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As mentioned previously in another clumsily-written article, 3D games were mostly limited to novelty and suffered the crippling lack of computing horsepower. Still, they were uncommon enough to pique the interest of nerds such as young budding designers John Carmack, Tom Hall and John Romero. These three are pretty much triple-handedly responsible for your Mountain Dew-fueled Halo and Call of Duty marathon sessions, but I'm getting ahead of myself.



Before id Software was formed, the trio worked for a little software publishing company called Softdisk, who released a handful of titles before being relegated to complete obscurity. During these days, 2D platformers were pretty hot shit because of the success of Super Mario Bros. so the dudes at Softdisk, thanks to Carmack, made a breakthrough in figuring out how to bring Mario to EGA displays once thought incapable of smooth scrolling graphics. Here's a really fantastic article on the birth of Commander Keen and the early days of id. When Nintendo denied permission to port Super Mario 3 to the PC platform, they used what they learned to make a number of platformers, chief among them Commander Keen (this technology also led to Duke Nukum).

With help from Apogee, id released Wolfenstein 3D on May 5, 1992 using the tricks learned from Hovertank 3D and the Catacomb titles. Almost immediately orders began pouring in and the money would allow id Software to eventually self-publish their own games. The game was so successful that a number of other development teams contracted the engine for use in games such as Corridor 7, Blake Stone, and Rise of the Triad.



The gameplay of Wolfenstein 3D isn't really that far removed from MazeWar, with the player in charge of running through simple mazes of uniform height and 90 degree corners and sometimes shooting a dude. The level design is very simplistic even compared to Ultima Underworld, a title released a few months earlier, but the simplicity allowed the game to run on a larger variety of computers. The sequel Spear of Destiny would be released a little bit later, but by the time I had the chance to buy it Doom was available, so I tend to think of it as the lame lost brother.



Today, Wolfenstein's legacy has been lessened somewhat by the monumental success of Doom and Doom II, but it's impossible to deny the game its value as an important and influential piece of gaming history. And to think, the franchise started as a two-dimensional espionage game.

Those of you old enough to remember or too young to have played it new can pick up copies of the game very cheaply (also freely if you just want a taste), and it has no problem running in DOSBox if you're like me and love command line. A short Google search brought me this source port if you find the idea of messing with DOSBox a little daunting. I haven't actually messed with that port so if it takes a big poo poo all over your computer then I'd say that's what you get for being a sacrilegious weenie.



Also try these great flavors of Wolfenstein Engine!
Blake Stone
Corridor 7
Operation Body Count
Rise of the Triad