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."

Comments

Ah, game journalism

[bonch]

The game is a remake of the classic Apple II game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

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.

Re:Prequel to ReturnToWolfenstein

[Nerdfest]

Yes, the original Castle Wolfenstein was an Apple }{ game. It was a top down monochrome shooter, with some nifty speaker tricks to emulate speech. Very cool game for the time (1982?)

Logged on to play.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Slow as hell

[Dwedit]

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.

Re:Slow as hell

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a quad-core CPU and a mid-range GPU that pushes more FLOPs than a PS3, so I can run Crysis at decent framerate.
But this version of the game stutters horribly and gets less than 10 frames/sec when enemies appear.

F------. Would not play again.

Re:Slow as hell

[monkeyhybrid]

What's wrong with that? I think it's pretty cool to see classics like this ported to 'super slow Javascript'. Kind of puts things in perspective when a game I saved up to buy all those years back (after playing the hell out of a magazine demo) and also led me to save up more money to upgrade from my AdLib soundcard to a SoundBlaster Pro (so I could hear more than what seemed like white noise sound effects), is now fully playable in my web browser, for free, with no install, and barely touching my CPU.

Re:Bethesda: Working on this instead of fixing Sky

[discord5]

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.

doesn't look like much now, but...

[Xtifr]

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.

Re:doesn't look like much now, but...

[I.M.O.G.]

I recall the same experience... Prior to seeing Wolfenstein3D, I had graduated from Intellivision to the Nintendo NES, and that constituted my main gaming exposure, other than some early versions of Flight Simulator. Wolfenstein3D blew me away with the graphics possible on a computer, and I probably jumped out of my seat a number of times as the immersion was like nothing I'd seen before. A lot of games with impressive graphics since then, but nothing like that first impression... Kind of a cool experience, yields a different sort of appreciation I think compared to that of younger gamers who have a more modern sense of graphics expectations.

Re:doesn't look like much now, but...

[artor3]

I remember having a friend describe Wolfenstein 3D to me before I actually saw it. I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I kept thinking it would have to be static images, like those old RPGs in which you looked in the four cardinal directions simultaneously (e.g. Moraff's World), and couldn't imagine how you could have a shooter like that. Realtime 3D really was amazing to see for the first time. Moreso even than seeing actual 3D with active shutter glasses many years later.

An abbreviated timeline, for those who care

[swordgeek]

* 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!

Already done in 4KB of Java

[Walking The Walk]

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.

Re:Already done in 4KB of Java

[artor3]

That's nothing like the original Wolfenstein 3D. The graphics are crap compared to the real thing (no animations -- bad guys go from living to dead in one frame), and the level layout doesn't even match. It's cool that they got it in 4 KB and all, but I can't imagine anyone preferring that version to Bethesda's.

Re:Prequel to ReturnToWolfenstein

[antdude]

Play that online: http://www.virtualapple.org/castlewolfensteindisk.html ;)