How Wolfenstein 3D shocked the world, 30 years later

https://www.howtogeek.com/802248/how-wolfenstein-3d-shocked-the-world-30-years-later/

by mariuz • 3 years ago

100 81 3 years ago

nailer• 3 years ago

I'd seen various Apogee games like Catacombs and Ken's Labyrinth and Ultima Underworld (some might have been released after Wolf3D). Wolf3Dwas MUCH faster, and had AMAZING sound design if you had a sound card, but what shocked me was DOOM.

I was thinking recently about where exactly I was - in both physical space and in Doom 2.5 space - when Doom shocked me. And it's to do with the very beginning of E1M1.

Player start in Doom's E1M1 makes it look like Wolf 3D for just a moment. All the walls you can see are are right angles, there's not much verticality: https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.78eb767e50af435112fea3ffb5ac8aee

And then you turn left GO UP SOME STAIRS AND THERE'S A WINDOW.

Or right and there's ANOTHER MASSIVE WINDOW AND IT LOOKS LIKE YOU CAN GO OUTSIDE. Then there's computers and glowing nuclear waste.

Wold3D was a great Nazi-themed maze game, but it was Doom where you felt like you were in a place.

I hope Carmack sees this (and Romero too but I don't think he's on HN).

notahacker• 3 years ago

Yeah. Wolfenstein 3D was very playable, but the levels were essentially a 2D maze. Doom actually felt like a 3D world

mysterydip• 3 years ago

Interestingly, doom is also 2D, in the sense that there are no level-over-level portions. The map design was pretty clever to hide this in some areas.

cwillu• 3 years ago

The link after “there's not much verticality” appears to be broken

thanatos519• 3 years ago

I also remember exactly where I was, playing a leaked version with no sound. Even without sound it was amazing.

Once it was released, we played it in the dorm via IPX-over-parallel cable going between rooms via the windows.

What I most vividly remember is the first time I saw an elevator come down with a figure I had never seen before ... the space marine, the guy in the other room! Then I got a rocket in the face.

giobox2• 3 years ago

playing a leaked version with no sound

Doom was shareware - it almost goes without saying we all played a copied version. Thinking on it, I don't know anyone who actually paid to get the full game, I miss the floppy cloning days.

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

I'd guess that the reason you think this way is because you're younger than I am. I wrote my first game in 1987 and so thought I had a basic understanding of how games were made and designed. Until Wolf3D came out. It blew me away on 2 different levels -- from a technical perspective and design wise on how they created immersion at a level never seen before. Wolf3D was the first game for me where jump scares were a big part of the game.

Doom did all of that much better. But that just confirmed my belief that Carmack was a freaking wizard who could do anything.

hnlmorg• 3 years ago

I know what you mean about jump scares in Wolf3D. That first boss with the chain guns, I nearly shit myself when he first appeared.

People keep calling Wolf3D a maze game but the level design worked well.

AndrewStephens• 3 years ago

It is impossible to overstate just how astounding Doom was when it was released. I had heard people talking about Doom for a few weeks but didn't know anyone with a fast enough PC to actually run it. Then I found that a friend of a friend with a 486DX had gotten a copy from somewhere so we all went around to see it.

Your description is exactly correct. I still remember the amazement when we realized that you could go up the stairs. Managing to find the secret doors and actually go outside elicited gasps.

I am not sure that Dooms level design has ever been beaten in terms of how elements are introduced to the player.

bombcar2• 3 years ago

Doom was amazing with the level design - it wasn’t until almost a year later when I started playing with the editors that I realized there was a limitation-you couldn’t ever be on a second floor above another place you could be.

microtonal• 3 years ago

It is impossible to overstate just how astounding Doom was when it was released.

100%. We had a 386SX-25 with 2MB RAM and there were two things that were just out that I couldn't run: Slackware Linux and DOOM. I took DOOM to my uncle at a birthday, since I knew he had a more powerful machine. I started up DOOM and I was shocked, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was just so otherworldly. I never had the same feeling with earlier and later advances (though Quake was really nice).

I was 11 or 12 and immediately after that I started lobbying my parents to get 2MB extra memory. Lots of fun DOOM (and Linux) hours followed.

scarface743• 3 years ago

Scott Miller didn’t hold a grudge: “It was entirely understandable and expected because, at that point, they had learned all they needed to learn from us as far as how to market these things.”

Why can’t people have this same attitude today?

On another note: I bought a 486 66DX/2 “DOS Compatibility Card” that had a dedicated 32 MB of RAM and a Soundblaster card for my PowerMac 6100/66 just to play Wolfenstein, Doom and the other games of that era.

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

Houdini II or the Apple one?

scarface743• 3 years ago

The Apple one. I thought the codename for the one for the 6100/60 was Houdini II and the one that ran on 68K Macs was the original Houdini?

Speaking of which, I wonder can I still salvage that setup. It’s at my parents house in a closet….

whoopdedo2• 3 years ago

Did you ever see Interplay's port to Macintosh? It has 128 pixel textures instead of 64 and a new soundtrack.

scarface743• 3 years ago

Yes, I bought that one when it came out. It was much better than the x86 version - especially with SpeedDoubler (a better 68K emulator).

_trampeltier• 3 years ago

Those old games are so cool and simple. You just can play this games without to spend 100 hours to learn the game first.

dzonga• 3 years ago

for casual gamers - a lot of games are offputting since you have to spend a lot of time trying to learn the mechanics / lore.

that's why the fps genre like call of duty reign.

simple point and shoot. and the more you do it the better you become.

btw : Wolfenstein 2 - New Colossus is probably one of the most fun game I ever played.

Insanity• 3 years ago

100% agreed. I enjoy games which are "easy to learn, hard to master". I think Counter-Strike, Left4Dead and TF2 are great examples of that. COD to an extend, but they added a lot of other overhead which I don't like. (Weapon customization, and general microtransactions)

yamtaddle3• 3 years ago

for casual gamers - a lot of games are offputting since you have to spend a lot of time trying to learn the mechanics / lore.

Now that I have kids, I have real trouble playing anything that requires you to actually build skill at the specific mechanics/controls of that particular game.

What happens is I get a ways in, have to put it down for a week or two, come back, am at a part of the game that's quite a bit more difficult than the beginning and requires you to know how to play moderately well, but don't even remember the controls, so I'm just fucked and can't make much headway without a ton of frustration and effort.

Same happens for narratives in games. I really appreciate the modern trend of reminding you WTF was going on when you load a game.

rightbyte2• 3 years ago

that's why the fps genre like call of duty reign. simple point and shoot. and the more you do it the better you become.

You need to grind gear nowadays to have a chance. It is not like CoD 2 anymore.

seattle_spring• 3 years ago

I'd love to play newer Wolfenstein games. However, I picked one up a few years ago and the very first thing you had to do was kill your pet dog as a crying and terrified child in a flashback while your abusive father yelled at you. I put the game down and haven't wanted to touch the series since. Notable because almost nothing in games gets to me like that did.

johnwalkr• 3 years ago

The latest Wolfenstein games are great. If you like old school fps, the remasters of quake and quake 2 are excellent. And in the last few years there have been great modern games that either recreate the speed of quake with modern graphics (like "Hellbound") or recreate the creepy, lo-fi atmosphere (like "Dusk").

jimt1234• 3 years ago

Wolfenstein was cool, but these 3 words sum up my experience: "...overshadowed by Doom..."

jhbadger• 3 years ago

One downside of the popularity of Wolfenstein 3D is that its success has almost completely erased the original 1980s Castle Wolfenstein (and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein) from popular culture. These earlier games (for 8-bit computers like the Apple ][ and Commodore 64) were in a way more sophisticated (despite their simple graphics) because they were stealth games -- in the original you were terribly outmatched and couldn't just run around shooting Germans but had to sneak around, kill one by stealth to get a uniform, and so on.

yamtaddle3• 3 years ago

One downside of the popularity of Wolfenstein 3D is that its success has almost completely erased the original 1980s Castle Wolfenstein (and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein) from popular culture.

Similar thing happened with Duke Nukem 3D. There were two pretty-fun platformer shooters before that, but together I'd say they have like 1% the cultural visibility/awareness as 3D does.

[EDIT] Oh, the Metal Gear series is another example, at least in the West (IDK how the series is perceived in e.g. Japan). The break-through entry was (checks notes) the fourth game, with two of the earlier ones having had US releases years before that one.

(there's also the phenomenon of starting in the arcade but getting huge with a console sequel, like Mario Bros, but I think that's a bit different, or cases of series that have several Japanese releases before finally having an English translation of some later title that gets big in the US, but, again, not quite the same thing)

kirbysnacks• 3 years ago

I loved the original Duke Nukem, and other side scrollers from that era such as Commander Keen. Duke Nukem 3D wasn't all that great if I remember.

whoopdedo2• 3 years ago

The follow-ups to Metal Gear and Duke Nukem at least were made by the same people as the originals. Hideo Kojima and Todd Replogle/Allen Blum III respectively. Some copies of Metal Gear Solid even included the original game.

Wolfenstein 3D only used the name for publicity. And for cheap too. Pro tip: don't sell your IP, license it. Especially if someone comes knocking on your door. If someone else wants something you have that means there's more value in it than you can see.

jnsie• 3 years ago

they were stealth games -- in the original you were terribly outmatched and couldn't just run around shooting Germans but had to sneak around, kill one by stealth to get a uniform, and so on.

Taking this off topic a bit but your description made me nostalgic for the video game Commandos Behind Enemy Lines. There's a lot to be said for stealth in video games!

EvanAnderson• 3 years ago

It's worth search-engining the author of "Castle Wolfenstein" and "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein", Silas Warner (of MUSE Software).

Coverage from The Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/silas-warner-and-muse-softwar...

Interview with Silas Warner from Kansas Fest 1992: https://www.kansasfest.org/wp-content/uploads/Silas-Warner.h...

TMWNN• 3 years ago

One downside of the popularity of Wolfenstein 3D is that its success has almost completely erased the original 1980s Castle Wolfenstein (and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein) from popular culture.

If 5% of Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 players know of the first game in the series, Red Dead Revolver,[1] I'd be amazed.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Revolver>

shermozle• 3 years ago

The amazing thing about the OG Wolfenstein games was the audio. There was actual speech coming through the tinny Apple II speaker. Amazing.

CaesarA• 3 years ago

I agree, the original Castle Wolfenstein was a fantastic game and was a lot more closer to something like Metal Gear Solid than Wolf3D in terms of gameplay. I still boot up DOS BOX and play it every so often.

pbj19682• 3 years ago

This is a terrible take. Games everyone has forgotten were brought back to popular attention. This happens countless times in popular culture.

tpmx• 3 years ago

Since September 2022 the current owners of the game IPR are finally allowed to sell it in Germany:

https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/wolfenstein-3d-available-...

... interestingly, its legal text has also been changed on Steam. Per the Wolfenstein 3D SteamDB page, we can see that lines suggesting the game's story "should not be construed" as glorifying the Nazi regime's beliefs or actions have been added. It's difficult to see how a game that's all about shooting Nazis in the face and then killing Hitler could be seen as glorifying Nazism, but hey.

msla• 3 years ago

It's difficult to see how a game that's all about shooting Nazis in the face and then killing Hitler could be seen as glorifying Nazism, but hey.

Because censors only want control, and if they can get that by doing something utterly absurd, they can rub your face in how much control they have. Laughing at them only goes so far: If they do something apparently idiotic, they're still the ones capable of enforcing an idiotic law, and punishing you for not going along with the idiocy.

arp242• 3 years ago

The full text is "The story and contents of this game are not intended to and should not be construed in any way to condone, glorify or endorse the beliefs, ideologies, events, actions, persons or behavior of the Nazi regime or to trivialize its war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity."

That last part applies a bit more.

Does it really need "Wolfenstein 3D® and Wolfenstein®: Spear of Destiny™ is a fictional story set in an alternate universe in the 1960’s. Names, characters, organizations, locations and events are either imaginary or depicted in a fictionalized manner"? Probably not. But the law can work in mysterious ways and was probably written by the Vorlons to mess with us all, so it doesn't hurt to add stuff like that.

But it's just a standard thing they add on, like "this movie is fictional and any similarities are coincidence".

jdorfman2• 3 years ago

“Mein Leben” if anyone has played Wolf 3D, you know what it is.

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

"Schutzstaffel!"

(and what sounds like "dustoff" but no one can quite tell.)

yaky• 3 years ago

Before I knew any German (or much about WWII), I always thought they yelled “Gestapo!”, introducing themselves

cf100clunk2• 3 years ago

To my ears, the brownshirted grunts seemed to shout ''Hark, Guard!'', although it might have been ''Halt, Guard!''

jdorfman2• 3 years ago

I always heard it "Stah Mon!"

dbavaria• 3 years ago

Play Wolfenstein 3D on Archive.org (DOSBox emulator runs in the browser): https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wolfenstein_3D_1992

justaj2• 3 years ago

When I switch to a different workspace and come back again, the screen is turned black with no other means of getting it back. I guess no one tested it on Chromiun that runs on Ubuntu 22.03 with i3wm.

Fnoord3• 3 years ago

I guess no one tested it on Chromiun that runs on Ubuntu 22.03 with i3wm.

Correct as there's no such thing as Ubuntu 22.03.

When I gamed on Linux a lot (ironically, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory) I used to run a second Xserver.

cf100clunk2• 3 years ago

If playing it locally in DOSBox on Linux here are some settings to try out in your ~/.dosbox/wolf3d.conf copy of ~/.dosbox/dosbox-x.xx-x.conf

  [cpu]
  
  core=auto
  cputype=auto
  cycles=10000
  cycleup=10
  cycledown=20

And at the bottom of the file add your own mount like this:

  [autoexec]
  # Lines in this section will be run at startup.
  # You can put your MOUNT lines here.
  
  @ECHO OFF
  MOUNT C /games
  C:
  CD WOLF3D
  WOLF3D
  EXIT

Then start the game with:

  dosbox -conf ~/.dosbox/wolf3d.conf

NeuroCoder• 3 years ago

I still remember sitting on my father's lap as a small child while he played Wolfenstein on the computer. Then my mom got mad at him for letting me watch him play.

themodelplumber• 3 years ago

Funny. It's awkward sometimes as a parent to weigh the excitement of "how cool is this" with the possibility of your kid being exposed to that kind of excitement before it's really appropriate. Particularly if your own childhood worked out more or less fine that way...

You got me thinking though...I first saw Wolf3D in high school drafting class. Mostly 386/40s but some 486/33 systems too. My mouse sat on top of a big digitizer tablet next to the computer.

The teacher was cool with us playing games and things at lunch. Sometimes people would pop in to ask about drafting and CAD while we were playing on Wolfenstein or...what was the artillery one? Scorched Earth I think. Death's Heads going off while brushing doritos crumbs off the shirt and saying "hi there, welcome...so these are all CAD systems running AutoCAD, and uh..."

To counterbalance this, another student was usually rendering things in POVRay and I think at one point I brought in VistaPro to show people.

It's funny to think about the scariness factor. Wolf3D and Doom were both pretty good for jump scares and relative tension. But the feeling of excitement was really well balanced in various ways. Finding weapons, using cheat codes, etc.

I still remember that I found Friday the 13th for the C64 _far_ more terrifying than even Doom on the PC. Similar with Force 7 and Aliens for the C64, in which the landing sequence made you think you were playing Master of Lamps and then boom, you were screwed.

Weirdly, I also remember Prince of Persia for DOS being kind of scary in an atmospheric way. It was one game that I'd usually quit after too long when playing it alone at home. Terminator Rampage was atmospherically intense and I couldn't play that one for long either.

Apogee and Microprose games in general were way easier on the atmospheric tension...some Blake Stone followed by Aces of the Pacific and then a bit of FastTracker II was so often my jam. Good memories...

bentcorner• 3 years ago

I remember playing this a bunch way back in the day. My dad overhead me playing, he recognized one of the levels played morse code in the background of the music and decoded the entire message.

https://eeggs.com/items/31712.html

drybjed• 3 years ago

Deep dive on the Wolfenstein 3D by Ahoy is worth watching, if you're interested in the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSb87DC-PtA

zantana• 3 years ago

Seeing Wolf3d running on PC screens in those computer shows at the Cow Palace was what finally convinced me to move from the Amiga to PC.

throw7• 3 years ago

I got nausea when playing wolfenstein. so yeah, I wasn't that interested until doom hit.

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

You probably suffered from the early version of the raycasting algorithm, which resulted in barrel/fisheye distortion because of the way raycasting algorithm calculates distances.

When the rays sent out from the player's position intersect with walls, the distance between the player and the wall is calculated. This distance is then used to determine the height of the wall slice being drawn on the screen. However, the distance calculation is based on the player's position, resulting in non-linear scaling of the wall heights, which leads to the curved appearance.

Some later ports of the game to other platforms employed a modified version of the raycasting algorithm, where the distance calculation is adjusted to account for the angle between the player's view direction and the ray being cast. By using the correct distance for each ray, the wall slices are drawn with more accurate heights, resulting in straighter walls and less distortion.

jakzurr• 3 years ago

Early 90's, 2-3 friends and I had all bought 486's. I got home and listened to answering machine, and the voice was practically gasping.

"You're not gonna believe this game.... You're just not gonna believe it! Uh-huh-huh, you're not gonna believe it!!"

I still wish I'd saved a recording of that.

ryanklee• 3 years ago

It's these kinds of unprimed expressions of authentic astonishment that can mark off the entrance to new cultural territory in tech. They don't always accompany quantum leaps, but whenever you do hear such noises, you can be sure something big has happened.

I heard such sounds only a few times in my life: - When the internet entered my brain, life, and social circles in the early mid 90s - When the iPhone landed - When ChatGPT tore a hole in the sky just a few months ago

benmccann• 3 years ago

Here's an amazing version that was recently written using Svelte, HTML, and CSS! https://wolfensvelte-3d.vercel.app/

wernsey• 3 years ago

If you're at all interested in the technical aspects or retro computing, I highly recommend Fabien Sanglard's Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/

The technical wizardry that went into making it fast went way beyond the raycasting graphics engine. There were all kinds of tricks used to speed up the engine:

One that comes to mind was compiled scalers - they basically JIT-compiled the code of an unrolled loop that drew each scaled vertical strip of a wall. That was why the game had to do some slow processing when you resized the view area.

Another one was that if two vertical strips were the same, they could be sent to the VGA card at the same time.

There were also a couple of tricks to speed up drawing sprites if they contained lots of transparent pixels.

I vaguely also recall seeing the "fizzlefade" effect discussed here a while back: When you die the screen is faded to red through a linear feedback shift register that touches each pixel on the screen once in a seemingly random way.

Kids today have it so easy with their Unitys and their Unreals... :P

The Black Book on Doom is also worth a read for comparison - it is quite remarkable how much the PC improved when 16-bit real mode was replaced by 32-bit protected mode and how different the design of Doom was from Wolf3D.

sourcecodeplz• 3 years ago

It was great, really immersive.

You gotta give it to Microsoft too also, software from 20-30 years ago still work on the latest versions of Windows.

Fnoord3• 3 years ago

One of the few games I was able to play in The Netherlands, while my cousin who lived in Germany wasn't allowed to. (He had everything.)

I liked it, played it on our 80286. Battle Isle 2 was also fun. Doom, Doom II I enjoyed back in the days, tho on the Pentium. But its games like Heretic, Hexen, Duke 3D, Dune 2, Command & Conquer, Warcraft II, and the Keen with the living vegetables which stood out to me. They were either unique, hilarious, exciting, or atmospheric.

I remember pirating C&C with a bunch of floppies. Played GDI, the good guys like the good kid I was. Till I got to Greece, that was brutal for me. So I tried Nod. Well, only one or two levels worked. It was incomplete! I didn't have the proper floppies.

But almost all above games I played single player. Doom was good fun with null modem cable. I guess the most multiplayer fun was things like Quake II with Lithium mod and something like Tetrinet.

To be fair, I'm not sure if its the enthusiasm I had back then (easily enthusiastic and impressed as kid) or if it was genuinely amazing games. Because nowadays, hardly anything impresses me, while I see my youngest playing the shit out of a bunch of toy cars we bought second hand (about 20 of them, together for one EUR). Best investment I made in toys, ever. Cause I bet I'd have loved some kind of Rollercoaster or Railroad Tycoon sim (I did play Simcity as well) or Leisure Suit Larry back in the days. My point being: stuff you missed wasn't necessarily bad. You'll never know how good it was. Cause you're a completely different iteration of yourself, with a lot more experience (different context). And so, I have this rule for myself: don't replay old games. Keep it nostalgic. Cause it won't be as fun as the lovely memory. I mean, I loved Speedball 2 and Mystic Quest on gameboy, not many people I knew did, and that's OK. But whenever I tried replaying them, it was a huge letdown. Likewise, I get annoyed to smithereens with old games. The keybinds, the graphics, glitches, etc etc. We're spoiled with today's supercomputers :)

Regarding the Wolfenstein franchise, I think the one game which did it for me was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Though I couldn't afford it back in the days, so I had to single player and pirate. Eventually Splash Damage's Enemy Territory got out. And that game I played an insane amount of time, as it was F2P without strings attached (as far as I can tell), and it worked native on Linux! Back then though, there were some weird people playing that game. With weird nicknames, for sure. I guess that aspect of gaming only got worse though...

pentagrama• 3 years ago

Gameplay https://youtu.be/561sPCk6ByE

luxuryballs• 3 years ago

Personally I think the newest Wolfenstein games reflect the original game much better than the new Dooms reflect the original Doom, though I’m confident no remakes will ever come close to the masterpieces that are the originals.

I still remember startle jumping every time at the sound of the doors closing behind me the first times playing Wolfenstein as a young kid, Doom 2 is still my all time favorite PC game.

ddingus2• 3 years ago

The first time I ran this game was on a 386/25 with 5Mb RAM.

Played for hours. And I had the PC speaker sounds too. As an Apple 2 owner and user, I have a love for those sounds, and for me they made WOLF3D more fun.

During that long session, I found myself at the end of a long, thin hallway with the knife and a couple health points. Was a dire, grim scenario.

Then I went for it! Rushed up the hallway to face three guards!

I did this round Robin knifing attack, stick one, then the middle, then the other, then the one, middle, other, repeat, until they were gone!

I stood there for a brief moment of disbelief, turned and ran to a nearby cache of supplies and was back in the game, able to finish the level!

And that experience has stayed with me. Simple, yet compelling and immersive gaming at a fine peak on hardware I did not expect to deliver.

Re: 5Mb RAM

One was on the main board, the other four on an expansion. Many programs that required 8Mb would run poorly on 5. I developed software on an XT class machine to pay for the 386 I had cobbled together from the cheapest parts I could find.

I was online with that machine running winsock and WFWG 3.11

pbj19682• 3 years ago

A 386 at 25MHz and 5MB of RAM would be like $5,000 today and was far above what most people owned in their homes when this game came out.

ddingus2• 3 years ago

Yup. The only reason I had that machine was the sale of some manufacturing related software I had written, and it probably was the worst 386/25 possible!

How Wolfenstein 3D shocked the world, 30 years later

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