Retro spotlight: Wolfenstein 3D

A vital and important classic that was almost immediately overshadowed by id's genre follow-up, DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D is still a great time over three decades later.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Wolfenstein 3D isn’t the first first-person shooter to be made. The genre existed well before the spring of 1992, and even id, the developers of the game, had made other first-person shooters prior to this one. Wolfenstein 3D, though, is very much like the Super Mario Bros. or Xevious of its respective genre: while it wasn’t the first, just like Super Mario Bros. wasn’t the first platformer and Xevious wasn’t the first shoot ‘em up, Wolfenstein 3D helped to both popularize and crystallize just what the genre was going to be from that point forward.

While there is no DOOM without Wolfenstein 3D, there also is no Wolfenstein 3D without id’s earlier efforts in the genre that weren’t nearly as popular. Wolfenstein 3D, and the first-person shooter as we came to know it, didn’t just appear out of nowhere. John Carmack didn’t just whip up the engine overnight (though, this is Carmack we’re talking about, so you can’t exactly discount that possibility, either). What came to be known as the Wolfenstein 3D engine was in use in two prior games, released in April and November of 1991.

The first of these was Hovertank 3D, which was released on DOS and has the kind of look you’d expect from an early 3D action game. First-person viewpoints weren’t new, especially not in PC games, but, according to David Kushner’s Masters of Doom, Carmack found these titles often unappealing: he was an action game guy who enjoyed the fast pace of a shoot ‘em up or arcade title, and something like a flight simulator wasn’t appealing to him either in its gameplay or its pacing. Defender, F-Zero, those were more his metaphorical and actual speed. The PC of the day, though, wasn’t powerful enough to run something with the speed of the kind of games Carmack did enjoy, not from a first-person perspective, at least, which led to Carmack attempting to build an engine that would work around this problem.

Said problem, in more detail, is that PCs couldn’t display the on-screen graphics fast enough for the kind of movement speed Carmack wanted, because they couldn’t draw them fast enough, either. The solution was to create an engine that would focus on displaying (and drawing) only what the player was about to see, using a technique known as raycasting. Instead of drawing up huge chunks of a level at once, this would draw what was in the player’s point of view. This freed up power for speed, as did the decision to eschew polygons for “sideways trapezoids,” which would comprise walls, but no ceilings and no floors. If you’ve ever wondered why light fixtures just hang from a blank nothing in Wolfenstein 3D, it’s so that you could run through a hallway guns blazing at top speed. Those ceilings, and the floors you run on, are single-color slabs for that reason.

The proto-Wolfenstein 3D engine would see improvements for Catacomb 3D, a first-person take on an existing top-down 2D series. Carmack took what he had figured out (in six weeks’ time — 1991 was very different for game development than what we know today) for Hovertank and added texture mapping on top of it. Whereas everything in Hovertank was flat, crude, the walls in Catacomb 3D, while similarly crude by the standards of today, had, well, texture to them. Grey bricks slathered in green slime were a significant step up from single-colored wall-shaped objects, as was incorporating an on-screen hand to shoot fireballs from rather than just a reticule. The first-person perspective and the feelings of immersion it would create was coming along, and fast.

Image credit: Giant Bomb

There was still plenty to work out: there was an odd wall-warping effect in Catacomb 3D, thanks to Carmack’s engine only drawing what was directly in the player’s viewpoint, and the kind of speed that was envisioned by Carmack as being possible wasn’t there yet. Hovertank and Catacomb were both significantly faster than the kind of games they were trying to improve upon, technologically speaking, but they’re referred to as using a prototype Wolfenstein 3D engine for a reason.

Much is made of the leap from Wolfenstein 3D in May of 1992 to DOOM in December of 1993, but we probably don’t make enough of that first vital jump from Catacomb to Wolfenstein. Catacomb is more than just a bridge to better things, but so, too, was Wolfenstein. And the difference between the two games, released just six months apart by the same company with the same (base) engine, is astounding:

Those bricks — both the white ones and the slime-covered grey ones in the background — were steps up in the tech from 1991’s Hovertank, and having enemies react to a fireball coming out of what was a massive hand on-screen was no small thing, either. The game still moves a little slowly, though, and getting stuck on corners is a common occurrence, since the corners don’t actually exist in-game in the way they do in your mind once they’re not in view any longer. Compare that to Wolfenstein 3D, which, again, was just six months later:

Six months before, a hand to show where the shots were coming from had just been introduced. Walls were just given textures, and movement speed was increasing, but if it was quick it was only relative to what else existed on the market: the speed of Catacomb was certainly nothing in comparison to that of 2D action games or shooters of the time. Wolfenstein, though, let you sprint down a hallway, rapidly change directions, open up multiple doors in a row without the entire game collapsing on itself, open a secret door that completely changed the structure and look of the level, and all while a horde of Nazis were on-screen, moving and speaking and firing at you, too.

And all of this occurred while the overall graphics and animation improved, sound was both more expansive and more impressive, the headshot of the character was far more expressive and changed more often… Wolfenstein 3D only seems like less of a monumental achievement than it was when it’s put up against what came directly after, but even that was because of it. It’s not Wolfenstein’s fault that Carmack moved on from the very rigid grid-like structure of this engine, perfect for creating first-person mazes, to DOOM’s more expansive, more open one that allowed for walls and ceilings of different heights, actual curved walls instead of the blocks rearranged to give the appearance of a curve like Wolfenstein 3D did in its three prequel episodes, stairs, more enemy types, and more and more varied weapons. Just like it’s also not Wolfenstein 3D’s fault that, eventually, the series would come to match the speed and intensity of the one that supplanted it at id as the most important thing they could make more of, making the original seem a little more quaint in comparison.

That relative quaintness is still a blast to play, even if its roots in the early days of first-person shooters are still so obvious to behold (for instance, while you would get caught on corners in Catacomb 3D, in Wolfenstein 3D, sometimes the game doesn’t recognize when you back over an item, since you aren’t looking at it — it might not “exist” just like those corners didn’t). Just like Super Mario Bros. and Xevious, you don’t look at Wolfenstein 3D and think just about how much better things would get for the genre they would become the face of. You also think about just how good those genres already were, thanks to those games existing at all.

The difficulty of Wolfenstein 3D escalates as you go: the first two episodes don’t even have this fast-moving enemy type in them, but eventually, you’ll find entire rooms full of them swarming you.

There is no up and down in Wolfenstein, just what’s in front of you. There’s a lot of leeway for your shots being accurate — you can shoot a little to the side of a target and still hit them enough to kill them without too much wasted ammo — but this leeway also exists for your foes. Just like how you can shoot through what seems like a solid pillar to get at what’s behind it, so can your foes, and the same goes for a door that’s in the process of closing: if it isn’t already closed, it might as well be wide open. The whole game is made out of 90 degree angles even if a level designer tried the best they could with the technology to make things feel otherwise in various moments, and it helps to think of it all as not necessarily being actual 3D, but instead a 2D game played from a first-person perspective. The entire design of everything is still as if you are playing topdown: it was a neat trick to flip the point of view and give the illusion of actual 3D, though, especially since it helped bridge toward the true advent of that kind of design philosophy.

What matters the most is that Wolfenstein achieved the goal Carmack (and then designer and programmer John Romero, who, as Master of Doom documented, immediately saw the potential for Carmack’s revamped engine) set out for, which was to develop a fast-paced action game using this first-person engine that managed to match the speed of the kinds of high-speed 2D games they already loved, that already existed. Hovertank and Catacomb were steps toward this; Wolfenstein was the achieving of it. DOOM would take things a step or six forward by the end of the next year, but there is no then without Wolfenstein’s now first.

What’s wild is that all of this technological success on the engine side of things wasn’t all Wolfenstein achieved, either. It became a massive hit through shareware, which wasn’t a new idea for game distribution, but was still untested on this kind of scale. Wolfenstein 3D’s first episode was uploaded with the intention of being distributed for free, with the rest available for purchase later: at first there were three announced episodes, but when publisher Apogee realized, per Kushner, that it would take around two weeks for the team to develop another episode, they ordered three more to be attached as prequels. Buying more meant a greater discount, so as you can imagine, people hooked on this innovative, wildly violent, addictive game in a genre they were unfamiliar with or had just seen a major leap from, handed over the cash for the rest of the bundle. Wolfenstein 3D reportedly cost id $25,000 to make: the first check they received from Apogee for the first month of sales, after the publisher’s split of the profits, was for $100,000. Apogee could give them 45 percent of the profits because shareware allowed them to cut out some middle-man distribution payments, and both companies thrived because of the arrangement, while the road was also being paved for DOOM to make Wolfenstein’s shareware numbers look like nothing of import.

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Wolfenstein’s violence is apparent: bloody corpses remain on the ground, which didn’t draw as much attention in Catacomb 3D when the corpses were little goblin folks, but here, they were people. Well, Nazis, so really just more little goblin folks, but critics of the day worried about the acceptance of violence in society weren’t going to make that kind of differentiation easy. It’s also got plenty of gross outs, like if you’re below a certain threshold of health, protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz will slurp up a puddle of blood and guts for a little boost, or eat bowls of dog food, and also, you will kill a bunch of dogs. So many dogs. Here’s the thing, though: killing a dog just because it’s wild or whatever in a post-apocalyptic game can be uncomfortable and unwelcome. Killing a Nazi dog? Some of them walk on all fours, some of them two, but you take care of them the same way.

And sure, Wolfenstein 3D’s politics aren’t as obvious or vocal as those of its modern day incarnations developed by MachineGames, and whenever everyone remembers that Carmack is a libertarian you get a run of “isn’t this the guy who made Wolfenstein 3D?!” out there, but it does merit mention that, when given the chance to create a first-person shooter the studio felt would change everything for computer games, the thing they wanted to do more than anything else was blow Nazis away with high-powered weaponry that made you feel like nothing in the world felt better. Whenever you complete an episode, you get a couple of screens of text explaining that you just killed one of humanity’s greatest monsters and made the world a better place in the process, and now it was time to hunt the next villain down. id might not have released any videos talking about the various ways you could kill Nazis with a hatchet as a way to promote their game, no, but there was still a clear glee about the targets here, and one that would carry through other parts of the industry for some time, too: plenty of first-person shooters featuring aliens or monsters would come in Wolfenstein’s wake, but the military shooters that went for realism focused on World War II and playing as the Allied forces in their earliest days for a reason!

Wolfenstein actually isn’t an original id property, but a first-person re-imagining of a pair of games from over a decade prior. These were topdown maze games, where you snuck around killing Nazis and hiding their bodies afterward: Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein were something like a proto-Metal Gear, featuring Nazis, and the inspiration for Wolfenstein 3D. As the studio that published Silar Warner’s games had closed and the rights to the name “Wolfenstein” had been freed up in the process, id was able to not just be inspired by Wolfenstein with their design choices, but also to simply name it that as if it were a continuation of the series. (They would eventually receive Warner’s blessing for all of this, and the game itself, later on.)

Due to the ways Wolfenstein still stuck to realism — to a degree, anyway: the first sequel, Spear of Destiny, had you chasing down the spear that supposedly pierced Jesus Christ on the cross because the holder of it would become impervious to damage and oh boy Adolf Hitler had the thing in Nazi possession, also you eventually fight the Angel of Death in a hell dimension to prove you’re worthy of carrying it — your arsenal isn’t that inventive. You have a pistol that you have to fire by pressing a key/button each time, a small machine gun you can hold down fire for, and the chaingun. Oh, the chaingun. That thing rips through every enemy in a hurry, and is what you’ll want for taking down bosses, since they are the only enemy type whom you’ll find equipped with one in the first place. Boss enemies in the expansion/prequel “Nocturnal Missions” (yes, that is supposed to be a joke about what you think it is) come equipped with some extra goodies like a rocket launcher, but you wouldn’t get to play with such a thing in an id FPS until DOOM, and there’s nothing that feels as good as DOOM’s shotgun does, either. Though the chaingun, here, is much more satisfying than DOOM’s to use, likely because its effects are much greater and necessary here. And also the sound of it is killer.

Also, there are revivified Nazis with machine guns implanted in their chests, and you will need to kill these Frankenstein’s monsters a second time.

Realism also probably isn’t the right word for Wolfenstein’s whole deal, given it still feels very much like a video game of the day instead of fully like the leap forward into a new tomorrow that it was, only in a perspective the world wasn’t fully used to yet. Hitler is, at first, presented as a wizard throwing slow-moving fireballs at you, and then when you find the real thing, he’s riding a mech. You pick up whole-ass turkey dinners on the floor to recover health. There’s a point system for extra lives, and also extra life items, and extra lives just as a concept. Treasures are secrets to be found that can also provide extra lives with enough points scored from them, and an emphasis on secrets to be uncovered reigns. Enemies have hammy lines when defeated, like the very literal translation of “Mein leben!” just meaning “My life!,” exclaimed by fallen guards toting machine guns. DOOM had its post-level count of kill, secrets, and item percentages, sure, but in the middle of a level itself, all you had was the speed, the violence, the need to survive. It’s a completely different vibe, and not just because one veered more toward horror with even more violence.

None of this is meant to diminish Wolfenstein 3D, either: it’s just pointing out where the series and genre had room to grow if it was going to be its own thing. Wolfenstein 3D is over three decades old now, and while it’s not as mindblowing or as obvious of a technological achievement as it was back in 1992, it’s still a ton of fun to play. The prequel episodes weren’t just a good idea for making extra money on the game through shareware bundles, but were also a chance for id’s level designers to try to one-up themselves and create even more challenging mazes to labyrinths to escape, more elaborate and Nazi-filled rooms you had to shoot and run and dodge and shoot some more to escape alive. Wolfenstein 3D has been improved upon in the intervening decades, but it’s still a joy to play, and you still can, too, since, like with whatever of their offerings they have the rights to, id has ensured that it remains on modern platforms. While you can’t get Spear of Destiny anymore since the agreement that had it included as part of Wolfenstein 3D has lapsed, the original three episodes and the three prequel trilogies remain available on Steam and all three current major home consoles. If you haven’t been back to Castle Wolfenstein in some time, do yourself a favor: id knew what they were doing when they decided filling hallways full of Nazis with bullets was going to be a crowdpleaser.

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