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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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)

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.

Duke Nukem 2D sidescrollers with the Keen sound fx.

The original Duke 3D and some expansions were alright but they got progressively worse with larger budgets and longer development cycles.

Agreed. Duke3D was junk, but a big part of that was the stiff 3D FPS competition from id.

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.

Duke Nukem 3-D was a great game if you were the type of kid that liked to modify your games rather than just consume them.

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.

What I'm hearing is that you loved the Build engine and tooling surrounding it.

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.

The thing that made Duke Nukem 3D great was its irreverence, compared to the seriousness of its contemporaries. It wasn't meant to be "great." It was fun.

Irreverence, and richness of the environments. Mirrors! Decorations that could be destroyed! Jetpacks! It felt so much freer than prior popular FPS games. A bunch of that stuff become standard fare in FPS games soon after, but Wolf3D, if not being the first to do those things (Rise of the Triad had some of that stuff, and came out first, but was nowhere near as popular as Duke3D) definitely popularized them and was a lot of players' first exposure to some of those features.

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.

Qbert on the arcade machine in the strip club.

Shake it baby. Do you wanna dance?

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.

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.

> Pro tip: don't sell your IP, license it.

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.

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...

> 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!

>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>

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.

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

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

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