![]() ![]() Even with the weight of expectation on its shoulders, the game outperformed even id's expectations-a hoped-for $60,000 first royalty cheque landed with $40,000 more than that on it. Players in 1992 were pumped for the release. The first of BJ Blazkowicz's Nazi-bashing adventures blew away all expectations-and these were already high. It was nothing short of revolutionary for the time, but the worry was still there: would a reimagining of a little-known, decade-old title be able to succeed? What we ended up with was a game of mazes and exploration, secrets and hidden gold stashes, Nazi soldiers shouting, 'Halt!' and SS officers crying, 'Mein Leben!' when gunned down. "We didn't want to slow it down so we actually removed the features and left it fast." The intention-the initial idea, even-was always to make a 3D version of Castle Wolfenstein, but in creating the game it soon became something similar only in setting and name than anything else. "The problem is that the game came to a dead stop when you did these things," John says. That's where the similarities began to fade, though-Wolf3D was shaping up to be a quick run-and-gun that felt great to those playing it. We even got it working so if a guard saw a dead body he tried finding the player." They were influential, of course, and John admits he and the id team had tried to incorporate elements from these games in the series' 3D debut: "We replicated a few of the features in the original game such as dragging dead bodies and opening crates. This was all very revolutionary in 1981, and unless you were playing on an Apple II back then you have no idea how awesome the game was at the time." These originals set the scene, with a castle, Nazis, violence against said Nazis, digitised sound and, honestly, not a huge amount other than that tying them to later releases. "He combined his game with another of his creations, The Voice, which could play back digitized audio, which is how the talking Nazis came about. ![]() It just needed the team at id to sit down and make it. ![]() It didn't need $2.5 million to be a global phenomenon. Its release directly spawned Doom and Quake, and influenced an entire genre still enjoying ludicrous popularity to this day. Wolfenstein 3D would still happen, though. id was willing to sell-even going so far as to create a cute little piece of artwork to celebrate the purchase-but wrangling over payments, with John Romero requesting $100,000 up front alongside a letter of intent, meant ultimately Sierra backed out of the deal. It shouldn't surprise you to hear that, in the end, Sierra's offer wasn't followed through. There were first-person games before id's effort, there were better games with more longevity since-most from id itself-but Wolfenstein 3D was the game that kickstarted everything, and made established publishers have a ‘holy shit' moment that made them slap $2.5 million dollars down on the table. It's difficult to understate how impactful a game Wolfenstein 3D was-how much it changed things, how it raised the bar, decided it still wasn't high enough and so tore it off and threw it over a mountain. Wolfenstein 3D was so good that, when id Software took an early version to Sierra in 1992, the publisher quickly tabled a $2.5 million offer to purchase the pre-Doom dev studio. ![]()
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