I think that both us and id knew that Wolfenstein was going to be big, but I guarantee you that no one at either company knew it was going to be anywhere close to being as big as it became. “It was entirely unexpected to that degree. “It was like hanging on to the outside of a rocket ship,” said Miller of Wolfenstein’s success in the 2009 interview. Wolfenstein also garnered critical attention-and ample praise-from mainstream publications such as Computer Gaming World and PC Games Magazine, which was unusual for a shareware game at the time. With the numerous ports to other platforms (including consoles like the Super NES and Xbox 360) it received over the decades, the game likely sold far more than that. During a 2009 interview conducted by the author, Apogee head Scott Miller estimated that Wolfenstein 3D sold around 200,000 copies, making it “by far our best seller” in that era, over previous best-sellers that sold 50 to 60,000 copies. Soon it was bringing in $200,000 a month in sales through shareware channels. Wolfenstein 3D proved an astounding success almost immediately. In retrospect, we can trace Wolfenstein 3D’s roots back to a handful of games, including previous first-person games that members of the id Software team had created for Softdisk in 1991: The aforementioned Hovertank One and Catacomb-3D.Īfter finishing up Commander Keen 4, 5, and 6, the id Software sought a new type of challenge, and they found it when John Romero looked back to two of his favorite classic games: Silas Warner’s Castle Wolfenstein, a 1981 top-down Nazi prison escape game for the Apple II, and its sequel, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984). Robert “Bobby” Prince provided haunting digitized sound effects and a thrilling MIDI soundtrack that in some cases mixed in elements of historic music from both Nazi and American culture into a blend that served the game very well. The entire id Software team brought Wolfenstein 3D to life, including programming from Carmack and John Romero (with sound driver programming by Jason Blochowiak), masterful graphics by Adrian Carmack, creative design and story direction by Tom Hall, manual design by Kevin Cloud, and key logistical support from Jay Wilbur. “Those were definitely glitchier, and I was trying to make something rock-solid.”Ĭarmack didn’t work alone, of course. “It was completely different from the Catacomb-3D and Hovertank One world rendering,” says Carmack, referring to two of his previous first-person games. It used a new raycasting technique developed by Carmack to pull off the magic. Just as Commander Keen had shown that an average PC could perform console-like scrolling, Wolfenstein 3D proved that a consumer PC could render a high-frame-rate, texture-mapped, first-person 3D environment in VGA. Like other id Software games from the early 1990s, Wolfenstein 3D pushed the limits of what people thought was possible graphically with a PC at the time, in no small part due to the programming wizardry of John Carmack. The world had never seen anything like it. And you killed not just one person, but dozens in quick succession. The game placed you directly in the action, with shouting guards hunting you down, and enemies that audibly screamed and collapsed in a pool of blood when you killed them. Its violence injected a dose of culture shock largely due to its immersive first-person experience, which was novel and somewhat terrifying in 1992. While it may look cartoonish today, reviewers considered Wolfenstein 3D especially graphically violent (id Software even voluntarily-but-jokingly rated it “PC-13” for “Profound Carnage” as a warning that displays when you first run the game).
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