Hagionaut

Before there was Quake (and its true 3D environment) there was Doom. But before there was Doom, there was Wolfenstein 3D. This was the true progenitor of every first-person game we now take for granted. Thanks, Robot Hitler!

Today, Wolfenstein 3D is museum piece, a curiosity. Its blurry sprite-based SS drones and vaguely-Nazi-shaped officers barely raise an eyebrow. And the giant swastikas on the walls are understood by all to be mere set-dressing, just like the golden eagles and occasional baffling chandelier.

But back in 1992, Wolfenstein 3D blew everyone’s mind... and some people’s lunch. Single-plane fakey-3D engines had been toyed with by various developers, but it took the programming genius of John Carmack and the undeniable gameplay instincts of John Romero and Tom Hall, to understand that an engine alone would not be enough.

Wolfenstein 3D’s real gift to gaming history is its speed. Other toody-threedy games were slow, even turn-based. The AD&D branded Eye of the Beholder is an RPG classic. As for Ultima Underworld (still praised to this day, and a future Hagionaut trip), it actually came out two months before Wolf 3D.

Yet these games, for all their strengths, kept the sedate pace of the traditional RPG. Sword-and-sorcery games are all about picking your way through the catacombs, only occasionally screaming and lashing out with your sword or arcane fireball.

Wolfenstein 3D, on the other hand, was full-throttle, sprinting, screaming, bullet-spraying spraying mayhem. The boys at id Software set the player’s run speed to something insane, and a skilled player could literally run rings around those dastardly Nazis.

Weapons were all about firepower. More bullets, more blood, more “mein Leben”. Levels were maze-like, packed with secret rooms and bonus pickups. It was all rather good fun.

Carmack, of course, was disappointed with how the game ran. Even as id Software grew too big for the boots its distributor Apogee gave it, Carmack was feverishly at work on another game you may have heard of: Doom. This, of course, would do everything Carmack hadn’t had time (or the available CPU cache memory) to make Wolfenstein 3D do. The rest, as they say, is history.

The story of Wolf 3D is the story of id, the wholly positive early days of the company, where a bunch of nerds under the thumb of Softdisk were written secret fan mail by thethe the boss of Apogee, in an attempt to poach them without letting Softdisk’s nosy, mail-mail-mail- mail-

opening receptionists know. Seriously - Apogee’s president Scott Miller wrote John Romero multiple fan letters under multiple assumed names. It took Romero noticing a familiar address in a shareware game magazine to put two-and-two together.

First, id built Commander Keen. The little boy in the gridiron helmet was familyfriendly, sure, but he demonstrated that the id team could build and deliver a game. It also showed their commitment to the shareware model. This was back in the day when the first few hours of a game were provided for free, and distribution to your mates was encouraged.

Because of shareware, Wolfenstein 3D ended up selling 100,000 units or more, in an age where cracking 10,000 was a good result. The game was immune from being pushed off store shelves for new inventory - something that is of course totally alien to us now (replaced with the phenomenon of being “lost in the fog” on Steam).

Most of the mythology of id centres around John Carmack’s ahead-of-the-curve programming, but Romero and Hall’s design deserves equal focus. Yes, Carmack’s combination of assembly language and C (instead of running everything in a higher-level language) meant the game could run extraordinarily fast on even the 286s of the day.

But the decision to make Wolfenstein 3D a fast game shouldn’t be understated. What could have been just a novelty Nazi-shooter, with herky-jerky movement and no real connection between the player and the gun, instead ran so slickly and had such a strong sense of kinetics, that Wolf 3D stayed relevant throughout the Age of Doom. There were gamers who continued to prefer it, especially its various sequels and addons such as Spear of Destiny, which gave us our first ever taste of Hitler in a power-suit.

The Wolfenstein 3D engine was also licensed out to other games. Sci-fi shooter Corridor 7 came out after Doom and flopped, despite its numerous upgrades over Wolf 3D. ShadowCaster showed that RPGs could be fast-paced, and probably set the groundwork for Doom- and Quake-based Heretic, Hexen and Hexen 2.

But it was Blake Stone that probably suffered most from id’s release of Doom. It came out just a week before Carmack’s 2.5D magnum opus, and its numerous enhancements - including better weapon effects, floor and ceiling textures, and secret levels - weren’t enough. It had a few days in the sun... then disappeared as Doom dominated.

Probably the greatest Wolf 3D engine game was Rise of the Triad. Its concept was simple: what if you thought Wolfenstein 3D wasn’t violent enough? The extreme speed and violence of ROTT kept it a relevant alternative to Doom, and it pioneered such modern mundanities as panoramic skies, fog, bullet holes, breakable glass and faked-up stairs.

Wolfenstein 3D had a huge and lasting effect on PC games. Before Wolf, games that took full advantage of PC’s exponentially-growing power were disproportionately intellectual, complex, and difficult.

Wolfenstein 3D was good dumb fun. Have we looked back since? Absolutely. And to the sides, and up and down. All thanks to id, and the 1990’s total lack of respect for the sacrifices of World War II.