Well, after only getting three hours of sleep one day in early June, I found myself in a tired haze of nostalgia. Watching Youtube footage of the crunchy PS1 port of “Final Doom” (1996) which I never got to play, listening to a giant playlist of every Iron Maiden song in my MP3 collection and stuff like that.
Then, for some weird reason, I got nostalgic about the early first-person shooter game “Wolfenstein 3D” (1992). One where you play as an American soldier during WW2 who has been taken prisoner by the Germans, but breaks out of his cell in the feared Castle Wolfenstein and fights his way through the castle.
(Click for larger image) Yes, this game is thirty-three years old at the time of writing. And it wasn’t even the very first FPS game ever made either…
This game wasn’t my very first encounter with the FPS genre – that was probably walking into the house’s computer room aged about seven or eight and seeing my Dad playing “Duke Nukem 3D” (1996) and being absolutely amazed by it… but told that I couldn’t play it until I completed “Duke Nukem II” (1993).
Even so, the one-episode demo version of “Wolfenstein 3D” (1992) might possibly have been the very first FPS game that I actually directly played. And, yes, bizarrely, I have no memory of the very first time I ever played “Doom” (1993) – it was like it didn’t exist one day and then I’d known about it for years. Weird. *X-Files music plays*
Still, playing the demo of “Wolf 3D” is a core nostalgic memory from the 1990s. And, whilst I got a CD-ROM copy of the full game to work on the ancient Windows XP computers I still used until about October 2018, I noticed that the game was on special offer on GOG – literally just 89p – at the time of writing in early June. So, I bought it and decided to give it another go. Even if I probably won’t be writing a full review of this game.
And, yes, I’m old enough that I had to change the modern WSAD controls in the GOG version back to the arrow keys because it felt wrong to play this game with modern controls. Not only that, the movement speed in the GOG version seemed much faster than what I remembered. Where is the ‘turbo’ button on modern PCs? And why is the GOG installer almost 20mb in size? I remember the demo version of the original being able to fit easily onto a 1.4mb floppy disk…. Yes, I’m probably officially “old” now.
Whilst “Wolf 3D” wasn’t the very first FPS game game ever made, it is a key game in the genre’s history – even if the same team who made it overshadowed their own game a year later with the one and only “Doom” (1993), the game which popularised the first-person shooter genre and is the reason why it’s still a popular genre today. Still, “Wolf 3D” is a historically-significant game, even if it really doesn’t hold up well these days.
Yes, when you get used to it, the game can be fun and thrilling. It’s an acquired taste. One interesting thing is how the game handles combat – even on the lower difficulty settings, you constantly have to be on high alert and shoot the bad guys before they shoot at you… since even just one shot from the weakest enemy can sometimes wipe out as much as 50% of your health if they are standing close enough to you (but they do less damage if they’re far away). This adds a surprisingly suspenseful feeling to the game.
But, although I bought the game out of childhood nostalgia, I only ended up playing two levels before briefly giving up in frustration for an hour or two. The level design is atrocious! Each level is an obtuse, complex maze – without even a map to help you navigate – and this is made worse by the very limited number of wall textures – it’s from 1992 – resulting in one of the most confusing games you’ll ever play.
Often, you just have to wander around aimlessly until you eventually stumble across a room with some enemies you haven’t fought yet. If you’re wondering why the level design in “Doom” (1993) was so good… it’s because THIS game was the team’s awkward practice project!
If you didn’t play it back in the day, “Wolf 3D” will confuse and annoy you in other ways as well. If you don’t know how to find the hidden sub-machinegun in the first level of episode one (Leave the starting room, turn left and go through the door. In the corridor, there will be an alcove to your left. Walk into it and press “action” when you are touching the wall at the end…), then you’ll be stuck with an annoying slow-firing pistol for ages.
And the game also never directly explains that the doors with the metal “X” on them (except for the one behind you at the start of every level) require you to find a small, well-hidden gold key to open them. Stuff like that. There’s also a vestigial “lives” counter, which doesn’t matter because you can save anywhere as often as you like. If you don’t remember it from your childhood, this game will confuse and annoy you.
As hinted earlier, being a game from 1992, space was at a premium too. I’ve already mentioned the monotonous wall textures, but there’s also very little in the way of enemy variety too. Yes, each enemy has distinctive dialogue lines (“Mein leben!” being the most famous) but the fact that you also sometimes have to fight their adorable-looking guard dogs might also put some players off.
Still, this was a game made during a time when computers had tiny amounts of RAM, hard drives were measured in megabytes etc… so, there isn’t really the variety you’d expect from even a slightly more modern game. But this game still has its own unique personality though. Seriously, for 1992, the “Yeah!” animation at the end of the first episode is STILL impressive.
However, because of the primitive graphics, the developers had to go overboard to get the WW2 setting across – resulting in lots of pixel art paintings of the “moustache man” and WW2-era fascist symbols decorating many walls of the castle. These days, this will seem like an “edge-lord” type of thing … Oh God, I’ve just remembered that it’s 2025! This accursed year! This horrible, goose-stepping year! This…. Ugh!
Not to mention that, when you play this game as an adult who understands the history, it seems a lot darker than it did when you were a kid. Case in point, my younger 1990s self used to like the catchy music that plays on the title screen… until I learnt, much later on, that it was a historically-accurate WW2-era fascist marching song. Chilling!
But this is thankfully NOT a fascist game 🙂 You literally spend the entire game fighting against 1930s-40s fascists. In fact, this is probably how and why the game got around the silly “ViOleNt ViDeOgAmEs!!!!” moral panic which seemingly began when “Doom” and “Mortal Kombat” were released a year later in 1993.
After all, the 1990s was a more civilised age when even the most miserable of conservatives agreed that fascism is bad. Some of the older conservatives in both Britain and the US back then probably also served in WW2 as well. In the 1990s, WW2 was still in living memory – even if, like me, you were a child back then, then you had grandparents who remembered “the war”. When I was a teenager during the 2000s, WW2 history was taught in schools…. In the 1990s and 2000s, everyone agreed that fascism is bad. Because it is. It is very bad. It was bad in the 1930s-40s and it is bad today.
Still, although the actual gameplay of this game is more likely to frustrate modern players than thrill them, you should still play this classic game. Not only is it ridiculously impressive for something made in 1992 but, once you get used to the flaws, you will sometimes find yourself having genuine fun with this game. It’s still a first-person shooter, but one from more than thirty years ago. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the early history of the genre, when everyone was still working out the “rules” of it – and where, as mentioned earlier, things like 2D platform game-style “lives” counters and “high scores” still sometimes appeared in the genre.
Yes, “Wolfenstein 3D” hasn’t aged that well. Yes, you should still at least try to play it once. It’s an awkward, early game in the FPS genre but it can be fun sometimes and it has a lot of personality.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂 Get psyched!
