Aram Cretan STS 145: History of Computer Game Design Professor Henry Lowood 2/22/200 1 Wolfenstein 30: The first game that ever made my pulse race 1. Wolfenstein 30 (roughly based on the old Castle Wolfenstein games for the Apple 11) was released in 1992 as a DOS game by id software. (It was later ported to the Macintosh by MacPlay, a great Mac gaming company which was recently acquired by United Developers.) Its development team was quite a bit smaller than the football-team- sized groups of many games today. It was made by now-legendary programers John Carmack and John Romero (Jason Blochowiak is credited with “additional programming”); artist Adrian Carmack (no relation, of course); and Creative Director Tom Hall. 2. Wolfenstein 30 is a first-person shooter from the perspective of BJ Blazkowickz, a WWII Allied spy who has just jumped his Nazi captor, acquired a gun, and is now trying to escape. How is he going to escape? Why, by shooting every Nazi in his path, of course. This was the first really successful 3D, first-person shooter games, and the idea that a game should be more than just shooting everything in your path and then beating a boss hadn’t really come into being. And frankly, puzzles and crafty storylines just weren’t necessary. In 1992, the fact that you could navigate a 3D environment and use a gun that it looked like you were carrying to actually shoot people who looked somewhat 3D themselves was so cool that no one really cared if the most complex thing you had to do was find a key to get unlock the last door on the level. In fact, Wolfenstein 30 couldbe seen as a reaction to the cerebral puzzle games that the primitive graphic systems of early PCs forced designers to come up with. Just look at the name of its developer: id Software. The id is the part of the psyche that unconsciously seeks to fulfill our most primitive needs. And if you find the idea of negotiating a text-based world full of princes and fairies a bit lame, what’s the one thing that you’re probably absolutely aching to do? Blow some godless Nazi to a freaking pulp. Don’t think, dammit! Shoot! Twitch! Anything in Wolfenstein that moves needs to be killed. This is pre-Goldeneye-in which if you shoot the scientist you can’t get the data and you fail your mission. This isn’t even networked Quake, where there could be a half-second of indecision before you hit the trigger because that flash of movement could be someone on your team. No. If pixels shift on the screen, you must shoot them-because whatever they are sure as hell wants to kill you. So simple, and that’s exactly the point. 3. The phrase “the technology that makes the game” is particularly apt when discussing Wolfenstein 30, because the technology really does make the game. Side-scrolling had been done for years; first-person 3D is what made Wolfenstein so cool. As a side- scrolling game, this would just be Contra inside and with Nazis. Sure, first-person 3D had been done in games like Battlezone, but Wolfenstein was so much more complex than those early wireframe games. And, of course, you’re a person rather than a tank, which also intensifies the experience. When I downloaded the demo in order to write this paper, I was a little disappointed in the graphics. I remembered them being smoother so many years ago. I figured this was just nostalgia, but in poking around on the Internet, I realized what itwas. When I first played this game, I played it on a Mac; I have since joined the Dark Side. Before PCs started to come with such ridiculously accelerated, chock-full-of-RAM graphics cards, the Mac had a dramatic graphics advantage-which was why it so frustrating that PCs became the dominant gaming platform. Although my PC has one of those fancy graphics cards, Wolfenstein hasn’t been updated to take advantage of it. Hence, it still looks chunky, and at some resolutions, there’s distortion. If you make the screen too small, instead of the graphics getting sharper, the game just gets harder and harder to play because the graphics stay pretty much equally pixilated, but get smaller. Fortunately my computer is fast enough to do just about anything Wolfenstein demands of it, but I imagine it might have been more frustrating with a 20Mhz 386. id does claim that it will run on a 286; I’m not sure I’d want to try. The enemies in the game are not the exquisitely rendered, finely detailed graphics that made id one of the premiere computer gaming companies-they’re basically primitively animated rectangular prisms. They have a front, two sides and a rear. The animation isn’t generally exactly in sync with the movement of the sprite as a whole, so sometimes they seem to just kind of float on over to you. When I was first attacked by a dog, it took me a minute to realize he was attacking me and not just gnawing on thin air. When I first played the game way back when, I only used the arrow keys to control the player, because that was what made sense to me, given the types of games I was used to playing. As I loaded up the game again, I was happy to notice that id not only let you use a mouse, but a joystick or the Gravis GamePad (which resembled a Super Nintendo controller in layout and cost, as I recall, about $50.) Initially I tried to re- create my initial experience with the game by just using the arrow keys, but that quicklybecame frustrating after so many years of mousing, so I switched over. The mouse control feels quite different from the kind that Quake and Unreal had accustomed me to-it’s more of a sluggish one-to-one feel than the more modern control models which incorporate mouse speed and acceleration. I was surprised that moving the mouse forward and backward didn’t cause the view to move down and up but rather caused the character to step forward and back, until it occurred to me that there was, of course, no reason to look up or down-all the action occurs on one plane. The AI isn’t terribly complex. Once they see you, they shoot at you. It’s difficult to tell if they respond to sound-they don’t seem to. They will pursue you out of a room, but they won’t open the door once it closes. (The physics are fairly consistent, though. I killed a guard in a doorway once, and came back
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