On Valentine’s Day 1998 — 26 years ago today — Wolfenstein 3D was released for the Apple IIGS, six years after its original release for MS-DOS, and 17 years after the debut of its Apple II namesake, Castle Wolfenstein.
Wolfenstein 3D was originally created by John Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall of id Software. It popularized both the first-person shooter genre and the shareware distribution model:
Id made use of a technique known as texture mapping that, combined with a raycasting engine written in assembly language, allowed the three-dimensional graphics to be playable on the lowest common denominator machine, at the time a 286.
Perhaps, the most amazing aspect of Wolfenstein 3D had to do with its distribution. It was shareware. Using a time-honored shareware technique, the first 10 levels of Wolfenstein 3D were free. It was the additional levels that were sold directly through the distributor, a shareware game company called Apogee.
Alexander Antoniades, “Monsters From the Id: The Making of Doom“
The phenomenal reception among computer gamers exceeded expectations, according to Apogee founder Scott Miller:
Up until then, we were making about $10,000 a month off of Commander Keen and we were making about $15,000 a month off of the original Duke Nukem game. Then Wolfenstein came out, and we were making about $200,000 a month.
Interview with Benj Edwards, “20 Years Of Evolution: Scott Miller And 3D Realms“
The game was soon ported to multiple platforms, including the Super Nintendo, Atari Jaguar, and 3DO. The effort to port it to the IIGS involved the companies id, Logicware, and Vitesse, and famed developers including “Burger” Becky Heineman, Eric “Sheppy” Shepherd, Scott Everts (formerly of Interplay), and Ninjaforce‘s Clue. A small team of beta testers assisted with quality assurance, with anecdotes of that experience shared on my personal blog.
The Apple IIGS version outperformed its source material in many ways, including audio:
Since the Ninjaforce programmers were from Germany, they were eminently suited to speak the German phrases that appeared in the game. In fact, some of the phrases in the original PC version of the game didn’t even make sense. In one place, a guard shouts, “Haben Sie Führerschein?” which means “Do you have driving license?” One of Ninjaforce’s members, Dreamer, asked his grandfather to speak the phrases that were wanted for the game. These were recorded in April 1997, and appeared in the final version. As a result, the IIGS version of Wolfenstein 3D is the only version in which authentic German voices and pronunciations were used in the game.
Steve Weyhrich, “The Long Strange Sage of Wolfenstein 3D on the Apple IIGS“
Upon its release, the IIGS version was met with expected and deserved critical acclaim:
To say that Wolfenstein 3D for the Apple IIGS was “popular” would be an understatement. It even became an event at KansasFest 1998, with a “KFest Shootout” planned as a contest. In January 1999, Ryan Suenaga listed it as one of the two best freeware products of 1998, tying with Kelvin Sherlock’s GShisen.
… Wolfenstein 3D on the IIGS is one of the most complex and demanding games that ever appeared for that computer, and a credit to the dedication to the platform demonstrated by Sheppy and his contributors.
Steve Weyhrich, “The Long Strange Sage of Wolfenstein 3D on the Apple IIGS“
When reached for comment on the occasion of this anniversary, Eric Shepherd said, “Autsch, mein Gehirn tut weh!”
Both Wolfenstein 3D and a scenario converter for playing levels made for the Macintosh version of the game remain available for free download from Shepherd’s website.
The source code for the original Wolf3D was released to GitHub in 2012. What other platforms might we see it be ported to next?