How Wolfenstein 3D shocked the world, 30 years later
howtogeek.com
howtogeek.com
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)
The original Duke 3D and some expansions were alright but they got progressively worse with larger budgets and longer development cycles.
I think people stopped caring about the Duke series enough to remember/play the 2D scrollers not so much because Duke3D overshadowed them, but more that there were far better games to play than any of them.
DOOM and Quake practically owned PC gaming in my sphere for quite some time. Even Descent didn't do too well despite the 6DoF tech being impressive at the time.
For a lot of us in grade school, it was our first introduction to games that actively encouraged you to mod them, it came with a level editor for the Build engine, and you could open up the CON files to physically alter the actual scripts and behavior of items and entities.
And when compared to id software's games (particularly the brown horribly muted color palette of quake), Duke Nukem 3d absolutely shone with personality and interactivity. There's a reason that it consistently scored in the 90s in old school PC gamer magazines.
That's somewhat orthogonal to Duke3D the game played-as-shipped...
I did software-rendered graphics programming back in the VGA days and a lot of your muted color palette complaint stems from a necessary compromise to support dynamic lighting in 256-colors. A huge part of what made DOOM so amazing was the dark environment and atmospheric, dynamic lighting. That they managed this in 256-colors was unbelievable a the time. Quake supported a software rendering mode on VGA as well, IIRC, also with dynamic lighting.
I tried playing with dynamic lighting w/texture mapping hacks in 256-colors after playing DOOM showed it was possible, and it only really worked well with dark/goth-y muted textures because you have very little dynamic range. Try fitting an RGB color cube in 8 bits...
Unless my memory is flawed, Duke3D didn't even attempt any dynamic lighting in the 8bpp VGA modes of the era. It was bright and colorful, but so were Wolf3D and Commander Keen.
It wasn't just goofier than the FPS games people were used to at the time—it felt like a leap forward in realism and capabilities.
And there was this one time I bought a Penthouse (I was 12) because I wanted the Duke Nukem Penthouse level which came with it.
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.
It was a different time. And maybe the original two games would be even more obscure without 3D. I'd also say iD tech for a while was the driving thing, not the franchise branding, as seen with Quake and its sequel. So always a negotiation.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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).
There’s also no aiming up or down; but it feels so natural with the level design that you don’t notice.
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.
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.
Doom did all of that much better. But that just confirmed my belief that Carmack was a freaking wizard who could do anything.
People keep calling Wolf3D a maze game but the level design worked well.
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.
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.
But... one day i learn that you can make "swap file" on DOS4GW just like on Windows. And i make it! Opening game, menu and first level screen took ~30 mins.
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.
And yeah I suppose gaming on Linux will always be the test of time however you look at it.
[cpu]
core=auto
cputype=auto
cycles=10000
cycleup=10
cycledown=20
[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
dosbox -conf ~/.dosbox/wolf3d.conf"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.
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
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...
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.
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.
I don't feel much worse at games, just new games.
You need to grind gear nowadays to have a chance. It is not like CoD 2 anymore.
(and what sounds like "dustoff" but no one can quite tell.)
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.
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.
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".
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.
Speaking of which, I wonder can I still salvage that setup. It’s at my parents house in a closet….
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
You gotta give it to Microsoft too also, software from 20-30 years ago still work on the latest versions of Windows.
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.
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.
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...