Posts Tagged ‘wolfenstein’
Podcast: Wolfenstein
This week features a massive three hours dedicated largely to the Wolfenstein franchise. Most are probably aware of the more recent shooters and the 90s game from id, but there’s a lot more to tell about this somewhat underappreciated series. Fred and Jam start with the original title on the Apple II and move all the way to the upcoming sequel this Friday. Segment 2 is all about community questions and segment 3 wraps things up with some neo-retro gaming from both hosts.
Apogee Software and GoG Are Giving Away Rise of the Triad
Today at 4:00 PM GMT (that’s 12:00 PM EDT and 9:00 AM PDT for those who need it easy) game distribution site Good Old Games is giving away Rise of the Triad for the first 30,000 people who request it. Now what’s funny to me is that the press release says they’re giving away the 2013 version of Rise of the Triad whereas I would have assumed it would be the original The Dark War version from 1994 but who knows, for now I would trust it’s the newer (and better) game. After the first 30,000 go it’s still going to be available at 80 percent off, which is a steal for that game. As my review in the link will explain, if you want the 90s brought back to life with modern controls and graphics, this long 20+ hour FPS with a campaign and frag-fest multiplayer is a gem. If you want to be prepared, you may want to zip over to the site, make a username if you don’t have one already, and be signed in and ready to refresh your browser at the golden hour. It’s free, what have you got to lose. Also if you’re curious to read up on what started life as the sequel to Wolfenstein 3-D, feel free to check out our historical context article on the development of the original.
Version: Wolfenstein 3D on 16-bit
This week we put the original SNES release of Wolfenstein 3D up against the recent homebrew port of the game on the Sega Genesis. How do you think it will work out?
Looking Back at Wolfenstein 3D
In truth the dawn of the first person shooter (FPS) and its popularity is more a case of luck as a group of intelligent designers got together and created pseudo-3D worlds. In 1991 John Carmack was accompanied by three others as the development team at id Software (that story was already told in our podcast) and funded by a company named Apogee (they also developed Rise of the Triad). Carmack had created the Catacomb 3D engine, which utilized ray casting to create 3D looking environments. In ray casting, basically lines are drawn in a grid and if they intersect a texture is placed at the intersection and over a grand enough grid, you get depth perception and a software-based flat image that looks like it’s in 3D. Combine that with the fact that Muse Software, developers of the innovative stealth-action Castle Wolfenstein title from the 80s, had let the license lapse and you have the building blocks of this innovation in game design. Apogee gave Carmack and his team $100,000 to develop a shareware title and they decided to move forward with Wolfenstein 3D.
Gaming History 101 