Saturday, 22nd July 2023

Wolfenstein 3D: the grandfather of FPS

Wolfenstein 3D is the first-person shooter that popularized the whole genre in the early 90s and is considered one of the greatest games ever made. Wolfenstein 3D was designed by John Romero and Tom Hall (id Software) and released as shareware by Apogee Software in 1992 for DOS. Wolfenstein 3D is based on the Wolf3D engine, programmed by John Carmack.

Game info
Genres: shooter, first-person shooter

Systems: DOS, Mac

Year: 1992

Publisher: Apogee Software

Developer: id software

Designers: John Romero, Tom Hall

Themes: World War II, science fiction, alternate history

Keywords: Europe, shareware, first person 3D, Engine: Wolfenstein 3D engine

Game modes: single-player
Input: keyboard, mouse, joystick, gamepad
Distributed on: 3,5 floppy disk, 5,25 floppy disk, cd-rom, download
Also published for: Acorn 32-bit

Collector's notes
The first episode was released as shareware for free distribution by Apogee and the whole original trilogy of episodes made available for purchase on May 5 as Wolfenstein 3D.
In 1993 Apogee also published the Wolfenstein 3D Super Upgrades pack, which included 815 fan-made levels called "WolfMaster", along with a map editor titled "MapEdit" and a random level generator named "Wolf Creator".
A retail Wolfenstein episode double the length of the Apogee episodes, Spear of Destiny, was released through FormGen on September 18, 1992.

Find out more about Wolfenstein 3D