Wolfenstein 3D's winding journey from pitch to release | Hacker News Reader

Wolfenstein 3D's winding journey from pitch to release

gamedeveloper.com

I played Wolfenstein by Muse Software, on which Wolf3D is based, in an Apple ][ and there is longer story on both of these games: https://www.apple2history.org/spotlight/the-long-strange-sag...

John Romero's recollections are fascinating:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788475

Wolfenstein 3D was my first video game. My brother and I had the Shareware version on our [unknown type] family computer running Windows 3.1. No soundblaster for us so we were treated to the generic alternative sounds from our built-in PC speakers (maybe somebody can add some illumination to this?). I still remember the cheat code (M+L+I) 25 years later and probably still know most of the secret passages. Lots of good memories from inside the castle.

Recordings do exist of PC speaker sound effects: https://youtu.be/5v36e4_jars

I used to play Wolfenstein 3D co-op with friends - one of us would 'steer' and the other would do the doors and gun. Bizarre now to think about it.

Not that bizarre actually. I played tens of hours of Serious Sam "local coop". Basically one player plays with arrow keys and mouse, the other player plays with WSAD and lookup/lookdown button. The general strategy is for the WSAD player to clear everything on the ground level, while the mouse player is killing stuff on higher ground and doing other precision shots.

No I mean two people playing one playable character. One running the legs and the other running the arms.

speaking of wolfenstein 3D, anyone remember Ken's Labyrinth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken%27s_Labyrinth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JH2kezTnRg

Yes, and Ken Silverman got contracted to develop the engine behind Duke Nukem 3D and the other 3D Realms shooters.

Yup, I definitely remember the first episode being on every shareware CD I had.

I went back to play the other episodes a few years back and it's interesting how far he was able to push a Wolf3d-style engine. There's lot of interesting little details and extra gameplay tweaks like the vending and slot machines. But it's a rough game to play in its entirety due to repetition.

There's a typo "Since it wasn't like a fixed palette--EGA was like only 16 colors--each of VGA's 256 pallet slots could be set to basically one of 16 million columns."

columns = colors

Only 6 out of 8 bits per channel were used, so there were only 262144 colors in total to choose from, not millions.

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