It was 20 years ago today when id Software's Wolfenstein 3D hit the gaming scene - changing the face of video gaming forever. Boasting amazing, smooth running 3D graphics, and B.J. Blazkowicz running around mowing down hordes of Nazis, the shareware release of Wolf hit the scene on May 5, 1992 and was a instant hit.
It is utterly bizarre to me to think that it was 11 years ago when I wrote this brief tribute to Wolf on its mere ninth birthday, but I still remember the first time I played it and how completely blown away I was but not only what it offered at the time, but what it promised for the future of video games. Certainly it was a pivotal moment for me personally as it began my long trek down FPS lane which ultimately culminated in my involvement with QGL and AusGamers.
If you want to relive the old days and don't still have a copy of it lying around, it's available on Steam by itself for USD$4.99 or in the Wolf Pack (with Spear of Destiny and Return to Castle Wolfenstein) for USD$14.99 - and of course available in a huge variety of other formats and on other platforms.
It's the game that started it all really. I often wonder how games like, battlefield 3 and those other shitty fps the kiddies play, would have turned out if it wasn't for wolf 3d. Obviously someone else would have come up with the concept of first person shooters eventually however how long would have it taken? To start off with something so pivotal as killing mother fucken nazis with a chaingun.
Oh and who could forget lending your discs to your mates for them to try, 20 something floppies? Oh and the first time you bought an actual sound card and speakers after playing the game for all those months / years using the on-board speaker.... holy fuck. Only one of 2 times I've ever been blown away by games in my life, the sound effects in wolf 3d when upgrading to a soundcard/speakers and the graphics in quake when buying my first voodoo card and running GL quake with transparent water.
Shit you take for granted now with video games eh!
I've actually just been rereading Masters of Doom in the last week and it still blows me away. Everytime I read about the ID guys and how dedicated, excited and genuine they were about hacking and developing games I find it insanely inspirational.
I was never a massive Wolfenstein guy, was probably just too young at around 6 years old, but enjoyed it when I was older, Doom is what really got me hooked. For years and years I've been a massive fanboy of Doom and ID software (and still am).
I remember making custom levels and customs sprites for Doom and god damn was that fun. I remember making levels consistently and my very last Doom level would've been in year 12 just before Doom 3 was released. Even in 2004 I was still utterly obsessed with ID's classic games, they just seemed to hit home where no other game could.
If anyone hasn't checked it out I seriously recommend you have a read of Masters Of Doom.
Yeah I was 8 when Wolf3D came out and while it was pretty cool, it was Doom that really blew me away. Wolf3D is pretty much too dated to play these days but I can still run around in vanilla Doom and have a good time.
Well put Casa, Wolf3D and Rebel Assault where the games I had when we first bought a soundcard (the creative bundle with a soundcard AND CD-ROM drive!!)
I have a soft spot for the range of 'firsts' games I played as a kid, and I was just old enough to get right into these bad boys!
I don't seem to enjoy AAA titles as much anymore, instead I seem to get a much bigger kick from a 'new gaming experience' (in recent years stuff like Braid, Shadow of the Colossus or Portal).
I'm REALLY not fond of 'grinding' in games, and for the most it never really 'featured' in any of the old school games.
What surprised me is that Wolf 3D followed the earlier games "Castle Wolfenstein" and "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein" which I'd never heard of until recently.
I remember playing the shareware version when I was 7 or 8 years old. The attack dogs scared the shit out of me :(.
I didn't really understand what was going on in the game at that young age and it wasn't until I played escape from castle wolfenstein in 2003 that I realized it was all about nazi's lul.
Oh and the first time you bought an actual sound card and speakers after playing the game for all those months / years using the on-board speaker.... holy fuck.
LOL yep... I remember saving up $200 as a teenager and buyinig a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 (16 bit card!@#(#$(#$$) and it was ZOMG
No more PC speaker *pew pew pew* it was ACHTUNG!! KABLAMO!! MEIN LEIBEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wolf3D came as shareware on our 486DX-33 PC, I was about 13 since I am now 33 and its 20yo.
I used to know aalll the secrets in the first level. Now I can't remember at all, and would like to say "must have forgotten lol", but actually suspect that this means neural connections are gone which is terrifyingly permanent.
This is why we can't have 'remember old things' days.
Wolf3D was amazing I only had the demo, but easily one of the first games I enjoyed and finished as a kid, with the majority yes Doom was the game that got me hooked.
Yeah I remember playing Blake, does anyone remember Hexen or Rise of the Triad?
The first game on my Dad's 486 DX 33 with 4 megabytes of RAM was Wolfentein 3d. I have fond memories of playing this as a kid when I was about 10 years old. I remember using cheats to get the gattling gun and going around blazing with it. I miss the days of having to modify config.sys and autoexe.bat, editing the DMA and IRQ to get sound working.
haha ahh the memories, Black Stone was awesome loved that game, Hexan was awesome co-op on the N64 & ROTT loved shooting people with the rocket launcher and getting eye balls on my screen or running after enemies as a dog.
Hell yeah Ravnos. Duke Nukem stadium duels with my neighbour peer to peer giver/receiver dialup styles rawked. I progressed through the vid cards and remember getting ancy when games had 'supports accelerators' stickers, then eventually 'required', condemning the pixel software low fps rendering to a slow and painful death. I also remember having the first GeForce 256 at qgl due to my phat bills and Term was fapping over it for ages lol. Lobby spotted the extra 15 fps it gave him over his tnt2 and made me drive him to lay down 5ish large to nail one aha. Also, I never was much good at trawling. :( :)
I don't know anyone who actually bought wolf3d, i know my copy was given to me on 3.5" floppy drive.. later on i got a demo of blake stone on a demo disk with a magazine i bought for the demo disk.
I wouldn't have cared about videogames at all if i didn't wares so many of them as a <10yearold child. I remember taking photo copies of the grid's that you had to line up to get into games like Zool or captain comic or whatever. Thanks to so many awesome 'shareware' and wares games i grew up to buy hundreds (soon to be thousand+ i'm sure thanks to steam) of them in the future.
Probably my fondest game memory is Hexen. Back in highschool my mate and I would stay up all fucking night playing co-op Hexen over modem. We finally got to the final boss only to find out that when you die you can't get back in to the boss room because the door shuts behind you and won't reopen. We saved our game when we were both outside the door before realising this.
Was still fucking fun getting all the way there, though.
Anyone play F19 Stealth Fighter? The copy protection for that was you had to look at a picture of a plane and then pick what type it was out of the list. How stupid is it to have copy protection like that when a bunch of warplane enthusiasts are your target audience?
I used to play Heretic, it convinced me that computer games were never gonna get good, until CS came out and I was like "holy shit this is so realistic!"
Anyone play F19 Stealth Fighter? The copy protection for that was you had to look at a picture of a plane and then pick what type it was out of the list. How stupid is it to have copy protection like that when a bunch of warplane enthusiasts are your target audience?
Haha, the first person I knew who had a computer, I used to go to his house all the time to play Red Baron and Hero's Quest, and the copy protection for Red Baron involved looking up various riddles with answers in the manual - we only knew the answer to one of them, so had to keep re-launching it until the question came up.
Le Sigh, I always wanted to be a pilot because of that game, growing up was supposed to be so much more awesomer than it turns out. :P
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