classicgames.org - Wolfenstein 3D

This is the game that started the entire 1st-person-shooter genre. Doom, Quake, Unreal, and Ken's Labyrinth were all spawned by this momentous game. I remember Wolf3D dominating the front page of my old catalogs from The Software Labs that I would randomly get in the mail.

[Note to readers: the reviewer and classicgames know that this was not the first 1st-person shooter; we are merely acknowledging that it was the sole catalyst for the immense success of the genre. If you wish to point out our stupidity, you may feel free to do so, but you will be branded as an idiot forever.]

The story is that you're B. J. Blazkowicz, an American POW in Nazi Germany. Evidently, you've killed one of the guards in your cell. You take his pistol and your adventure begins.

I think this was such a pivotal moment in gaming history because it was probably the first highly-publicized game that involved killing realistic-looking (for the time) people with somewhat gratuitous blood. The game designers thought of the perfect excuse:

Plaintiff: This is a horribly violent game involving killing hundreds of people.

Id Software: Aw, c'mon, they're not people. They're Nazis! It's perfectly moral to kill scores of Nazis, because they invented evil!

I assume that a similar argument was used in Doom, where you kill crazy people and demons. In Rise of the Triad and Body Count, you kill terrorists. After those games, the foot was in the door and there was nothing anyone could do about violence in computer games.

I think that this is arguably the most influential shareware game ever created, so if you've never played this and you like Half-Life or any of those other newfangled games, you might as well download the granddaddy of them all. Plus, it's all worth hearing that huge German guy with the two gattling guns say "Gutentagen!"

Posted by Darius on 2000-06-14

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