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Wolfenstein 3-D Celebrates 20 Years With Free Browser-Based Version
Dr Herbert West writes "20 years ago today, id software released Wolfenstein 3D, inspired by the classic Apple II game, Castle Wolfenstein. To celebrate, Bethesda Softworks on Wednesday released a free, browser-based version of the iconic first-person shooter. Users can pick which level they wish to play in the browser version, even the secret levels."
Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a remake made in 2001. The Apple II games by Muse Software were Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein 3D was not an official remake of them, but it was inspired by them.
RTCW was a 2001 release. I was playing W3D *waaaaay* before that.
Good to see the classics making a comeback, tho.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Was there a game that came before Return To Castle Wolfenstein. ÂAnd was it ever ported to a more advanced machine than the Apple II (like Atari or Comodore)?
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
They wanted my fucking bitrthdate so I gave them 1/1/1900.
WTF, is our fucking legal system so screwed that having some dipshit fucking form where anyone can lie is preferable to to just letting anyone play?!?
Nevermind don't answer that. That was rhetorical.
DOn't want to get the pedant NAzis all worked up here.
Works just fine for me with Firefox 12 under Ubuntu.
This sig is false.
Yes, let's take a game originally coded in tight X86 assembly language, then shit all over it by converting it into super slow Javascript.
Then again, rather than going to wolfenstein.bethsoft.com-- which doesn't work and only shows a black screen-- I went to piratebay.org. A few seconds later, and it worked like a charm.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I guess this is why they haven't fixed all of those bugs in Skyrim. They were too busy making a browser-based Wolfenstein.
Nah man, this is the tech demo for the Elder Scrolls MMO. I shit you not.
It's hard to tell from looking at it now, just how much of a revelation Wolfenstein3D really was. Compared to modern games, the graphics look like crap, and even back then, we had games with better graphics in the cut scenes, but we all knew that cut-scenes were pre-rendered, slowly, on much bigger machines. The idea that our simple desktop systems could create that level of 3D realism on the fly was astonishing! The first time I saw it, I kept wondering if it was going to make my CPU explode from all the calculations it must be performing.
The page source shows me some beautifully nested divs indicating game components (like HUD). Is this all javascript?
I can't believe how familiar that first level was to me. Didn't get lost at all. Amazing the things we remember.
What I don't understand is why they didn't keep the iD name.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Works just fine is a bit of an overstatement. Took me a few minutes to reorient to the controls and remind myself why we started actually using the mouse with DOOM. Ouch.
The textures are fucked for me. As I walk by a dead body there is clearly a frame that flashes of the soldier standing erect...every time. The side panels of doors also render as a rainbow.
Aside from that its very jerky, not smooth at all. Looks better with the browser in full screen mode but, still rendering badly.
I know its free but, as someone who played the original, for all its faults, it was better than this.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'm pretty sure that my old 386 DX 40 -- of which I played Wolfenstein 3D through several times via my gravis game pad -- can't even manage 1% of the power of my current MacBook Pro; but yet this browser based bloat really knows how to suck up my resources for something that's so simple compared to today's games.
Maybe I should be playing this on my PC instead, since JavaScript is such a resource hog? My PC is an i7 at 4Ghz with a GTX 580. Maybe it can manage better? Then again, some of my modern games use less resources than this abomination. <sarcasm>Hurray for progress.</sarcasm>
Sorry, your IP address shows you are coming from a country that requires us to block access to this particular site.
German internet censorship laws at work. As a popular meme figure would say: "I don't want to live in this country anymore" (or something like that).
* Castle Wolfenstein: 1981 (on the Apple ][. Atari and Commodore shortly thereafter)
* Beyond Castle Wolfenstein: 1984
* Hovertank 3D: 1991 First FPS
* Wolfenstein 3D: 1992
* Return to Castle Wolfenstein: 2001. A very, VERY different game!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Work in Opera. I'm not sure if it's intended, but some of the wall textures get a bit horizontally "compressed" if you view them at angles.
Oh well, I guess it's cool. Too bad they took so long in doing this when others have done far more.
We have to go deeper!
Wow. That was so horribly jerky I started feeling sick playing it. And I'm a guy that plays a ton of cs source with his mouse sensitivity cranked and whipping around wasting people.
It's Wolfenstein 3D alright, but with only arrow key controls it sucks way too much.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"a remake of a classic Apple II game, 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein.'"
first, wrong game
second, classic is very debatable, most people didn't know it existed until well after wolf3d, including myself, and I have owned and apple II since 1985 to present
just cause its old, its not automatically a classic
As of this posting, the port linked in the article doesn't work on Opera 11.64 (Win 32). Luckily, Wolfenstein 3D has already been ported to a 4KB Java applet, for the 2011 Java4K competition. Go play it there instead.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
Because between Doom3 and Rage, iD has been in gradual decline, a pale shadow of what successful 'indie/shareware' gaming can become given fame and success. iD is like all the bands that are 'still together' after 20-30 years even though have the members have been drummed out/left because the vision and excitement that once made the company great has long since past.
Go read up on Adrian Carmack's dismissal and then put that into perspective with the iD sellout and you'll see that this had been planned for quite some time. Combine that with Valve and Epic's success with their game engines' licensing compared to the 4th generation of iD's (And it's not like we've seen a bunch of Tech 5 games either!) and you know the writing has been on the wall since midway between when Q3A and Doom3 came out.
looked at the HTML source code & it's all div's not canvas. the JS isn't a recompiled version - they actually re-wrote it from scratch.
What I don't understand is why they didn't keep the iD name.
Probably because id has never spelled their name lowercase i, uppercase d.
IN MY BROWSER
TOO DAMSLOW TO PLAY.
i HAVE THE ORIGINAL THOUGH! :)ahahahah
AND i paid FOR IT! 2
MY FAvorite game before Quake.
Now Q3 still beats the crap out of every game today. (CTF & FFA)
one of these HERE days I'm gonna get myself a reeeel innnernet kunecshun and come back to the Q3 servers still surviving and just laywayste to the poor slackers.
Yea that and when I get to be a multibillyunaire I'll pay someone to build my own network so we don't have LAG time :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Whatever happened to the original Death Cam? That made the whole game!
Works for me w/ FF in Ubuntu 12.04; I set Opera to mask as FF for the site, works fine, set it in Speed Dial. The video is worth watching/listening to, bit of interesting history. I'd like to see the Jaguar version, time to see about emulation for it, I guess.
it's sad not to have that great little music playing. the music playback seems improved too.
else this is the first 3D javascript game ever that runs acceptably!, though I have a fast PC (athlon II X2).
It used to be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst-Wessel-Lied in the original PC version
Try picking a lock without sound. You're supposed to get a click when one of the three digit numbers hits, but I had no sound, so I was playing the state lottery to kill Hitler. I did it once. The worst part is if you died, thats it, restart. So not only did you have to get a three digit combination right, you had to use that dagger to slay guards and make your way to the bottom of the bunker and out with 1 life.
God spoke to me
And yet Doom 3 and Rage both sold millions.
Not in the original game of course, but the modern website front end..
I entered my birthdate as the 32nd day of the 13th month of 1874, and it was cool with the fact that I was born on a fictitious day in a fictitious month and I'm older than the oldest person alive on the planet.
I'm looking forward to this.. the intro music has stimulated some neurons that have lain totally dormant for 20 years. I can't wait to find the crazy machine gun wielding giant blue guy who shouts "GUTENTAG!!!"
I disagree, iD has been a game engine company since Doom first came out, the product isn't the game, it's the engine. The games themselves are basically just extensive demos of the engine that people just happen to enjoy playing.
That being said, I really think they could have done better with the Doom 3 level design as it just wasn't very good. And ditched that stupid stealth sequence in RtCW.
Good to see the classics making a comeback, tho.
Is it always a good thing? It's the same game you can play in DOSBox already. We've already seen lot of remakes of the classic adventure games, for example. I think it is also important to grasp what aspects made them so memorable, and then make completely new games based on those observations.
Very jerky indeed. I took out my old floppies and loaded WOLF3D in dosbox and it was smooth as butter. Added bonus, I never had so much EMS and XMS memory free in my life!
Yeah, but somehow W3D didn't have that fully immersive experience that came with Doom.
"Sorry, your IP address shows you are coming from a country that requires us to block access to this particular site." (Austria)
while we're at it, check out my project: http://code.google.com/p/bzzwolfsp
coop version of return to castle wolfenstein, wil run on your precious mac/linux/windows boxes
Sitting here in Germany (and being a German), I get this message when I call the link:
"Sorry, your IP address shows you are coming from a country that requires us to block access to this particular site."
Thanks you, Germany, Thank you very much for taking such good, loving and thoughtful case of your children.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
id has not been in any gradual decline. They still make millions with games that are admitedly tech demos. They are just as strong as ever, more sophisticated gamers with opinions might think otherwise and such opinions are completely valid, as Doom 3 and Rage were less than perfect, which is what people expected for some reason from people who have been almost 20 years making blank states for people to make stuff - mods, TC, other games. People whould have known that ever since Quake, which was an honest attempt at making a hugely moddable game, throwing in some nice SP because Sandy Petersen and John Romero are good designers. There is a reason why Carmack is the face of the company: and that reason is that id isn't a "game studio", they are "game developers" and that is the focus of the company.
Oblivion Awaits
Wish it was a download. The web version sucks.
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Ah, I remember playing this when I was younger. It is always nice to play a nostalgic game like this to see what games were like back in the day.
You really need to watch the Bethesda "video podcast" of John Carmack playing Wolfenstein 3D and commenting on it - it's fascinating stuff.
Particularly as he brings up exactly the point you're talking about and how the big studios, with multi-year plans for a single game can make really epic stuff but loose out on a lot of the ingenuity and flexibility a small group of people can have. If you plan to make a game in just a couple of months, you can perfect the gameplay or pull and scrap "features" as necessary to make the game truly fun, whereas on a big AAA title you can't really do that without potentially pushing the project back years - assuming it gets released at all.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amDtAPHH-zE
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I've just tried it in Firefox 12 and it was working fine, poor controls aside. I am running a decent dev machine with a Quad Core Sandy Bridge under the hood and 12Gb of RAM though - so it might be down to that.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Fuck you, youtube^Wgoogle, I'm not going to create an account just because someone somewhere thought someone else somewhere else might possibly be sometimes in future be offended by pixels of red color.
Didn't like Doom 3 at all, but Rage is the best thing they've made since Doom 2. I'd say they're pulling out of a decline, if anything.
Id Tech 5 is actually an amazing engine and set of tools, allowing multiple artists to modify the same map at the same time without messing each other up, with full version control over art assets. You don't know how much that speeds up development vs the ANCIENT tools that come with source. Source is waaaaay out of date, but it works fine for what Valve is doing, so they just keep patching it. But Source can't handle things like megatexturing that id tech 5 does well. Unreal Engine 3.999 by Epic is on the same level as Id Tech 5, as is frostbite 2, and just about nothing else. These are bleeding-edge engines, and no, we haven't seen many games with them yet; but they JUST CAME OUT. AAA games, the kind that would licence these engines, take years to develop, so it won't be until years that we'll start seeing these engines. Not to mention, consoles are holding back PC development, there's no point in making a more powerful engine if it can't run on console too.
At this point, Id isn't concerned so much about making amazing games, nor is Epic. Before Gears of War, epic was just kicking out another Unreal Tournament after Unreal Tournament. They all played pretty much the same. Pretty limited game too, fun, but just multiplayer, that's all. But that was the point. Id and Epic are spending so long working on these engines, they don't have time for games as much, and they don't care to. They make their games as tech demos, to show off the engine to other companies. You go back throughout time, all the games by Id, look at quake 2 (half-life was made with that engine, MUCH more of a "game" in the traditional sense, with a proper story, vs quake2's simple action) you have quake 3 (other games like Jedi Outcast or Star Trek Elite Force were made with that engine, again, MUCH more of traditional "games" with a full story and campaign, vs quake 3's simple multiplayer).
Thats just their business model, man. And somebody's gotta make those engines, most game companies just want to make games. They don't have the time or the money or the interest to roll their own engine for every game.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
iD is a company based in Dallas, led by John Carmack, which makes games, like doom.
Bethesda is a subsidiary of ZeniMax, based out of Bethesda, Maryland, which publishes games.
Bethesda was never known as "iD". Id is still known as Id. So I have no idea what you're talking about.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
iD is also a subsidiary of ZeniMax. The game featured in the article was produced by iD, but is now published on the Bethesda website. This indicates to me that the iD name is at least somewhat deprecated.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
bonch is one of many user accounts which are used to pose as corporate shills for companies such as apple and microsoft, and also to crapflood discussions with personal attacks on fellow slashdotters.
Other known sockpuppet acounts are BasilBrush, Overly Critical Guy, hairyfeet, SharkLaser, InsightIn140bytes, jo_ham, etc.
Here's what one of them has to say about the art of corporate shilling:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2035122&cid=35473078
do you wanna help slashdot? mod these sockpuppets down. They are only effective if they manage to get modpoints to upvote their own posts.
Thanks, dude! Very interesting clip. :)