Epic Win: Wolfenstein 3D
Submitted by katsak
We got this game for $1 from the flee market on a 5ΒΌ-inch floppy disk when we were kids. Then late at night or before they got home from work, we’d sneak into our parent’s office and play on the old 386. It was the first time most of us saw blood-splatter in a video game and it popularized first-person shooter style games. Remember all of the cool hidden rooms? How many of you had handmade maps on graphing paper so you could collect all of the secret compartment shwag?
Ah hell yeah!
Much fun here!
But I wanted to be first
yeah! W3D… Feel’s like a kid again. Nowadays kids dont know whats the floopy disk anyway. Whats next? NFS 1? Twisted Metal?
I had an x-men game that consisted of three floppy disks that you had to keep switching in the drive depending on where you were at in the game. I don’t think we ever had this game though, but I do love that you can shoot the dog!
Space Ace on the Amiga had something like 5 or 6 disks. A couple of them just contained one cut scene each. Was so worth it.
oh yeah, loved this game as a kid.
My brothers and I were so into this game we found the cheat codes for it and then played or edited the levels for hours and hours. So much time was spent with this game as a kid for me.
FLEA market
But I’ve been to these markets. You actually do want to flee.
You do have a point…
Well, I agree with this post, but the TRUE blast from the past would be Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple ][+. I want to call it the “original”, but I’m not sure it is.
Yeah, that’s the one I remember… the 2.5-D version! It was AWESOME!
alas, i was never able to enjoy wolfenstein. while playing it (or watching someone else play it) i would get nauseous. >_< stupid motion sickness….
LOL I suffered from that too! I remember the first time my brother played I was like “Oh so coo…oh I’m feeling sick…” XD
Oh wow! I’ve remembered playing this game as a kid but I could never recall the name.
Oh HELLS yes, this was awesome. The Hitler level cracked me up.
Or how about the levels were all the rooms were made of swastika’s?
FLEA market, not FLEE market
Trust me, they were fleeing the market.
I thought I was such a BAMF playing Wolfenstein.
Then Doom came out and blew W3D out of the water.
Yeah! Wolfenstein 3-D was a game changer and deserves its kudos on this site.
I wish I still the version that my brother and I hacked. We altered the graphics with “Shoot Me” signs on the soldier’s backs. Especially nice were the extra blood splatters we added and bodies ripping in half. Made it much more satisfying!
Dang, I wish I could play this right now!
How did you make it so bodies rip in half?
I can’t even remember the specifics except that you could directly edit the application’s data. So we just basically repainted each frame of the animation. I think there were only like 3 or 4 frames for the whole “kill scene”.
We used to play this on my housemate’s old 486 while we were at Uni. It made me motion sick.
I played this just last year again on an old laptop. Sure is an easy download at 600k. I remember downloading it back in the 14.4 modem days, it took forever back then.
It’s still a fun game
maaan…those were the days
I’m impressed that this game and not Doom came up, despite both being nostalgic, simply because this game came before Doom
Doom was awsome too. And did not give me motion sickness.
The SNES version was notorious for its censored content. Just to name a few things:
Hitler had his mustache removed and became “Staatmeister”.
The swatstikas were removed, so sometimes there would be just logoless banners around.
All blood was turned grey and referred to as ’sweat’.
Guard dogs were transformed into giant rats
LOL that must have been a seriously different game.
I think that may have been the version I was playing – it was my uncle’s game, and my sister and I were paying when we were about 7/8.
I didn’t know who Hitler was, so I can’t comment on that, but I do remember the insanely giant rats and random wall hangings that were blank.
…didn’t really notice that it was weird, at the time. XD
hehe gigant rats
“GOOTen tag!”
When that guy jumped out at me I nearly had a heart attack!
Ach! Mein Leben!
This game is the reason I still have the old 486 around.
Ok, this one, and a whole lot of other games that just won’t play on the newer boxes. (Hint to the game makers out there… gear up the classic games for the faster boxes and re-release them XD )
That’s what DOSBox is for!
Seriously look into it.
Yeah. It’s going to be way easier to use DOSBox than hope some video game manufacturer will re-release a game and not ruin it. Even runs on Macs and Linux PCs.
that game was so cool!
I used to stand behind my dad with my brothers and start yelling SHOOT THAT ONE SHOOT IT!!!! cuz I wasnt allowed to play it till i got older
OH MY GOD YES!!!
I totally remember Duke Nukem and Blake Stone… We had a 250 games cd which had all of these on it… Including Hugo’s house of Horrors 1-2-3… Awesome games…
many nazi fell to my chain gun in this game, never found all of the hidden chambers inthe game though , hours of fun, played both on the pc and on the SNES, and they rerealesed it on the Gameboy Adavance a few years ago, but i thinkit was basedon the snes version XD
I used to play this on the first computer we had in our classroom. The teacher banned us from playing it in a little less than a week. But wow, it sure beat the hell out of the QBASIC games and was fun while it lasted.
I have the GBA version (Doom and Doom II, as well). 3-D shooters are VERY difficult to control on the system. I remember the “Get Psyched!” load bar took FOREVER to finish on the old compy, but it was done in about a half second on the GBA.
HAHAH… oh Wolfenstein. lots of family memories with the cousins on this one
Oh I was nice that you could buy this pirated, just so long as someone xeroxed the manual for you! My uncle gave this one to us, and I remember logging on each time and having to look something up in the book. Also, the new wolfenstein games, I can’t play them, my memories of this are way too good.
Same goes for Goldeneye on N64 and newer Bond games.
I remember trying to download that from a BBS on my 2400 bps modem. I seem to recall it took over 2 hours. I remember being amazed that I really got tense playing a game on a computer when the german shepherd jumped out at me.
I, too, had a pirated game, and got thru the first three or four levels (out of six, wasn’t it?) by using the mouse to move Blaskowitz around. I didn’t know you could use the arrow keys to move him!
Once I discovered the arrow keys, the game went a lot faster. And I never found all of the secrets, neither.
I was a preteen girl when this came out, so although I was *totally* aware of it, I spent more time with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I’ve just read the Wikipedia article on Wolf 3D, though, and WOW what a game. I think my favorite is the “Call Apogee” sign but most *surprising* is that the player character is supposedly the grandfather of Commander Keen!! That’s so awesome.
Anybody remember Jill of the Jungle?
*crickets*
YES! Jill of the Jungle was awesome, I just never finished it @_@;; This makes me want to dig out my old 386!
I finally finished Jill of the Jungle after downloading it a couple of years ago. I love that game!
great memories of this game!!!
I am sure if I loaded up this game I could remember all the maps without thinking. I faced ever single wall panel in the whole game and hit, I think it was spacebar?, to see if I could open the panel.
Hmmm…. This looks familiar… Can someone help me? When I was little, we went over to my moms friend’s house and her daughter (who was like 16 and I was 5 or something) had a computer game sort of like this that she let me play. You ran around a maze like thing like in this, but instead of shooting nazis, you shot at things like walking skeletons and zombie. (I remember the walking skeletons the most for some reason) Does anyone know what that game was?
Catacombs 3D?
Oh I modded the crud out of those old ID games, Wolf 3D and Doom. It was pretty easy to edit the game sprites for Wolf3D and the total frames you had to edit were pretty small.
Could’ve been a game called Blood, as well. I’d google screenshots of both and see what you come up with.
Yep. That was it. Thank you.
What I remember most is the last level of the shareware version:
The elevator door opens, you hear the ominous music, and you see a room, empty but for the pillars on either side, and a door on the opposite wall. You nervously step out of the elevator, quickly turn right, then left, and no ambush.
The music continues, you step to your right to look behind the pillars, your neck craning as though it would help you peer around it to see the Nazi before he sees you…but no-one is there.
Feeling more sure of yourself, you move about the room normally, looking for the ambush that doesn’t come, so you figure there must be someone behind the door. You walk up to it, check your health and ammo, then open the door.
You don’t hear what he has to say, you just see that he is twice your size (height and width) and has two, count ‘em two, turbine guns that fire immediately. You barely shout your expletive before you’re on the floor, a bloody mess.
That was the first time I swore out loud.
I beat that guy easily, there is a chaingun hidden in the previous level
hahaha i remember this game. my parents wouldnt let my play it cuz i was like, 3. but when my brother let me play it was a huge deal. haha he would put me on the level with the weird zombie-frankensteins with the guns on their chests on the hardest difficulty (death-incarnate.) what a dick haha.
Oh my gosh. My dad taught me how to play this game when I was like 4 or 5. I never got the idea to graph out the secret rooms, so instead I would just kill all of the enemies, then circle the perimeter of the room holding spacebar! >_<
Duude… I hardly ever played this game… I love the concept but it’s really claustrophobic and stuff (almost scared the sh*t out of me when that dog came out!) I think the only other game more cluastrophobic (and much more disturbing) than this game is “Bad Toys.” Man, that laughing, giant smiley face… *shudders*
BAH! BAH I say! You want an Epic Win, go for the original Castle Wolfenstein. Flat, top down appearance. Nothing special. But when an SS man came in and “SS” Came through the soundboard, that would scare the crap out of folks.
/Old School
Yup. You’d find a uniform to sneak past the guards, but the SS would always spot you, and then they’d stay on your trail until you took them out with a grenade — which would usually attract more SS.
Someone who remembers!
You find in a chest: Schnapps! The War Plans! A Grenade!
Liebfraumilch!
I’ve been playing this all 15 years of my life, my grandfather and I would play it together. at that point I knew how to open the doors and where the wall panels were. I still play it, but all I know now is where the first wall panel is
Never played it, but it reminds me of an old Windows screensaver, a maze with customizable walls.
Uh, chronology fail?
the game that started it all for me. been hooked on video games ever since. the classics never die.
Ha ha ha! The number of Nazis I racked up playing this game! Loved it!
ARRRG ARRRGGG! What are they? PIRITES???? ARRRGG ARRGG ARRG! ANNOYING!!
I loved that game! I had it on my windows 3.1 computer.
I hid it from my parents because i was young back then and blood and guns were a huge thing. 0.0
I started with Doom, but there was the doom level cheat where you could go back and play a wolf3d level.
Oh…FPS…how do I love you…
God damn, that takes me back. My sister had a game saved, like, at the point where Hitler’s health ran out, and we used to open it up to watch his flesh melt off his bones.
Meanwhile this one time I was playing, like, a part of the game I hadn’t beaten before, and it was all dark in the computer room and it was all silent and intense as I was caaaaaarefully going around corners, and my dad burst through the door and shouted “HOO HA HA!” and I jumped about three feet in the air. Good times.
I beat all 6 of these games by the time I was 11…so great. One of the best parts was the cheat code that added extra gore…a lot of extra gore =D Wish I could still play these.
Oh man, I remember this game, my brother used to play it all the time. My mother hated it. Actually, I think this along with Doom was why we were banned from playing first person shooters for a long time. Until 007 Goldeneye that is. We were allowed to play Diablo, because they were demons and not real people.
I personally never played it, but along with Kings Quest, such good memories from my childhood.
Also there was this one that I loved, but I can’t for the life of my remember it’s name. Or much details about it. Lots of secret panels and fruit though.
I electrocuted myself playing this game. I was trying to take the computer cover off to do something and it hit the power supply. the kicker is that it was on my birthday and my grandparents had just driven up to take me to see a movie!
I remember stealing this from my brother’s game collection and playing it while I supposed to be sleeping. First video game I ever played!
…it’s still forbidden in germany
I remember the secret room in doom 2 I think, that was like this game complete with dark blue brick walls and “AIEEE” screaming nazis.
I love this game
Would play it back on my brother’s old windows 3.1 PC back in the day, but I would always get killed by the dogs XD
I think the floppy is laying somewhere around here now, but this computer doesn’t even have a floppy drive, shows you how times have changed
I have a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone and got it on there. It’s almost as good as playing the REAL thing
My mom had a problem with violent games, but she would play this all day while we were at school.