![]() ![]() Spy or not, it was you versus an entire castle of Nazis. It only took one poorly negotiated run-in and you were done for – and kicked back to the very start of the level, however far through you made it.ĭespite being a latecomer to the self-flagellation party, there was something incredibly perfect about “I am death incarnate!” mode, not least because you’re a prisoner escaping from certain death, and the fear of being caught is ever-present. The only true way to play Wolf3D is on ultra-hard mode – and I say this as a man who’ll buy every Call of Duty game going, but never venture past Hardened mode, because I just can’t be arsed with the frustration of it. In fact, it was something I didn’t even try properly until 2009, reliving the game alongside the very man who introduced it to me over 15 years earlier. This threat of pursuit was particularly stepped up a gear by a factor in Wolfenstein 3D that many people dared not experience. Admittedly, killing Hitler at the end of Episode 3 – Die, Fuhrer, Die (“The Fuhrer, The”) – was a real nothing moment when it finally came round, but his intense death animation is one that lives on forever through the glory of DeathCam™. The storyline was so simple that it’s pointless to pontificate, but the standard rule was that in each chapter, you started with nothing, navigated through different levels, gradually got better guns and fought harder enemies, then inevitably had a boss fight who was associated with, but usually wasn’t, Hitler himself. Yet the ten-stage taster of the FPS world from Apogee (that’s nine levels and a secret bonus level) was the first to really take things up a notch, and it showed me a whole new world. We used to huddle around his dad’s ageing PC in his parents’ bedroom, playing all sorts of stuff, like The Crystal Maze or Jill of the Jungle. My best friend, Richard, introduced me to the shareware-gifted Episode 1 of Wolf3D: Escape from Castle Wolfenstein. That is to say, a shockingly high figure for games you can now buy for under £1. Shareware was a simple proposition: play the first part and, if you enjoyed it, you could go to a holding screen within the game and send off an order form to some random office block in the US, along with a cheque for a surprisingly high amount. Yet back in the early 90s, if the word “shareware” was stuck onto your three-and-a-half-incher, you knew you’d have unrestricted access to plenty of hard and frantic fun. Whether that was being limited to bombing around Gare d’Europa in a Feisar to CoLD SToRAGE’s Body in Motion on Wipeout 2097, enjoying the Net Yaroze Hall of Fame on Official PlayStation Magazine’s demo 42, or dashing through the epic, famous, ten-minute run-through of Resident Evil 2, you got a great taste of the game… but just not quite enough. While modern games now regularly allow time-restricted access to the full game before you have to buy them – and, with the likes of modern Telltale games, you’ll be given a whole episode of a series for free – demos, historically speaking, only gave you a brief insight into the biggest hits of the day. ![]() In the case of Wolfenstein 3D – the first-ever first-person shooter I (and many others) ever played – it literally opened out in front of you. ![]() In those days, all you needed was a floppy disk drive, and in a matter of moments, a whole new world opened out in front of you. Games were expensive and hinged massively on how good your PC was – the early 90s, you’ve got to remember, was a time when hardware capabilities were improving exponentially. Like me, my mates were too young to have consoles of their own, but many at least had family computers. I had to plan in advance for any gaming session so-called “instant gaming” was experienced solely through my friends’ greater technological fortunes. Even terrifyingly crap titles like BC Bill took upwards of four hours.Īnd so I spent a lot of my time outdoors, cycling circuits around the block and waiting for the cassettes to do their duty. Sadly, whatever I played, I’d have to wait a minimum of 15 minutes for them to load, and that’s if the tape didn’t jam. While most of its games seemed tedious, insanely difficult or downright unplayable, there were a few I just couldn’t get enough of – International Karate and Shinobi were particular standouts. I was without anything approaching “cutting edge” for a good few years, but I learned to work the C64 surprisingly quickly. In my earliest days of gaming, I only had access to an inherited Commodore 64 and a broken ZX Spectrum.
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