![]() The lack of any sort of in-game map meant that you didn’t even know where you were most of the time you just kept moving around shooting Nazis until you stumbled upon the elevator to the next level. You glided through its corridors as if you were on a branching tram line running past a series of fairground shooting galleries, trying to shoot the Nazis who popped up before they could shoot you. Its engine was just too basic to allow for compelling level design. ![]() The dirty little secret that was occluded by Wolfenstein 3D‘s immense success was that it wasn’t all that great a game once it was stripped of its novelty value. For everyone at id, and most especially John Carmack, was beginning to look upon Wolfenstein 3D with a decidedly jaundiced eye. Who needed them? The world was id’s oyster.īy now, 1992 was drawing to a close, and they all felt it was high time that they moved on to the next new thing. And indeed, when they were finished they took a mutual vow never to work with Nintendo again. Before they were through, Nintendo demanded that they replace blood with sweat, guard dogs with mutant rats, and Adolf Hitler, the game’s inevitable final boss, with a generic villain named the “Staatmeister.” They hated this bowdlerization with a passion, but, having agreed to do the port, they duly saw it through, muttering “Never again!” to themselves all the while. ![]() They had no idea what they had signed up for. The id boys now heeded Nintendo’s plea to port Wolfenstein 3D to the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System, whilst also grudgingly agreeing to abide by the dictates of Nintendo’s infamously strict censors. Spear of Destiny sold at least 100,000 copies at retail, both to hardcore Wolfenstein 3D addicts who couldn’t get enough and to many others, isolated from the typical means of shareware distribution, who came upon the game for the first time in this form.Įven Nintendo came calling with hat in hand, just a couple of years after summarily rejecting id’s offer to make a version of Super Mario Bros. Thus readers of magazines like Computer Gaming World could scratch their heads over two separate luridly violent full-page advertisements for Wolfenstein 3D games, each with a different publisher’s name at the bottom. ![]() They struck a deal with a company called FormGen to release a seventh, lengthier installment of the game exclusively as a boxed retail product it appeared under the name of Spear of Destiny in September of 1992. With Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity soaring, the id boys started eyeing the territory of the boxed publishers greedily. And when Carmack put his foot down, he always got his way at the end of the day, he was the one irreplaceable member of the id collective, and every one of the others knew it. (The most popular of them all filled the corridors of the Nazi headquarters with facsimiles of the sickly sweet, thuddingly unclever, unbelievably grating children’s-television character Barney the Dinosaur and let you take out your frustrations with an automatic weapon.) The id boys debated fiercely among themselves whether they should crack down on the modders, but John Carmack, who had read Steven Levy’s landmark book Hackers at an impressionable age and thoroughly absorbed its heroes’ ethos of openness and transparency, insisted that people be allowed to do whatever they wished with his creation. The game’s levels were stored in a rather easily decipherable format: the “WAD” file, standing for “Where’s All the Data?” Enterprising hackers were soon writing and distributing their own level editors, along with custom levels. One telling sign of its influence - and of the way that it was just a fundamentally different type of game than The 7th Guest, that stately multimedia showpiece - is the modding scene that sprang up around it. And yet Wolfenstein 3D‘s impact would prove even more earthshaking than that of The 7th Guest in the long run. It thus seems reasonable to assume that the total number of Wolfenstein 3D players reached well into seven digits, putting the game’s exposure on a par with The 7th Guest, the boxed industry’s biggest hit of 1993, the game generally agreed to have put CD-ROM on the map. Most people who acquired the free episode were content with it alone, or couldn’t afford to buy the other installments, or had friends who had bought them already and were happy to share. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid episodes, yet that number hardly begins to express the game’s real reach. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity during 19 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model.
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