Tech Olive

This month’s retro review for me was hardly a choice. I grew up with this game, playing it quite a bit. Granted, this is surely not the first game I played, but this is the game that would make the biggest impact on my gaming future. Before I laid eyes upon Wolf3D, I had only really played basic platformers and random console games. Wolf3D is really the game that gave me the push and showed me not only that PCs where awesome gaming machines, but also that this “first-person shooter” game and genre was unlike anything I had ever played before.

As anyone that has played the game can tell you, Wolf3D does not take itself seriously. Granted, this is nothing new to gamers nowadays. There are plenty of games that have a humor undertone, but Wolf3D was a very early example of this, making fun of almost everything German and even playing on the typical American hero. Which brings us to the main protagonist, William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, an Allied spy that was captured while trying to find the plans for Operation Eisenfaust. Now imprisoned inside Castle Wolfenstein, he must fight his way out by any means necessary.

Although simple, the level design can get very confusing due to so many identical hallways and corridors. The only sign that indicates you are going in the right direction is if you run into more Nazis to kill. As you fight through the levels, you must find keys to unlock doors that will eventually lead you to the elevator, thus taking you to the next level. Of course, the Nazis are nice enough to scatter the keys to these doors throughout the levels for you to find laying on the floor.

If you have never played Wolf3D and you are a fan of the FPS series, I strongly suggest you give it a try. If not to play it seriously, than just for nostalgia’s sake, to see the game that essentially started the genre. Who knows, maybe you will end up liking it and it will stay with you for some time. To finish this month’s retro review, here are some fun facts about the game.

• The protagonist of the game is Commander Keen‘s grandfather.
• Released on May 5th, 1992 for DOS, it had system requirements of an Intel 286 class CPU (25MHz), 640 KB of RAM and came in a package of four 3½” floppy disks.
• One set of survey results showed that more copies of Wolfenstein 3D were installed onto computers than MS-DOS itself (there were several different types of DOS at the time of the survey).
• In episodes 3 & 6, there is Morse code hidden within the level’s background music. It reads as follows:
  TO: BIG BAD WOLF
  DE: (“de” is  telegraphic short-hand for “from”) LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
  ELIMINATE HITLER
  IMPERATIVE: COMPLETE MISSION WITHIN 24 HOURS
  OUT