Tag Archives: Retro

Computer Computer Games

This is hopefully the first of many articles in which I review hacking, programming, and other games that mostly involve in-game interaction with computers. There are a ton of these, from classics like Infocom’s Deadline and A Mind Forever Voyaging and Activision’s Hacker and Portal, all released in the early to mid 80s, SysOp and/or BBS hacking simulator door games I played on BBSes in the mid 90s, all the way to the crop of modern games meant to either leverage, or in many cases teach, coding and automation concepts in a “gamified” way. I hope to explore dozens of these games, but I’m starting off with a few that have been collecting dust in my backlog for ages.

Given my love for vintage computing, including the Commodore Amiga and the BBS scene, two topics both relevant to Digital: A Love Story, I’d been meaning to play this one since first hearing about it… which was like 15 years ago. 😒

So yeah, what I knew about DALS was that it was a narrative heavy game whose gameplay mostly involved calling various BBSes and reading and sending messages. What I didn’t know is that it is actually much more of a visual novel than any kind of simulation. In fact, it’s built on the well-known visual novel engine Ren’Py. Evidently a lot of cool trickery went into making this feel like more of an immersive, faux computing simulation though, as it’s reasonably effective at it. Of course, it’s far from perfect, but while a giant nerd like me could get all “ackchyually…” about dumb stuff like DTMF tone and modem handshake noise accuracy, there are bigger fish to fry.

“Reading a message on a board in DALS. Gotta find that warez!”

First, the entire BBS experience is extremely dumbed down. You dial a BBS and are treated to a welcome screen that looks more like a BBS advertisement (though this isn’t totally inaccurate – such welcome screens weren’t uncommon.) You then need to logon, which requires only a password and not actually a username, oddly. From there, all you can really do is read and reply to public messages and send private message the users on the BBS. The whole experience is very simple, reminding me a lot of the BBSes in Interplay’s Neuromancer adaption (which I reviewed years ago here.) It absolutely gets the job done in terms of gameplay though, and I think some abstraction is probably necessary, but regardless, these BBSes only barely resemble the real thing.

It’s all a little anachronistic too. The game’s intro/title screen is based on the Commodore 64, yet the rest of the game’s interface is based on Amiga Workbench 1.x. The fonts, music, graphics; none of it quite adds up. It’s even mouse driven, though this is somewhat forgivable as even though BBSes weren’t generally mouse based, basing the game’s interface on a mouse driven OS made this seem much more plausible. Despite these nitpicks, it’s effective enough in my mind. I mean, if someone like me could get immersed in it, it’ll surely work on someone less familiar with the tech.

“Calling the new board I was just recommended.”

Disappointingly, despite how absolutely crucial communication via messages is to the gameplay, you don’t actually get to see the messages your character writes. While I didn’t expect you to be able to free-form write messages yourself, you don’t even get to see what your character wrote. Instead, it’s only hinted at by the subject lines of the messages people are replying to. Kind of weird, but it’s also sort of cool that it leaves the contents of the messages open to interpretation. Given that your character is also kind of a tabula rasa, that’s probably for the best. That said, as mentioned, this is actually a visual novel, not some kind of slick hacking simulator, so the fact that it’s even this functional is remarkable.

Unfortunately the gameplay starts to feel repetitive quite quickly, as it mostly just involves dialing a BBS, reading and replying to messages, logging off, and moving on to the next board. Sometimes it’s not clear where you need to call next, or how to get into a system, but overall it’s all fairly simple. With a time to beat of around 2 hours, I appreciate that it doesn’t quite overstay its welcome either. Still, I would have personally liked to see more tension here. What I mean by that is that a big part of BBSing back in the day was having to wait hours, maybe even days to get a response to a greatly anticipated message, or for your daily allowance of time, game turns, or download credits on a particular board to reset, but none of that is really represented here.

“Sweet welcome screen, though that’s not quite ANSI.”

Surprisingly, I think where the game really stumbles is the story itself. Before playing it I imagined a really involved, lengthy narrative as the main character starts to befriend various people on these BBSes, perhaps build a reputation of sorts, and the romantic relationship referenced by the title blossoms. Instead, it all feels fairly surface level, especially the relationship, which progresses incredibly quickly to the point that I barely felt much towards the character you have this relationship with. It all feels a little rushed and shallow as a result. Beyond that, it cribs from Gibson pretty hard, but then, what good cyberpunk story doesn’t?

Digital: A Love Story is available for free from the author’s website, so if any of this sounds interesting to you, I’d recommend giving it a shot. There are much worse ways to spend two hours.

Speaking of slick hacking simulators, Introversion’s Uplink is just that, and really, one of the progenitors of the entire modern genre. After playing Introversion’s WarGames inspired global thermonuclear war focused light strategy game Defcon, I briefly became quite intrigued by Introversion Software and their innovative, stylish, often somewhat toy-like games that remind me of highly evolved products of the same underground computer scene I came up in. This is when I bought Uplink and a few other games of theirs, though somehow, despite thinking it looked awesome, I never actually got around to trying it.

“Killing my boy Dan in the original Uplink. Sorry, bud!”

Uplink takes place in some presumably cyberpunky version of (then future) 2010 in which you sign up with the Uplink Corporation as a freelance hacker. Through them you take on jobs/missions, monitor relevant news articles, update your software tools, and upgrade your gateway computer – something of a “jumpbox” that you do all of your nefarious deeds through. Once you have one or more missions, you’re emailed a more detailed description of your objective including the name and IP address of the server you need to carry them out with. You’ll need to connect to the server, but oh no, not directly, as you’d be traced and caught in no time. Instead, you’ll need to bounce your connection through multiple intermediary servers to increase the time it takes to trace you. It also helps if at least one of them is a server you can easily gain admin access to so you can clear the logs of your connection being routed through it to break that chain, as it were.

From there, things only get more complex. Some missions have you deleting files, some have you downloading and emailing files, sometimes needing to decrypt them first. Sometimes you’ll need to hack an institution to view or change some records, or move some money around, and sometimes you’ll need to trace someone else’s bank transfers, or even track down a rival hacker. The more difficult missions require a complex series of subtasks, and some may even have time limits. The mechanisms you need to work around are more difficult too. At first, just using a cracker to brute force an admin password is good enough. Later on, you’ll need to break encryption keys, provide voice imprints, and maybe even route your connections through other company servers. Sometimes you’ll need to disable monitoring servers, proxy servers, and firewalls too.

“Providing a voice sample to work my way into this Logic Systems server.”

The variety and complexity of these tasks ties smartly into the game’s progression system. Each level of mission gives you more and more cash, which lets you buy new software tools, update old ones, and upgrade your gateway’s hardware, allowing you to handle higher tier missions, which grant you even more money. Repeat! At least, that’s how the game is meant to be played. A cheeky strategy I found a lot of references to online is to hack a bank early on to give yourself a massive injection of funds and shortcut a lot of this progression. Of course, you’ll still need to gain experience to have higher level missions available to you, though having all of the best tools and the fastest hardware would certainly make that easier.

Regardless of how you get there, this all culminates as you reach the hardest missions, which often require gaining access to a corporate LAN and mapping out and hacking every server in the network to reach your target. Each hack may require bypassing multiple of the above mentioned roadblocks, and you’ll have an admin aggressively chasing you at every step too. Fun!

“Providing a voice sample, but this time in the Uplink OS mod.”

One of the best things about Uplink, and honestly, all the best entries in this genre, is that it is quite immersive. You’re interacting with a virtual computer system of some sort, and given that you’re actually interacting with a real computer system of some sort to play the game, it’s not a massive leap to feel like you’re actually really doing something. Couple this with the realistic sense of isolation you experience playing a single character in first person (narratively speaking) staring at a somewhat open-ended GUI and/or a blinking cursor at a CLI prompt, with your only contacts being an occasional email or chat message. If you’ve ever been there yourself, and I’d wager most of us have in one way or another, it’s extremely effective.

Uplink suffers some here in that it was developed and released in the early 2000s. It still has a lot of now anachronistic references to “dialing into” servers and its GUI, while looking like a slick Window Manager you might have used with X back in the day, is a little clunky by today’s standards. Text boxes need to have their default text manually cleared, and have other weird input limitations, for example. The game also doesn’t handle modern screen resolutions very well, either. Thankfully, there are mods for all of that, some of which I almost hesitate to call mods as they replace the entire executable becoming what is more or less a whole new client for the game. The most popular of these is probably Uplink OS. I would highly recommend anyone looking to play Uplink these days just go ahead and start with something like Uplink OS, though with the caveat that you know that some of these UI and seemingly minor gameplay enhancements actually heavily affect the gameplay itself. That, and in Uplink OS’s case, even the aesthetics are quite different. While I prefer some elements of the original Uplink, Uplink OS was clearly a labor of love and its benefits outweigh its negatives in my opinion.

“Uplink OS replaces the world map with a boring hexagon, but I love the Randomize button!”

I started off with the original Uplink and didn’t find it too annoying to work around the UI and technical imitations of it, but at some point, maybe 10 hours in, I found myself almost hard locked from proceeding any further: I needed money to purchase some tools to do the new mission types at my current level, but had exhausted all of the lower tier missions I could actually handle. This is, admittedly, totally my own fault for not managing my funds better, but hey, this seemed like a good time to check out Uplink OS. Making a new character and being much more methodical this time (thanks to understanding the game a lot better) paired with a much more responsive UI, meant progression was waaaaay faster. Unfortunately I made another silly mistake. I was learning the ins and outs of hacking LANs when I finally completed my mission and increased the game speed to wait for the news to report on my deeds. Instead, I received my first game over screen – busted! This wasn’t really game over, but I essentially would need to work my way up from zero. As much as that sucked, I was much more annoyed by not knowing how I could have been caught. Regardless, having put probably 25-30 hours into Uplink, I’d have probably thrown in the towel if I hadn’t sneakily backed up my local save file at some point before this.

With that, I decided to change focus. When you make it far enough into the game, you start being offered missions out-of-band, which lead to a more linear set of special missions. With my second playthrough going so fast, I never got to the calendar date in which the first of these missions would be offered to me, so determined to beat the game legitimately at least once, I restored my game, did a few more missions to get a little more cash, then put the game’s clock on fast forward. At a high level, the story consists of two corporations vying against each other: one that wants to destroy the Internet because they feel like it has become corrupted by government and corporate control from its once great position as a bastion of free speech, while the other would rather, you know, NOT destroy the entire Internet. Of course, you’re able to choose either side, or ignore the entire thing (although that may eventually turn out badly for you if things have already been set into motion.) Personally, I chose Arunmor because at first ARC’s motives seemed more anti-social, plus being a professional hacker, my character would be out of work if the Internet were to cease to exist. I’m nothing if not practical!

“Deleting a system’s logs via CLI to cover my tracks.”

That said, the story feels a little rushed and could have perhaps used a bit more drama, even if just in the form of more emails, news articles, and other text, but I do appreciate how there are a lot of little clues about this whole plotline sprinkled throughout the game. More of this would have made the story that much better, though. As for the story missions themselves, beyond the new mechanics introduced by the Faith vs Revelation viruses, they utilize a little bit of everything you’ve learned up to this point. It’s a simple but smart design, and my final mission for Arunmor, which involved racing against the spread of the Revelation virus, was surprisingly tense.

Perhaps one day I’ll return to follow the ARC storyline, but for now I’m ready to move on to something else. In any case, Uplink is a bona fide classic. I’m looking forward to seeing how other games have attempted to evolve the formula, however.

I remember hearing a lot about Her Story when it was released back in 2015. It seemed like everyone was playing it, but I didn’t know much about it apart from it supposedly being one of the more impressive entries in a wave of FMV revival games. I knew it involved watching a lot of video clips, and that was about it. So what does it have to do with this theme?

“Making my screen a little cluttered to show off the UI in Her Story.”

Her Story puts you in the role of some kind of an investigator who is placed in front of an old PC with access to a curated archive of police interview footage. The interviews focus on a single person, Hannah Smith, the wife of a man found dead in their home, seemingly murdered. You’re not given much in the way of background on who you are, why you’re reviewing this data, or what your goal really is. One would assume you’re a detective, and you’re trying to determine the details of the murder, including whether or not Hannah is guilty or at least a legitimate suspect. Almost all of the interaction in Her Story involves typing simple search queries into this video database application and reviewing the results. Mostly this is in the form of keywords and phrases, but you can also add your own tags to individual clips, which is pretty neat. One interesting aspect of this is that each search will only let you see the first 5 results, which means narrowing down and refining your searches is practically a requirement, especially if you want to try turning over every last stone.

The simulation here is surprisingly competent for a game that, well, isn’t really about that. The machine you’re in front of is modeled after Windows 95 and you’re able to interact with it with a reasonable amount of fidelity – there are multiple programs you can open, including a little game that someone had apparently tried to delete, you can move windows around, etc. Probably the most interesting aspect of this is the “glare” effect which adds a not-at-all subtle CRT effect to the screen – scan lines, a slight curve to the picture, dust on the screen itself, and reflections in the form of the fluorescent lights behind you, occasional lights from passing police cars, and even your own character’s reflection at times. This is the type of feature that a lot of people might immediately turn off, but I’m personally really fond of Her Story’s implementation of it, and I feel that it does just as much to set the mood as the ambient soundtrack in the background.

“Hannah tells us about her favorite video games.”

What really intrigued me about Her Story was the mysterious nature of many of the details of the story, both those expected (the obvious “whodunit?” of it all) and perhaps surprising. I obviously need to tip-toe around potential spoilers here, but the biggest mystery is in regards to Hannah’s identity. Is she who she says she is? It’s blatantly clear that there is some kind of manipulation going on, but it seems as if the game goes to lengths to specifically throw you off the scent, tossing out hints to support and oppose both of the two main conclusions you’re likely to draw. Personally, I went with the… err, let’s say “same person” conclusion myself due to some phrasing that is used here and there and some of the overall manipulative behavior observed, though I later watched a video on YouTube that convinced me that the other option was probably correct. Regardless, the game purposely leaves a lot of this, a lot of everything, open to interpretation. In fact, before I was even 50% through the archive I thought I had a fairly good idea of what happened, but with no idea how I was supposed to “beat” the game. While that becomes more clear eventually, the game ends without answering many of these questions, and a detail given at the very end still managed to surprise me while re-framing a few things at the same time.

It’s short, despite clocking in at a few hours tops, and it’s minimally interactive for a “game” to boot, Her Story’s execution really worked for me, and its story is one that I won’t forget any time soon. Part of this is thanks to the performance of Viva Seifert, but I also want to seek out more of Sam Barlow’s games, including Telling Lies, which is something of a spiritual successor to Her Story and includes a similar style of gameplay, which means it might end up in a future installment of this series.

The First Four

Maybe it’s the holidays, but I was recently hit by a random streak of nostalgia around my family’s first ever computer, the Commodore VIC-20. I’m guessing it was sometime around 1985 or 1986 that my dad, almost certainly inspired by another family that we became friends with, the father being a huge Commodore 64 nerd, brought us home a VIC-20. We quickly amassed some game cartridges, a tape deck and a couple of tapes filled with demos and games, a joystick, and soon enough a Zenith ZVM-123 monochrome monitor so my brother and I weren’t tying up the family TV. I thought it would be fun to go back and revisit those first four cartridge-based games. This is where it all started for me!

“Fast Eddie plays exactly how you might imagine from this screen.”

Fast Eddie is a single screen side-perspective platformer similar to more well-known titles like Lode Runner, Jumpman, and Donkey Kong. Your objective is to avoid these little mushroom looking “Sneaker” dudes while you climb ladders up and down multiple levels collecting “prizes” that appear at random. There’s a really tall Sneaker on the top level (called the “High-Top”) who will shrink in height with each prize you collect, eventually getting short enough for Eddie to jump over, which completes the stage. It’s pretty simple, but even on the VIC-20 it feels reasonably fast and responsive. The challenge is in timing your movements with the fast moving Sneakers, which is easy to do, but the faster you try to clear a level, the more likely you are to make a mistake and lose a life. I also checked out the Commodore 64 version while I was at it, which despite being more colorful with higher resolution, well, everything, doesn’t have quite the same charm as the VIC-20 version to me. Still, the more responsive and smoother feeling controls make it the superior version.

Despite the fact that I recall liking Fast Eddie as a kid, it wasn’t my favorite, nor did it get a ton of playtime in my house. I think that’s likely because, like so many early arcade style games, the formula is almost immediately obvious and doesn’t deviate much from what is established at the start in anything but difficulty. Once you “figure it out” the only real drive to keep playing is to push yourself to further levels and higher scores. That said, it is fairly addictive, and when I replayed it for the first time in preparation for writing this article, I ended up playing it for a lot longer than originally planned. Not bad!

“Despite the clown car colors, killing Klingons is serious business.”

I never got into this next game as a kid, likely confused by its multiple perspectives and chaotic action, but I have fond memories of my brother camping out in front of this game for hours, filling little notepads up with diagrams and drawings. Having put a fair amount of time into the game while revisiting it for this post, I’m guessing these were simply sketches of ships and maybe a log of how far he made it and his scores, because an RPG or adventure game this is not; there’s really nothing to map nor clues to jot down.

Despite its title, Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator is purely an arcade action game, but one that crams a fair amount of ingenuity into its simple concept. On the top left of the screen you have indicators showing your health, photon torpedoes, and warp power. On the top right, you see an overhead view of your ship and the space around it in a style very similar to Asteroids. On the bottom of the screen, you see a first person perspective from the viewscreen of your ship (I assume the USS Enterprise?) which is synchronized with the action in the top down view. Pretty nifty. You fly around these little “sectors” shooting Klingon battlecruisers who are either attacking you, or focused on attacking your starbases. You can fly to a starbase to get a small bump in health, torpedoes, and warp. Your normal attack is an unlimited, rapid fire blast that is supposed to represent your ship’s phasers, but you can also launch a torpedo which has a devastating area of effect, and warping is simply a speed boost which I actually never found all that much use for. Once you dispatch all of the enemies, hopefully saving your starbases in the process, your score is tallied up and you move to the next sector map. There are some simple boss stages every 4 or 5 sectors as well. All in all, it didn’t really hook me, but it was fun, and I can imagine some people really enjoying it.

I tried out the Commodore 64 port of the game as well, and as with most games that exist on both platforms, while the gameplay is more or less identical, the graphics and sound are greatly improved (you can actually tell what the ships are supposed to be!) and control is a little more responsive, although it’s not bad in the VIC-20 port. The experience was so much more enjoyable that I ended up playing for quite awhile, far surpassing my previous high score on the VIC-20 version. Interestingly, the original game both of these ports are based on is a 1982 Sega arcade game. The arcade game looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t think I ever played growing up. Boasting impressive hi-res vector graphics and some digitized sound samples, it looks damn cool, although the gameplay is basically the same as what is presented in the home computer versions.

“Frogger with a weird perspective and terrible controls? Sign me up!”

Out of the four of these games, there’s only one I had almost zero recollection of and that’s because, well, we barely played it, and we barely played it because it fucking sucked. Congo Bongo is a platformer that plays like a sloppy combination of Donkey Kong, Pitfall!, and Frogger, depending on which level you play. That is, the first level has much more of a Donkey Kong vibe, while the second brings in those Frogger elements. The key difference is that the levels are shown from something of a skewed isometric perspective. Different enough to keep the lawyers away, I guess. The wacky perspective, terrible, jumpy animations which make dodging coconuts and hopping onto moving platforms feel excruciatingly inaccurate, and the less than responsive joystick controls made a game that probably already relied a bit too much on memorization just one big bum out. I ended up beating the first stage (a feat I don’t recall if I ever managed as a kid) after about a billion tries but, running out of patience, abused TheC64’s save states to get through the second. That was it though, that’s the game! In theory, those two levels repeat with a higher difficulty 4 more times, but there’s no way I was going to go any further, at least not with this version.

This game was ported all over the place, however, and morbidly curious, I decided to check out the very similar Commodore 64 version of the game. I’m happy to report that while it looks quite close, it has more colors, better sprites, better animations, slightly better sound, and vastly superior controls. The monkeys even properly harass you in this version! Still only two levels though. Interestingly, the Commodore 64 actually had a second port released a couple of years later in 1985 which had much nicer graphics sporting a much better take on the arcade version’s isometric perspective, all 4 levels from arcade, and a lot of other original elements intact. Unfortunately the cracked dump I played glitched out on the last level so I couldn’t legitimately beat it, but hey, not too shabby! In either case, I’d have been a lot more satisfied with the Commodore 64 versions of the game than I was with this awful VIC-20 one. Honestly, the best part was the awesome box with its colorful cartoony characters and massive Sega logo.

Oh, and yes, believe it or not this game was based on an arcade game. The arcade Congo Bongo actually had beautiful graphics for the time and, while I’m sure it was still a quarter sucking kick in the balls, the gameplay looks a lot smoother. As a kid I had no idea it was ever in the arcade, and I didn’t know until researching the game for this replay that there’s actually an interesting story behind the game being something of a troll of Nintendo over a lawsuit related to Donkey Kong. I’ve never seen that event referenced before, but I wonder if that’s where the Sega and Nintendo beef all started?

“Actually, Spider City doesn’t look half bad.”

My favorite of these games as a kid was Spider City, AKA Flash Gordon. Spider City was a side-scrolling shooter, likely influenced by the arcade classic Defender. On the top half of the screen is a view of your ship, and on the bottom a sort of mini-map showing you the tunnel system you’re navigating. The map was crucial for locating your objective, the hordes of hatching spider warriors you needed to murder. Of course, you also need to avoid debris, patrol ships, and other hazards, as well as rescue captured spacemen. I remember thinking the game looked good as a kid, but… eh? Still, of these four games it does the most with the VIC’s meager sound capabilities by a longshot.

In retrospect, dazzling graphics aside, I don’t know why it appealed to me quite so much back then, other than I remember wanting to ape my brother’s deep fascination with Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator by diving deep into and mastering a game of my own. That said, like Star Trek: SOS, there wasn’t actually all that much to master. Fly through the map avoiding and/or shooting everything on the screen (except for spacemen, which you could fly over to rescue) and seek out the hatching pods, mow down the hatching spiders which would hopefully grant your ship a temporary shield, then rinse and repeat until the entire map is clear. There were also these “disruptor” zones which moved around the map and would fill your screen with debris when you entered one, though you could shoot the generator inside of them to freeze them temporarily if you couldn’t simply avoid them. Of course, all of these details are fairly obtuse and unintuitive, and I’m mostly only able to talk about them clearly because I read the manual.

Unlike the rest of these games, Spider City didn’t have a Commodore 64 port. In fact, the only other place it appeared was the Atari 8-bit computers. Odd, given that it’s actually fairly fun.

These days I think I probably prefer Fast Eddie to Spider City, but I still have to give Spider City major credit for being the first video game I ever loved. Additional takeaways? While I’m endlessly grateful to my dad for bringing home my first ever personal computer, I mean, I have multiple hobbies and a career to thank for my interest in computers, I definitely wish it was a Commodore 64 instead of a VIC-20. Oh well. As an aside, I’d love to make a part two to this if I can ever figure out exactly what those cassette tapes I mentioned having were. I have no idea if they were commercial releases or otherwise widely distributed, or if some dude at whatever local computer shop my dad got this stuff from cobbled them together himself. A mystery for another day. *shrug*

Apologies for the poor quality pictures – there are some major color inaccuracies, for instance. These were photos from my TV (usually at night, even) rather than actual screenshots. Box art stolen from LaunchBox’s games database.

Wolfenstein 3D / Spear of Destiny Review

Note: The screenshots posted on this page have been scaled up a little from their tiny native resolutions as well as had their aspect ratios corrected to proper 4:3 dimensions as they should have looked on CRT monitors originally. For posterity’s sake you can also click them to view the “pixel perfect” originals.

Introduction

“Wolfenstein 3D”

“…and Spear of Destiny!”

I’d been whining to my poor parents about wanting a new PC for literally years. While it seemed like I might have finally worn them down, I’d do whatever I could to play with any and every kind of computer whenever the opportunity presented itself in the meantime. One of those few opportunities was my 8th grade computer class. The first ever class I had with semi-modern IBM compatible PCs. The class was okay, but the main event was what happened when the last bell of the day rang and our computer teacher’s newly formed ham radio club gathered. For one reason or another, the club almost instantly devolved into most of us just hanging out in the computer lab and screwing around most every afternoon, and we were absolutely fine with that.

Our computer lab was in a pretty sorry state. Other than our teacher’s PCs, which were more or less dedicated to ham and, soon, running our middle school’s official bulletin board system, most of the computers we had were some form of outdated IBM AT clone with zero notable upgrades to speak of. Us nerdy delinquents quickly discovered that one was a cut above the rest, though: a 386 with a VGA adapter and an soundcard. Soon enough, this uber PC got pulled out into the middle of the classroom so we could all gather around it, watching and taking turns playing whatever the latest random game someone smuggled in and managed to get working was.

“A showdown with a Nazi guard.”

One fateful day it was the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D. This machine only had an AdLib in it, so no sound effects, but it didn’t matter. To see Wolfenstein 3D smoothly rendering its glorious violence in full 256 color VGA was utterly amazing. On that day, the obsession I had to acquire a new PC turned into absolute fucking resolve. Wolfenstein 3D was already a year old at that point, and I’d get to see the shareware episode of Doom running (rather poorly) on the same machine before the school year was over, but you can bet when my parents finally caved and spent a ridiculous amount of money on a new 486SX/33 for me that summer, one of the first things I did was drag my mom to Radioshack to buy me a copy of the Wolfenstein 3D shareware disk.

Loading it up for the first time, my AZTECH Sound Blaster clone pumping out that distinctive AdLib soundtrack as my cell door loudly rolled open and I cautiously crept around the corner, pistol in hand, a Nazi guard spotting me and shouting “Achtung!” as he sprang to action, is something I’ll probably always vividly remember, and something that still feels fresh whenever I revisit the game. I loved Wolfenstein 3D! Doom soon utterly overshadowed it, sure, but Wolfenstein 3D will always be the game that introduced me to the now ubiquitous First Person Shooter genre and its masters, Id Software.

“I still have my original shareware version. 3 bucks well spent (even though there’s absolutely no mention on the package that this is only the shareware version… shady!)”

Id Software was formed largely on the back of John Carmack’s technically impressive smooth side-scrolling routines and he soon turned his attention to developing an equally impressive first person ray casting, 2.5D engine which first saw publication in 1991’s Hovertank 3D and a little later, Catacomb 3-D, both released by Softdisk. By the time Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992, Id had greatly improved the engine, making the controls more accessible, upgrading from EGA to VGA graphics, and adding AdLib music and Soundblaster sound effects. Probably most importantly, they abandoned Softdisk’s subscription publishing model and moved to publishing under Apogee’s shareware model which was already earning them some success with the Commander Keen series. Releasing as shareware meant much, much more exposure, and the game went on to be wildly successful. A commercial only sequel (really, more of a standalone expansion pack) called Spear of Destiny, which I’ll also be covering here, was released by FormGen the following year in 1993, leading to even more exposure. Wolfenstein 3D was a bonafide hit.

Gameplay

Wolfenstein 3D established what quickly became the basic gameplay template for most of the FPS games released in the 1990s. Each level begins in a predetermined location of a self-contained area (usually called a “map” in FPS vernacular) and it’s your job guide your character to the exit. Some parts of the map are behind locked doors which require keys you can pick up along the way, adding a tiny bit of complexity to the exercise. Of course, there are also guards patrolling the map who will shoot you on sight and alert others to your presence if you don’t take them out first. There’s also weapons, ammo, and health scattered around to collect, and unusually for the genre, various treasures that can be gathered to increase your score. It’s a simple formula, and with Wolfenstein 3D’s beautifully performing engine, you can often absolutely blaze through these maps.

“The end of level score tally.”

At odds with the blazing speed of the gameplay, the score tallied at the end of each mission rewards 100% completion, which includes enemies killed, treasure collected, and “secrets” discovered. These secret hidden areas became a fairly normal part of early FPS design, but Wolfenstein’s are particularly infamous for not being marked or otherwise hinted at in any way. This lead to the stereotype of players running up and down every single wall in every single room and corridor frantically tapping the open key, colloquially known as “wall humping” thanks to how absurd this looks and sounds. That said, without exploring quite a bit, you’re unlikely to get a 100% completion in any of these categories the first time through.

Exploration tends to be unavoidable anyway thanks to Wolfenstein’s labyrinthian maps. While the game starts out with simple designs seemingly based on vaguely realistic floor plans, it quickly goes off the deep end with some gigantic and thoroughly maze-like map designs, and with no auto-map to speak of, getting to the end of these take quite a while and be more than a little frustrating. Navigating the map in the correct order to find the aforementioned keys is the closest Wolfenstein ever comes to throwing puzzles at the player – there are no special trigger areas, switches, elevators, etc. as would soon become staples of the FPS genre. Lack of gameplay variety is not the only problem with Wolfenstein’s maps, as the maps themselves tend to be quite repetitive, with the engine only supporting simple, 90 degree angled walls on a single, level plane.

“Ow. The mutants in episode 2 are fucking obnoxious.”

A bit more challenge comes from the enemies, which are often positioned to strike the second you open a door or go around a corner. While not quite “monster closet” levels of cheesiness, Wolfenstein can occasionally feel a little unfair when it comes to purposely devious placement of enemies, and getting caught by surprise can quickly lead to your death, especially on higher difficulty levels. There’s not too much variety in enemies either, with probably the most crucial variable besides their hit points and rate of fire being how quickly they draw on you in the aforementioned ambush situations.

The variety of your own arsenal is similarly a little slim, with the only thing being anywhere close to exotic being the minigun, which I tend to avoid using during anything but the end of the episode boss fights – the machine gun’s rate of fire is quick enough to effectively stun/stagger enemies but doesn’t chew through the ammo nearly as quickly as the minigun. This is notable, as ammunition can be a little sparse early on which can lend the game a bit of a survival feel, adding some much needed tension to the formula. This mostly falls to the wayside as you progress, assuming you live long enough to hang on to your ammunition supply between maps. These simple, hit scan based weapons do feel pretty satisfying though, which I have to think is a big part of what makes Wolfenstein so damn enjoyable.

As I said in my Duke Nukem 3D review, the old school style of FPS level design ends up feeling quite tedious to me, and in Wolfenstein the simplicity and lack of variety only exacerbates that feeling. As a kid, while playing through the first, shareware episode felt a little bit repetitive, it didn’t really overstay its welcome. By the time you add in the full version’s 5 additional episodes, and if you also play Spear of Destiny, which adds in another 21 levels, that’s a total of 81 levels, never mind the two GenForm bonus mission packs for Spear of Destiny, for another 42 maps, yeah, it’s a bit of a slog.

“Probably the most popular map editor at the time, the aptly named MAPEDIT.”

Surprisingly, a lot of people didn’t seem to think so though, as in addition to Wolfenstein 3D kicking off the FPS genre, it also introduced the world to FPS map making and modding. Wolfenstein’s data structures were quickly reverse engineered and map creation software was released. Given how simple Wolfenstein’s maps are, these editors were simple to use and a lot of people found themselves creating their own maps and campaigns, and a few even dove into editing the sprites and textures, creating some early examples of something close to resembling “total conversion” mods. Personally, I never played around with 3rd party Wolfenstein 3D maps and modifications back in the day, but apparently they were quite popular.

As a quick aside, some of the later console ports of Wolfenstein 3D do make tweaks to the gameplay, from the minor such as differently designed maps, to the more notable ones such as new weapons and even an automap feature. While it’s mostly the DOS version I’m covering here, I still feel this is noteworthy, as some of you might be reading this thinking “What about the flamethrower?” or “What? I used the automap when I played it!”

Story

Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t have much of a story, rather it sets up scenarios and throws you into the action, never really advancing anything resembling a plot. Nevertheless, in presenting you with excuses to be in these mazes, it does at least make an attempt at throwing some fluff in in the form of text introductions and endings to each episode.

“The introduction to episode 1 (as taken from the in-game readme in the shareware version!)”

“Continued.”

“I’ll definitely tell me grandkids about this.”

Directly inspired by the 1981’s Apple II action stealth game, Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 3D follows the exploits of allied spy Captain William J. “B.J.” Blazkowicz against Nazi forces in WWII. The most famous of these scenarios, the first episode, has BJ attempting escape from the dungeon fortress Wolfenstein where he was being held prisoner. After that, BJ heads into Castle Hollehammer to stop Operation Eisenfaust – a sinister plot that involves reanimating corpses in an attempt to create the ultimate super soldier. In the third and final episode of the original trilogy, BJ heads to Hitler’s massive bunker complex underneath the Reichstag to put an end to the Third Reich once and for all. This is the definitive set of missions, without a doubt.

The second trio of episodes, snarkily called the “Nocturnal Missions”, are actually prequels, taking place before BJ was captured, in which he attempts to put a stop to a chemical weapons program. These missions aren’t bad, but don’t really add anything essential to the story.

“Spear of Destiny… now with more wall textures!”

Spear of Destiny, on the other hand, is notable because it fully commits to fantasy Nazi tropes, having BJ attempting to stop Hitler from using the occult powers of the legendary holy relic, the Lance of Longinus. He infiltrates Castle Nuremberg and eventually retrieves it, but not before getting transported to hell and having to defeat a demon “Angel of Death” in order to escape. Yes, you go to hell to fight a demon! Wolfenstein REALLY dove into the deep end of the occult stuff here, foreshadowing the full on demonic assault of Doom a year later. Outside of that, again, these missions hardly feel necessary.

Mission specifics aside, the fantasy World War II setting felt fresh to me at the time, especially when combined with Wolfenstein 3D’s immersive first person presentation. Even today, despite how exhaustively the setting and its associated tropes have been mined, the particular combination of pulp comic book action, occultism, zombies, super technology, and real life World War II presented in the original Wolfenstein 3D games feels like a relatively unique blend. I’d guess most people would prefer either semi-realistic World War II settings or even deeper dives into these concepts (as presented in later games in the series) but Wolfenstein 3D’s take certainly was enjoyable.

Oddly, the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D features a totally reworked plot in an awkward attempt to censor any association with Nazi Germany. All this really accomplishes is turning the antagonists (renamed the “Master State”) into a sloppy and rather obvious analog for Nazi Germany, with Hitler being named Staatmeister and given a shave. Humph!

Controls

Wolfenstein 3D’s controls probably feel totally alien to gamers that grew up after FPS games moved to the WASD + “mouselook” style of control, but what Wolfenstein 3D did at the time set the template for other first person shooters for quite a while: Both hands on the keyboard with your right hand moving you back, forward, left, and right using your arrow keys and your left hand doing everything else with the far left side of the keyboard – Left Ctrl, Left Alt, Space Bar, and Left Shift were typically used to fire, strafe, open doors, and run, respectively. I got used to this control style with Wolfenstein 3D and perfected it with Doom, and had to pretty much force myself into using the newer convention only after it became the norm across the genre.

“Yeah, you shoot dogs in this game. Seriously vicious dogs.”

Granted, part of what makes it work is how simple Wolfenstein 3D is. There’s very little going on outside of moving, firing, and opening doors. You don’t need to (and indeed, can’t) look up and down, nor do you need precision aim since there is a vague aim-assist (or maybe just big hit boxes?) While I’m not sure how it technically works, it’s definitely less pronounced than in latter early FPS games since there is no variation in verticality in Wolfenstein 3D to make it jarringly obvious that your shots are being angled outside of your control.

Still, attempts to get those simple controls mapped to my old Gravis GamePad back in the day never ended very satisfactorily. In the case of the numerous console ports, greater care was put into getting the feel of playing on a gamepad right and thankfully, most of them have various degrees of passable implementations. Again, the simplistic controls make that translation fairly easy. Newer console ports, such as the Xbox Live Arcade version, introduce the modern dual-stick FPS control style to the game, albeit with the right stick only used to look left and right. It sounds weird on paper, but it feels pretty normal and overall I found Wolfenstein 3D to be right at home on an Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller.

“It’s pretty typical to leave a trail of gore in your wake.”

While there is mouse support in the original DOS versions, it’s very rudimentary and won’t satisfy anyone trying to replicate modern control schemes. If you’re looking for that experience, the most popular of the Windows ports of the game, ECWolf, includes support for proper WASD + mouselook, and it works excellently. Like the Xbox 360 port, mouselook is limited to looking left and right, but it still feels fine. In fact, it’s my preferred way to play these days.

Graphics

While Wolfenstein 3D’s graphics aren’t typically the first thing I think about when I look back on the game, I have no doubt that they had quite a lot to do with the game’s success. As mentioned, the Wolf3D engine ran extremely smoothly, even with its VGA textured walls (an upgrade over the original Hovertank 3D) and sometimes large amounts of sprites on screen. Floors and ceilings remained untextured, oddly, but in playing the game this doesn’t really stand out as a deficiency. If anything, it helps the environment feel a little less cluttered than less skilled implementations of fully textured “2.5D” environments in some future games.

“The death animations certainly give a hint of what was to come in Doom.”

The real standout here is the artwork. An obvious precursor to his work in Doom, Adrian Carmack’s colorful, stylized sprite and animation work is a mix between the cartoony and (particularly in the death animations) dark and macabre, and is simply jam-packed full of character. As with in Doom, he really manages to nail the kind of “cool” that appeals greatly to teenage boys, without fully tipping over the edge into being embarrassingly cringy for adults to enjoy. Interestingly, I read somewhere that one of the reasons for Wolfenstein’s distinct, colorful look is that many of the textures and sprites were originally drawn with the limited EGA 16 color palette and then touched up with the engine’s move to VGA, which makes a lot of sense.

I will have to throw in just a little negativity here. While I mentioned the variety in weapons and enemies, as well as the simplicity of the maps already, the lack of variety in wall textures and environmental objects adds to this feeling of repetition to a large degree as well. While there are a fair number of different wall texture sets, it won’t take long until you’ve seen them all. This is huge factor in what makes the maps a little too maze-like, as well – when every room looks the same, exactly how are you supposed to tell them apart? While Spear of Destiny adds a few new textures into the mix, it really feels like a token effort.

“Neat little details abound, like BJ grinning ear to ear when he picks up a minigun.”

Still, altogether, the look of Wolfenstein 3D is quite strong and holds up surprisingly well today, with this lack of environmental variety hurting the gameplay more than the presentation.

Interestingly, the graphics found in the original DOS release were not the only ones around. When the game was ported to the SNES some of the sprites were redesigned, most notably the weapons and your character’s head indicator on the status bar. When ported to the Macintosh, the rest of the graphics were redesigned, redrawn, and/or tweaked, including the enemy sprites and wall textures being drawn at double the resolution for cleaner scaling. The Jaguar and 3DO releases were also based on this version, though again with various tweaks of their own. Opinions on these facelifts vary but it seems like the new graphics in these versions are generally well liked and don’t stray too far from the spirit of the original work.

Sound

From the second the title screen loads and the AdLib rendition of Horst-Wessel-Lied starts blasting, you know you’re in for something different. Like with its graphics, it’s hard to imagine what Wolfenstein 3D would have been without its excellent soundwork.

“Hitler delivering a serious beatdown.”

First, you have Bobby Prince’s soundtrack which is one of my personal favorite examples of classic AdLib music to this day. He manages to combine the sizzling snare rolls of military marches, triumphant anthemic horn blasts, and the intrigue of a good spy thriller into tracks that somehow gel with the feeling of sneaking around these Nazi dungeons almost perfectly. While some of these tunes can get a little repetitive, as an overall package it is very strong.

On top of that you have the Sound Blaster digital sound effects. The first cell door you exit slamming shut behind you, a sound you’ll hear a thousand more times before beating the game, in fact, grabs your attention and puts you at high alert. The gunfire thuds nicely, and the barks of the enemies as they spot you and, with any luck, go down, are awesome regardless of their humorously loose interpretation of German phrases.

“Officers draw on you in and instant, barely giving you time to react to their bark.”

More than just sounding cool, this is one of the first games I recall playing where the sound effects greatly affect gameplay. It’s easy to unwittingly attract enemies to your location while clearing out the map, and sometimes hearing a door open in the distance is your only hint that you’re being hunted. Likewise, almost every enemy “barks” at you the second it sees you, often giving you a few seconds to react before taking fire. Besides helping you avoid getting shot, this can also help identify which type of enemy it is, which can make the difference between life and death. That is, getting caught with your back to a normal guard isn’t nearly as detrimental as letting one of the machine gun wielding SS elite soldiers get a free burst off on you.

Returning to the subject of ports, it won’t surprise you by now to read that the music and sound effects in many of these versions have been touched up or replaced entirely. Most notably, the Mac and 3DO versions have their own, mostly totally distinct, orchestrated soundtracks from Brian Luzietti. While these have an entirely different feel from Bobby Prince’s original soundtrack, it’s hard to deny how great they are too.

Old Age and Alternative Versions

As usual, my primary method of playing through the game for this review was my dedicated 486 gaming PC. I didn’t bother disabling my cache or trying to slow my system down in any other ways, as I recalled it running fine back in the day on a machine only a tiny bit slower than this one. Other than running into some issues with the non-standard way I had my Sound Blaster configured at the time, I had no trouble running it, and it ran just as buttery smooth as expected. There is an issue with secret “pushwalls” sometimes moving further than they should on systems with extremely fast CPUs, but this requires some very specific conditions, thus isn’t a widespread issue.

As for playing it on a modern system, I also played through a significant amount of it in DOSBox. I used the pre-configured version from GOG, although I did have to increase my CPU “cycles” setting to make it run as smoothly as I’m accustomed to. Once I did that, I found that it played quite well. Given that if you acquire Wolfenstein 3D legally from places like Steam or the aforementioned GOG these days, you’re almost certainly going to be getting a copy bundled with DOSBox, don’t forget that you may need to tweak this and maybe a few other things to get the game running optimally.

“ECWolf running smooth as butter in 1080p.”

“ECWolf with the ECMac mod!”

“ECWolf’s automap, as basic as it is, is a godsend.”

That said, I also played through a large amount of the game in the most popular Windows ports of the game, ECWolf. I had only intended on playing through a single episode in ECWolf, but enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up playing through the entirety of Spear of Destiny in it as well. Besides running just as smooth as the original engine, ECWolf natively supports widescreen resolutions, modern WASD + mouselook controls, and includes an automap. It’s hard for me to quantify just how much more enjoyable the game is with an automap at my disposal – it’s a huge quality of life improvement and goes a long way to nullifying my complaints about the the repetitive, maze-life maps. ECWolf also includes some pretty cool drop-in modding capabilities, and I spent some time playing with a mod called “ECMac” which overhauls the original game’s maps with the improved aesthetics of the Macintosh version. Extremely cool.

Finally, I also played through an entire episode in the Xbox 360 / Xbox Live Arcade port of the game (on my Xbox One.) Despite some well-known issues with the music and some very minor texture changes, I found this version to be faithful to the DOS original and a fair representation for new players wanting to check out the game without dealing with getting it to work on a PC. As noted above, playing it with dual sticks on a modern joypad is a little odd at first, but I got used to it extremely quickly.

“The SNES version looks passable up close.”

“But the scaling is extremely harsh. You can barely make out the guard here!”

“The 3DO version, on the other hand, is mostly excellent.”

There are, of course, other ports. I mentioned some of the original console and PC ports: SNES, Macintosh, Jaguar, 3DO, and oddly, the Apple IIGS. There were also later ports to GBA and IOS, and unofficial ports for a number of systems, almost reaching Doom’s ridiculous levels of ubiquity. Some of these ports include their own maps and other odd changes that could be worth looking into for the truly dedicated. There are also some hidden versions and throwbacks in newer games, such as the original Xbox port included with Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War, and the cool little appearances in Doom II, Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus… too cool!

The original game manuals are available when purchasing the game and various other sources, though besides being a straightforward introduction to the game, they’re not really required. You can also find the official hint books that came with boxed copies of the games around too. These hint books aren’t too useful outside of having detailed diagrams of every map in the original game, but they’re fun to flick through and even include some bonus vintage pictures of the Id Software guys.

Sequels and Related Games

Id Software moved on to Doom almost as soon as Wolfenstein 3D was out the door, and most wouldn’t consider Spear of Destiny a proper follow-up. It wasn’t until almost 10 years later that Gray Matter Interactive put out Return to Castle Wolfenstein, rebooting the series with some success. It was almost as long for it to get a sequel, the Raven Software developed Wolfenstein in 2009. In 2014, we finally got the acclaimed Wolfenstein: The New Order which continues the series, and it’s prequel, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which is somewhat of a re-imaging of the events of the earlier titles. The New Order got a proper sequel in 2017 with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Along the way there was also Wolfenstein RPG for mobile devices, though I never got to play that one before it dropped off the face of the earth.

“While the guard is slow to react, the SS soldier is about to drill me.”

There were also plenty of other games that used the Wolf3D engine and its derivatives. Besides its predecessors, Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D, the sci-fi Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and its sequel Blake Stone: Planet Strike are favorites of mine and I’ll likely cover them here some day. There’s also the much less enjoyable Operation Body Count and Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, and the infamously bizarre Super 3D Noah’s Ark for SNES. Using a heavily modified version of the engine, Apogee’s Rise of the Triad: Dark War actually started life as a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, and some hints of that exist in the game as-released. Finally, straying off a little more, technically, the Raven Software developed Shadowcaster used what was a bit of a stepping stone between Wolf3D and the Doom engine, AKA Id Tech 1, kicking off a long history of association between the two companies.

Closing

“The camera zooms out to show you in 3rd person as you exit an epsiode. Awesome touch!”

It’s honestly been a treat for me to head back into the corridors of Castle Wolfenstein and to see just how closely my memories of blasting Nazis and hording treasure hold up. I think others who remember Wolfenstein 3D and other, similar early FPS games fondly will potentially enjoy playing the game too, at least until its repetitiveness wears out its welcome. That said, if you were brought up on newer FPS games with frilly extras like “stories” and “mechanics” its hard to imagine Wolfenstein 3D keeping your interest even that long. It’s a highly influential, well polished, fun, but at the end of the day, very limited game, and it was improved on in just about every conceivable way by Id Software’s follow-up, Doom, and the long line of first person shooters that followed it. Outside of the nostalgic and those interested in FPS history, it’s unlikely to entertain all that much, sadly.

Bummer of an aside: While writing this and reminiscing about my old middle school computer science class, I thought it might be fun to track down my teacher and thank him for being an influence in my own successful career in information technology, only to discover that he passed away in 2012. Pouring one out for you, Mr. Miller!