, the game was to have stealth elements, dragging bodies, the whole bit — literally a 3D Wolfenstein. But these elements were eventually scrapped in favor of what had been their goal all along: a fast-paced murderfest, hypnotic and violent, the kind of thing that exemplified id Software’s “bad boy” reputation, pushing the envelope in the burgeoning video game violence debate, soon to reach its peak with the 1994 Congressional hearings and the rise of Mortal Kombat and Doom. Formgen, a now long-defunct software distributor, had a publishing deal for Wolfenstein 3D, but upon seeing the game in action during development they were concerned about the level of violence. id Software responded by adding more violence, skeletons, blood pools, etc. — something that lead artist Adrian Carmack relished after the family-friendly Commander Keen. And it worked. With Silas Warner’s blessing on the name, id Software released Wolfenstein 3D in all its gory glory, and made id Software into superstars. The end result is that Wolfenstein 3D is considered the granddaddy of the modern FPS, and for good reason.
To think that it all started as a tribute to a venerable stealth classic. Even the basic plotline is the same: captured by the Nazis during the second world war, the hero (in this case he has a name: B.J. Blazkowicz) must shoot his way out of Castle Wolfenstein. The game opens with a dead guard in front of you, blood pooling onto the floor. You have 8 rounds in the pistol you got off his corpse. Between you and the exit are dozens of other Nazis, all of them just gagging for a bullet. Cue one of the most iconic fps franchises ever. Of course, it’s exceedingly simple by our standards. Everything is on one plane: there are no stairs, no cliffs. Floors and ceilings are a uniform color. Level design is made up of blocks; it takes on the characteristics of a tile-based game from the protagonist’s perspective. Enemy AI is very simple, they just home in on you and don’t really know how to go around walls to get to you. (Though, funnily enough, a little bit of the AI code has been in every id Software engine since — that’s right, there’s vestiges of it in Call of Duty!) There’s little to actually do in the game besides collect treasure for points, get bigger guns, get keys to unlock doors, and kill every last Nazi motherfucker in the place. But sometimes that’s all you really need, isn’t it? This is an FPS in its purest form. Even Doom was a major departure from Wolfenstein, technology-wise. Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t need to be anything else than 60 levels of Nazi murder, even if some of those levels kinda suck.
Does the game still hold up today? Of fucking course it does. I’m not so sure about some of these levels, especially in episodes 3, 4 and 6, but the basic conceit, as simple and primitive as it is, is pure catharsis. There’s a reason we’ve had so many throwback shooters lately. They’ll always be chasing that dragon, that undeniable satisfaction of slamming a couple shells into a shotgun and unloading it into some inhuman monster’s face, over and over. Even if that inhuman monster is a Nazi. Especially if it’s a Nazi.
Wolfenstein went through a weird period in the 2000s. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a post-Half-Life shooter that drew heavily from Goldeneye 64 and to a lesser extent Thief in structure; the 2009 Wolfenstein sequel was a stripped down, World War 2-themed Deus Ex clone. Then there was the Wolfenstein RPG, an oddity for mobile platforms with its own continuity and bits of strangeness. Wolfenstein: the New Order promised a return to basics; and yes, it’s still very much a modern FPS, but it revels in its history, revels in the sheer joy of Nazi murder. It puts on an oh-so-serious face that hides the cathartic carnage within. And we wouldn’t have that, we wouldn’t have Doom (1993 or 2016), we wouldn’t have Call of Duty or Half-Life or Halo or any of that without this silly little shareware title. Its purity is something to be admired.
Get psyched.
