On Games Gone By: Wolfenstein 3D (Apogee, DOS)

Sometimes you just want to punch a Nazi. But you don't want to get arrested for doing it for real, your computer's graphics card can't handle the new Wolfenstein games, and the old Call of Duty games doesn't make the combat personal enough. Have I got the game for you.

Wolfenstein 3D, developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in May 1992, three days after I was born, is the follow-up to a couple of 2D stealth games and one of the very first first-person shooters. You play as William "B.J." Blazkowicz, an American prisoner of war in the Nazi-held Castle Wolfenstein, fighting your way out of the castle's dungeons and collecting stolen gold along the way. I played the first few levels of the shareware version, which is available on My Abandonware, in DOSBox with keyboard controls.

The controls are tank-style: the up and down arrow keys move you forward and backward, the left and right arrows turn you left and right, and moving left and right without turning requires an extra key press. Adding in one button for shooting and another for opening doors, it can be a lot to keep track of if you're used to simpler control schemes, leading to slower progression through the levels. (Full disclosure: the only other first-person shooter I have experience with is the iOS port of Fortnite Battle Royale, which has remarkably comfortable touch controls.) But that slow movement has a silver lining: it gives new players opportunities to practice the spatial awareness that is necessary for success in faster-paced shooters, checking around every corner for enemies.

Wolf3D's UI and level design rely on the conventions of dungeon-crawling games like Dungeon Master in ways that don't feel entirely appropriate for later shooters. The player stats are collected at the bottom of the screen, instead of spread out around the edges as in newer games, and it can be hard to tell which numbers represent what aspect of your character's status at a glance. Level maps resemble the classical "maze of twisty passages, all alike," to the point where I often got lost playing unfamiliar levels and could only really tell I was making progress when someone was trying to shoot me. At times, I wanted to pause the game and map out the levels on graph paper, but I never actually did, because I felt like the game wanted me to keep moving, and to move faster, and like taking the time to make a map would make my performance worse somehow.

The end-of-level statistics support this feeling: in addition to the percentages of enemies killed, gold collected, and secret rooms found, there's a timer that tells you how long you spent in each level. The game rewards practice: if you take the time to play each level repeatedly and learn the layout, you'll get a shorter level time. And once you're good at it, the levels go pretty quickly. But spending lots of time stumbling around Castle Wolfenstein's dungeons when you don't know what you're doing is not particularly rewarding. Especially not when you have to kill adorable pixelated German shepherds. I feel sorry for those dogs. (Note: the Sega Genesis port, which I have not played, replaces the dogs with rats.)

Between feeling lost, feeling rushed, and being forced to shoot cute animals--not to mention a list of difficulty settings that mocks you for playing on lower difficulties--there's a lot about playing Wolfenstein 3D that just doesn't feel good. If you do decide to play, make sure you read the list of keymappings carefully, and don't let the game bully you into playing on a harder difficulty than you're ready for. And maybe pause every so often to draw a map.

Rating: It's a nice lesson in gaming history, and shooting Nazis is cathartic, but if I'm not looking for one of those two things, I would rather spend my time and energy doing something else.