Wolfenstein 3D: id In The Nazi Killing Business

What’s there left to say about the grandfather of shooters that started it all back in May 1992? It’s technically not the first of its kind but it’s more than certain the most popular one and generally accepted as the forefather of what some would call the boomer shooter genre. Which brings me to my reason for revisiting the game after finishing Heretic: to take a step back from the DOOM engine and see how the iconic Wolf3D lives up to its name in 2024, together with the DOS Game Club Podcast episode.

I admit: what a mistake to a-make to reverse the play-order: everything that makes DOOM clones thrilling in contemporary times was yet to be invented in Wolfenstein 3D. It’s strange to see how the genre evolved: Wolf3D and DOOM seem to have little in common besides the perspective and the use of guns and key(cards) to make your way to the exit. Wolf3D feels much more like a Rainbow Six stealth shooter where one misplaced shot will cost you dearly, independent of the chosen difficulty.

A single cheap shot by well-placed enemies tucked away in crevices by evil level designers can eat away more than half of your life bar. I didn’t expect B.J. Blazkowicz to be that feeble. Luckily, the same applies to your adversaries: two bullets with a rifle usually kills your generic Nazi patrol, but the farther away the enemy, the more difficulties the auto-aim seems be having actually hitting anything.

Firing a gun in Wolf3D feels unlike every post-DOOM shooter and it’s crazy to see these enormous leaps in technology and game design id Software managed to roll almost out every ear: Catacomb 3-D (1991), Wolf3D (1992), DOOM (1993), the double barrel shotgun & Ultimate DOOM (1994-5), Quake (1996). It’s even crazier that almost all of these games are still great fun to play today. Well, almost, and Wolf3D is a bit of an exception here, however technically amazing its pseudo-3D engine was back in the day.

I didn’t finish the shareware episode back in the day—not because I ran out of ammo or got my ass handed to me time and time again, but because I simply gave up after getting lost in Nazi dungeon mazes alike. Unlike any common early nineties platformer, Wolf3D has no verticality, meaning the designers had to get creative when it comes to placing wall, door, and untraversable pillar tiles. The retail version of Wolf3D I comes with 6 episodes times 9 levels each, and after the first few episodes you’re quickly over it.

It’s easy to bring up old war stories of the technical achievements, especially with Fabian Sanglard’s excellent Wolfenstein 3D Game Engine Black Book, but for me, the question is: how does it play? Am I having fun? What’s the gameplay and design like? And although it is very difficult to independently judge the game after the release of hundreds of its successors, these questions implicitly were the same we asked when it was originally released.

Some of the later maze-like levels, such as the beginning of episode 4, feel like awkward dungeon crawling experiences instead of how we have come to known the shooter genre. But part of the problem is: there was no shooter genre in 1992—or 1993, for that matter. id Software sold Wolf3D as a unique “virtual reality experience”: there was nothing like it, and at the time, I’m sure it felt hyper-realistic. But without the automap of ECWolf—the modern source port I played most levels in that backported some of the ZDoom engine features—levels are stupidly hard to navigate. I suppose that was part of the charm, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The lack of variety only makes things worse. The first episode only has two kinds of enemies apart from the boss: the gun-wielding soldier and the rifle-wielding SS officer. If you manage to find it, the chaingun is there to devastate these enemies—and your ammo supply, so apply those shots in short bursts only. If you ever have to use the knife Blazkowicz carries with him, your chances of survival will have greatly diminished.

The three guns all use the same ammo, and yes, there’s only three. Again, this sounds like a big let-down, but in 1992, there were three, not one, wow! That pretty much sums it up: it is hard to go back to the source of the huge and sprawling FPS genre. In a way, my feelings about Wolf3D are the same as the first Super Mario Land on the Game Boy: it was amazing to have Mario on the go, but it felt like nothing more than a short tech demo. Its successors more than made up for it, just like DOOM did and still does.

Does this mean you shouldn’t care about Wolfenstein 3D? That depends on how much joy you manage to get out of historically important games. The music is still good, arranged by Bobby Prince, a well-known name in the Apogee shareware scene of the early nineties. It’s not as present as in their later games and—just like the level structures—tends to repeat itself, but it’s there. In 1992, al I heard were PC Speaker effects as Sound Blaster and Adlib cards were still very expensive. It’s weird to actually hear the soundtrack play now, while in my memories, Wolf3D didn’t have any music.

It’s still a hoot to find hidden rooms after you manage to push back a secret wall piece that goes click. Most of these room floors are littered with treasure that increase your score. Did you notice that score number on the HUD next to the floor level and total amount of lives? All that will be gone forever once DOOM adds an armour percentage and more numbers for different ammunition types. Contemporary Wolf3D clones (is that a thing?) like Project Warlock and perhaps also Nightmare Reaper happily mimic these features, and while I enjoy picking up treasure and hearing its associated crunchy speaker effects, I never really cared about that score number anyway.

If you want to play a time period correct Wolf3D alternative, you should check out the hidden gem Blake Stone instead, which as always can be found on Good Old Games.