The Best Way To Experience The 'Wolfenstein' Games

​Welcome to Fan Service, a guide to engaging with gargantuan, lore-heavy franchises. In each volume, we'll recommend an order to approach the given series with and dissect our argument for it. Today: Nazi killing capers in "Wolfenstein."

The miserable political climate of 2017 has somehow made gaming's oldest first person shooter franchise particularly relevant. Ten years ago, using Nazis as video game villains had started to fall out of vogue. Now, marketing material for the next "Wolfenstein" game is leaning into "punch Nazis" sentiment because somehow that's a stance with a touch of progressivism to it. A legacy franchise is now thrust back into the spotlight once again for a "bold" political message few thought society would need again — a message the game's creators have barely thought about seriously sending.

Nazis are bad. Is saying that reason enough to call "Wolfenstein" good?

To understand both the true significance of "Wolfenstein" in gaming and the contours of the series' story, you've got to dig deep into its 36 year history. id Software's "Wolfenstein 3-D" took a premise from one of computer gaming's early greats and spun it into a genre-defining touchstone. From that game onwards, seeds of a continuing story have been planted across each game, hiding beneath the telltale signs of reboots and reimaginings.

In this installment of Fan Service, we'll take a close look at the adventures of number #1 Nazi-killer B.J. Blazkowicz, including today's release of "Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus." Along the way, we'll look at some of the key figures who made this franchise what it is and examine how each game portrays its Nazi villains, ranging from blocky baddies to garish caricatures of fascism's true evils.

Ready for it? Get Psyched!

The New Play Order

Playing older computer games often requires some legwork. Luckily, in the case of "Wolfenstein," both the 1981 original and the 1992 first-person shooter it inspired are available in above-board in-browser free versions on the internet. Silas Warner's "Castle Wolfenstein" can be played courtesy of archive.org's in-browse Apple II emulator, and in 2012 Bethesda Softworks made "Wolfenstein 3-D" available in recognition of the game's 20th anniversary.

In the order that follows, all the bolded installments are the ones that newcomers should definitely check out. Because "Castle Wolfenstein" and "Wolfenstein 3-D" are just a click away, it's worth spending at least a little bit of time with them to both appreciate the roots of the series and to remind yourself how far games have come. The newer installments by Machine Games, "The New Order" and "The New Colossus," are the only ones essential to Wolfenstein's ongoing story. As you'll see, there are threads that tie all the games after "3-D" together, but you won't really be lost in the plot without them.

Storywise, the original 1980s games are not connected to the later games in any tangible sense. The protagonist in "Castle Wolfenstein" and its sequel is nameless — B.J. Blazkowicz was named by id's Tom Hall. B.J. has been the protagonist in every "Wolfenstein" story for the past 25 years:

• Castle Wolfenstein (1981)
  
• Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1983)
• Wolfenstein 3-D (1992)
• Spear of Destiny (1992)
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)
• Wolfenstein (2009)
• Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014)
• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (2015)
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017)

I've left 2009's iPhone-only "Wolfenstein RPG" off the list for two reasons. First, I'd argue it's more of a spin-off than anything. You could make the case that the direct involvement of id's John Carmack on the game should mean it deserves a place in the order, but there's another issue: You can't play it anymore (what I said about it being hard to play old computer games goes doubly for depreciated mobile games).

When "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" was ported from the PC to the original Xbox and the Playstation 2, it had two different subtitles appended (respectively, "Tides of War" and "Operation Resurrection"). These versions are only slightly different in content from the original "Return," so you might as well check out whatever version you can.¹ The class-based multiplayer-only "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" doesn't make the cut either since it has no story, but it was an excellent game (and this author's first "Wolfenstein"). There's a team of fan developers keeping the "Enemy Territory" gameplay alive as "ET Legacy," so there is a way to play it if you're so inclined.

Silas Warner And The Death Of Office Productivity

Nearly every profile you read of Silas Warner is going to tell you that he was a big guy, so let's get that out of the way. Silas was 6'8″ or 6'9″ and he was the first employee at Muse Software, a publisher founded in 1978 by Ed Zaron. The first two games released by Muse were Zaron's "Tank Wars" and Warner's "Maze Game," both for the then-new Apple II. It would take a while for home computing to catch up to some of the extravagances afforded to early mainframe system games, but Warner's "Maze Game" and its follow-up "Escape!" had something on earlier maze-centric games: they were drawn from a first-person perspective. Silas Warner was a big guy who pioneered a big idea.²

"Escape!" was a blip compared to Warner's later success with "Castle Wolfenstein." Inspired by the game "Berserk" and the oafish Nazis in "The Guns Of Navarone," Warner smashed the two together in a new game. Abandoning the first-person perspective for a simplified top-down view, "Castle Wolfenstein" combined simple maze navigation with stealthy combat. The story is simple: you're trapped in the titular Nazi-occupied castle and you have to engineer your own escape. The game's flashiest feature was the enemy voices — between games, Warner had worked on a voice playback program for Muse that wrung as much as it could out of the Apple II's limited audio hardware. While bulky arcade games could be made with more sophisticated audio, Warner's was the first commercial game for home computers that featured "talking" enemies. Sure, all they had to say was a collection of clipped phrases in Warner's butchered German, but it was speech all the same.

"Castle Wolfenstein" is Warner's best-remembered game — a hit when it came out that's now better-known as the precursor to id's "Wolfenstein 3-D"… which itself is better-known as the precursor to id's "Doom." Warner continued to work on games through the '80s and early '90s before transitioning into other programming work. Both Warner and his wife Karen struggled with physical disabilities and society's biases against the disabled, eventually forcing the couple to relocate from Silicon Valley in the early 2000s due to soaring prices. Warner didn't profit off of id's adaptations of "Wolfenstein," as Muse had dissolved back in the '80s and the copyright on "Wolfenstein" had lapsed. Warner passed away in 2004.

Aspects of Silas Warner's original "Castle Wolfenstein" design would find their way back into installments designed after his death, but in a weird way each new "Wolfenstein" title both reaffirms and obscures Warner's contributions to the medium. "Escape!" and "Castle Wolfenstein" both serve as important predecessors to countless games, but the name "Wolfenstein" typically brings a pair of different gaming pioneers to mind.

Between 'Commander Keen' And 'Doom' There Was…

The story of id Software's early days involves swords, and trust me that I'm not trying to be cute when I say that the story is double-edged itself. How else to describe the arc of a company that redefined what was possible in games and, in a very tangible sense, contributed to the toxic machismo that readily pairs with hives of actual-Nazi-admiring gamers today? In the '90s id positioned itself as the arbiter of what could be called the "attitude era" of games, for all the booming success and cringe-worthiness in hindsight the label suggests.

Before id got around to Nazi-killing, their games were relatively tame. The company was founded by a group of young, rebellious programmers working at Softdisk, a subscription based software company. Customers paid Softdisk a monthly fee to receive disks containing useful applications and cutting-edge PC games designed by the company's rebel cohort. The PC games peddled by Softdisk and other companies paled in comparison to the offerings on home gaming consoles, at least in terms of speed. The smooth, responsive side scrolling of any "Super Mario" title was as yet-unseen on the PC, until one of the game programmers at Softdisk made a breakthrough. As a tech demo, and unbeknownst to the higher-ups at Softdisk, the game programmers recreated the first few levels of "Super Mario Bros. 3" for the PC and sent the program to Nintendo as a pitch for a PC version of the game. Nintendo declined, but the group of programmers would soon take the code and repurpose it for a colorful, kid-friendly game of their own, the first published as id Software: "Commander Keen."

The programmer who made the sidescrolling breakthrough was John Carmack, and the designer closest to him on the team was John Romero. Carmack and Romero are afforded special attention in David Kushner's book "Masters of Doom," a pop-history tome about id's early days. Surely, the two deserve the recognition, but Kushner's version of events is maybe a little too gleeful about how the force of Carmack and Romero's personalities helped push id Software away from the quirky weirdness of Keen and into the blood-and-guts of "Wolfenstein 3-D" and "Doom." Kushner and other biographers of Carmack and Romero frequently wedge the pair into stereotypical archetypes: Carmack the Mad Genius and Romero the Rockstar. Their odd habits and faults are acknowledged frequently (to provide that oh-so-essential pop profile color) and interrogated rarely (don't go disturbing the myths of tech's savants and bad boys).

By the time id started work on "Wolfenstein 3-D," Carmack and Romero were undisputably the leading creators at the company, but it was Tom Hall who took responsibility for the game's story. Carmack was the lead programmer, refining his pseudo-3D raycasting engine, capable of drawing first-person perspective graphics reminiscent of Silas Warner's "Escape!" with speed and more fidelity. Romero worked on development tools for the game and on designing the gameplay itself. Hall, also a designer, took Romero's initial idea to adapt "Castle Wolfenstein" and started to give it more depth. Naming the protagonist "B.J. Blazkowicz" was a start — Hall also penned interstitial story screens and added as much character into the settings of the game's levels as the limited grid-based layouts could allow for.

With the "Commander Keen" games, Hall embraced a goofy, lighthearted tone; "Wolfenstein 3-D" didn't approach the metal-riffs and intestine walls of its successor "Doom," but that was surely due in part to Hall countering Romero's impulse to make the game faster and bloodier. Their adaptation of Warner's vision strayed from the original game's stealth elements and the massive success of "Wolfenstein 3-D" pretty much killed any chance of getting id back on the track of kid friendly or story-focused games. Still, one wonders what would have happened to "Wolfenstein 3-D" had Hall not been around — it's not like the pixelated Nazis in the game have depth or historical weightiness to them (Hitler appears as a double chaingun wielding boss in a mechsuit, for chrissakes) but had id done away with even more story, there might've been no interest later on in reviving the series with the pulpy, Indiana Jones-esque storylines of its '00s installments.

A Long-Awaited Return

"Wolfenstein 3-D" and the quickly produced follow-up prequel, "Spear of Destiny,"³ were decidedly light on story. When id moved on to "Doom," the company's internal conversation over whether story was crucial to the game prompted a now-infamous quote from John Carmack: "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important." Tom Hall's insistence to ground "Doom" with a story got him sacked from id.

The next few years saw id's games hit the mainstream, the dawning of online competitive gaming culture… and multiple challenges to id's throne. John Romero was ousted from id after the completion of "Quake," so Romero formed a new company and licensed id's tech for "Daikatana," a game with a sprawling, time-hopping plot featuring multiple characters. Under Carmack, id moved on to making more "Quake" games. Meanwhile, other game studios got to work on titles that threatened to knock Romero and Carmack down a peg. The success of Valve's "Half-Life" (built on "Quake" tech) reoriented the industry to the idea that story was necessary — even if the plot was pulpy and simple, placing characters and cinematic moments in the world was more immersive and attractive to players. "Quake" ended up focusing more on multiplayer, "Daikatana" was a spectacular failure, and in the end mainstream shooters started to care (at least slightly) more about story.

That's why, when "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" debuted in 2001, it opened with a long, expository cinematic. Developed by Grey Matter Interactive and Nerve Software, the game was the first to be released under id's name on "Quake" technology where multiplayer wasn't the spotlight. "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" brought back B.J. Blazkowicz as the protagonist and introduced a resistance group opposed to the Nazis: the Kreisau Circle. Where "Wolfenstein 3-D" had thinly sketched excuses for robotic and undead enemies, "Return" fleshes things out by drawing on the same real-life facts about Heinrich Himmler and absurd Nazi weapon engineering projects (there's your "Indiana Jones" comparison). The main threat in the game is of occult, supernatural origins, while the newly introduced villain Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse is more involved with weapons research. The game ends with Blazkowicz defeating a resurrected demonic prince before returning to the war's frontlines.

Eight years later, the "Wolfenstein" mantle was passed to Raven Software for what many assumed would be a complete reboot, simply titled "Wolfenstein." Instead, the game expanded upon the role of the Kreisau Circle resistance — it introduced the group's leader, a former schoolteacher named Caroline Becker — and the game brought back Deathshead as the primary villain. People piecing together the "Wolfenstein" timeline could place Raven's title at the end of chain dating back to "3-D" thanks to a tie-in comic released alongside the game. "Wolfenstein" did represent a significant departure from its forebears in that it incorporated some open-world elements, changing how the game's story was delivered. Still, the focus doesn't diverge much from the pulpy blend of sci-fi and occultism that informed "Return." A magical medallion MacGuffin grants B.J. special powers tied to a parallel dimension, a realm that Deathshead seeks to harness for Nazi advantage in the war. Once again, B.J. prevails and Deathshead escapes.

What's Old Is New Again

The next title in the series was initially assumed to be a reboot, just as Raven's installment had been. Developed by a then newly-formed Swedish studio called MachineGames, "Wolfenstein: The New Order" didn't have much buzz leading up to its release. The 2009 "Wolfenstein" reviewed well but didn't leave a lasting impression, and it came at time when World War II shooters were seen as old-hat. "Call of Duty" made its first break from the war with 2007's "Modern Warfare," "Medal of Honor" had churned out even more World War II shooters before it, and there was no reason to think that "The New Order" wouldn't be more of the same old Nazi-killing business with a supernatural element layered on top.

People paying attention to MachineGames' pedigree were probably more excited to see what they'd do with the series. Before forming MachineGames, the studio's founders all worked for Starbreeze. In 2004, Starbreeze took a similarly cheesy franchise and spun a cinematic first-person shooter out of it: "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay." 

The game featured Vin Diesel as Riddick and Diesel himself was closely involved with the game's writing and development. It was schlocky sci-fi for sure, but the story was engaging enough to inform the gameplay and vice-versa — structured as a prison escape, "Butcher Bay" incorporated stealth elements in addition to polished, big-action shooting set pieces. All the nuts and bolts befitting a good "Wolfenstein" game were there in "Butcher Bay," and now the same developers had their chance to leave a mark on the franchise.

"The New Order" opens with a doomed assault on Deathshead's compound, leaving B.J. in a vegetative state. B.J., here reimagined as a brooding, PTSD-stricken warrior fond of waxing poetic, wakes up years later in a Polish hospital. It's the 1960's, and the Nazis have taken control of the entire world. B.J. searches for what's left of the resistance, leading him to discover that Caroline Becker survived the events of the last game and still leads the Kreisau Circle:

From the early chapters of the game, "The New Order" sets itself apart⁴from past installments by putting more emphasis on the real, devastating horrors of the Nazi regime. The similarities between Deathshead and Joseph Mengele are exaggerated, Nazis arrive to purge the hospital housing B.J., and the player-as-B.J. is put through a racial "purity" test by a Nazi officer. The game's historical connections peak in the "Belica" chapter, a mission of the game set in a forced labor camp modeled after Auschwitz.

Most "serious" World War II shooters look away from the Holocaust, frequently abstracting the Nazis as "Axis" soldiers and leaving genocide as the implicit, unspoken sin of the enemy. Whether "The New Order" approaches the matter in an acceptable way is up to debate — really, could a short stealth level in a game where you also blast your way through a Nazi moon base hold up as respectful? Still, the "Belica" mission shows a willingness on Machine Games' part to portray the Nazi regime, pulp nonsense aside, as an evil force in line with what they really were: fascist, bloodthirsty and incapable of being "reasoned" with. Ultimately, that's why B.J. fights the Nazis.

In "The New Order," the Kreisau Circle starts to fight back from a position of near-total weakness. The Nazis rule the world, the resistance is utterly outmatched and the only way to make a dent is fight like hell. The first major blow B.J. and his allies strike against the Nazis comes by way of a car bombing, decried in later chapters by Nazi propaganda as a "terrorist act." In an essay at Waypoint, writer Dante Douglas aptly summarizes the way the game approaches the resistance's tactics:

The game never judged the player for using violence against the Nazis, because it knew that the violence of the underclass could never—morally or materially—match the horrors of what was already being enacted. The conflicts in The New Order were not equal-sided, and even in the most powerful moments, were not shown as anything other than a glancing blow against the roving monstrosity that was Nazi world rule. The violent acts of both sides were both shown as political, but not shown as equivalent.

"The New Order" ends up far from perfect in its commentary, and when it briefly turns its lens towards American-born injustice it stops just short of condemnation. The 2015 follow-up add-on, "The Old Blood," reimagines some of the events from earlier "Wolfenstein" games, edging closer in tone to supernatural frivolousness, but that story ends just where "The New Order" begins: on the verge of mass murder and terror under global Nazi rule. MachineGames seems set upon impressing one thing in the audience: it is always, always okay to fight a Nazi.

The Future

So, with "Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus" Machine Games is continuing the story in America, following along as the Kreisau Circle goes stateside with the intent of sparking a mass rebellion and ousting the Nazis from the country. Development on the game started right after the completion of "The New Order" (there's a trilogy planned) so there's no way the developers could've predicted that by depicting American KKK members cavorting with SS soldiers they'd be touching such a raw nerve in 2017.

That hasn't stopped the marketing department from leaning into the "controversy," spinning out an ad with the slogan "Make America Nazi Free" again followed by a short trailer playing off of white supremacists getting publicly clocked in the jaw:

There is only one side. #NoMoreNazis #Wolf2 pic.twitter.com/7Ctu265Mus

— Wolfenstein (@wolfenstein) October 15, 2017

Early reviews of the game are effusive in their praise for "Wolfenstein II" — this time, critics knew what they could expect from MachineGames in terms of gameplay and politics and, to leave spoilers out of it, the game goes places few would've guessed.

So, a third MachineGames installment of "Wolfenstein" is almost a given. Let's hope it doesn't feel quite so timely when it comes out, shall we?