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Why Wolfenstein 3D’s System Was a Technical Marvel Ahead of Its Time
Here you'll read more about Wolfenstein 3D's development history and related articles.
The foundation of Wolfenstein 3D was laid in late 1990, when a small team working at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana, developed Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons under the name Ideas from the Deep. The group—programmers John Carmack and John Romero, designer Tom Hall, artist Adrian Carmack, and manager Jay Wilbur—created the game in their spare time using Softdisk’s equipment, even taking computers home for weekend coding sessions. The title was published by Apogee Software in December as shareware and was a success. The team’s goal was to break off and start their own studio, and when confronted by Softdisk’s owner Al Vekovius about using company resources, they were upfront about their intentions. A compromise was reached: they would produce a new game for Softdisk every two months while preparing for independence.
That independence came in the form of id Software , and the team began using the Softdisk assignments as a testbed for their ideas. Adrian Carmack pushed toward darker, more graphic visuals, while John Carmack explored the limits of 3D rendering on personal computers—something mostly confined to flight sims like Wing Commander or rudimentary wireframe displays. Carmack tackled performance limitations by simplifying the game world to a flat grid and using a technique called ray casting , which rendered only what the player could see. Within six weeks, he built a basic 3D engine using 2D sprites for characters, and the group used it in Hovertank 3D , a Softdisk game released in April 1991, featuring a tank battling mutants in a colorful maze.
Later that year, after relocating to Madison, Wisconsin (without Wilbur), Carmack finished the engine for Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy! but turned his attention to improving 3D rendering. Inspired by the upcoming Ultima Underworld , which aimed to use texture mapping, Carmack believed he could achieve similar visual depth without sacrificing speed. Over six weeks, he reworked the Hovertank engine and built Catacomb 3-D , released in November 1991, which added texture-mapped environments. This caught the attention of Apogee’s Scott Miller, who began encouraging the team to build a full 3D shareware action game.
By late 1991, with their Softdisk commitments nearly finished and the second Commander Keen trilogy wrapping up, id Software gathered to decide their next major project. Tom Hall was in favor of continuing Keen , but it was clear Carmack's interests had shifted firmly toward 3D gaming. Hall pitched a sci-fi concept called “It’s Green and Pissed,” but Romero suggested something more grounded: a 3D reboot of the 1981 stealth game Castle Wolfenstein . The idea clicked. Romero, Hall, and Carmack were longtime fans, and they saw the maze-like structure of the original as a perfect match for Carmack’s new engine. Adrian Carmack, tired of child-friendly art, welcomed the chance to work on a more brutal and violent title.
Romero expanded on the pitch, envisioning a fast-paced shooter full of gunfire, blood, and Nazi enemies. Looting bodies and dragging them aside were early features, but these were later dropped to preserve the game's speed. Romero wanted Wolfenstein 3D to be sleek, loud, and simple—something that stood apart from the slower, more cerebral strategy and sim games dominating the industry. Carmack and Adrian were fully on board. Hall thought the game had potential and figured they could always return to his ideas later.
Initially, the team feared they couldn’t legally use the Wolfenstein name. After contacting Silas Warner, the creator of the original, they discovered that Muse Software had gone out of business in 1986, and the trademark had passed to a private owner in Michigan. Id managed to buy the rights for $5,000 in April 1992. With the name secured, Scott Miller at Apogee approved the project immediately, offering a $100,000 advance. At the same time, id’s temporary president Mark Rein pitched a retail version to FormGen—who had published the final Keen game—and secured their interest despite concerns about the violent content. This dual deal put id in a unique position to release the game through both shareware and retail channels.
The Achtung! begins
Work officially began on December 15, 1991. Romero and Hall led the creative direction. Romero envisioned a relentless assault on Nazi bunkers filled with SS troops, attack dogs, and ultimately Hitler himself. He wrote the general storyline and focused on delivering nonstop action. Hall designed the levels, introduced collectible treasures, and added food as health items. He also sketched boss characters and the title screen.
John Carmack, meanwhile, spent a month refining the game engine. He introduced support for doors and decorative objects, optimized rendering speed, and increased resolution quality. The engine was written in ANSI C, with performance-critical components like ray casting handled in assembly. Initially developed in 16-color EGA, the game was upgraded to 256-color VGA just four months before launch, improving the visual fidelity significantly.
Romero started building gameplay around the engine, streamlining the experience by cutting features like body looting that slowed the pace. Adrian Carmack created hand-drawn sprites from eight angles using Deluxe Paint II. An external artist briefly worked on animated wall textures, but the team found the quality lacking and discarded the work. Levels were laid out using a custom tool called Tile Editor (TEd), which had been used since the Keen days. The maze-like, grid-based design was reminiscent of Pac-Man —so much so that they included a hidden Pac-Man level as an homage.
Romero later admitted that level design felt less creatively rewarding than in Keen , and had to promise Hall a brand-new car to motivate him to finish the maps.
The team considered referencing Nazi atrocities or adding anti-fascist themes but chose to sidestep controversy by focusing on action. Instead, they created a shocking, visceral experience. Adrian Carmack added gory death animations, while Bobby Prince—drawing on his military background—composed intense music and sound effects. Prince used a 16-bit sampler and cassette recorder, even capturing real gunfire at a shooting range to ensure realism. He and other team members, along with Scott Miller, voiced the German-speaking enemies, including lines inspired by the original Castle Wolfenstein .
During development, former Softdisk colleague Kevin Cloud joined as an assistant artist, and id moved its operations to Mesquite, Texas, near Apogee. Miller, thrilled to have his top developers nearby, offered to finish id’s last Softdisk obligation ( ScubaVenture ) himself, and increased their royalty share to 50 percent. The game was initially planned as three episodes with ten levels each, following Apogee’s shareware model, but when Miller learned they could produce levels in a single day, he encouraged them to expand to six episodes for additional sales flexibility. The team structure shifted again: Mark Rein was dismissed, and Jay Wilbur returned as CEO. Bobby Prince moved temporarily into the office to work on audio, while Adrian Carmack moved out to escape the noise.
As the project neared completion, FormGen expressed concerns about the graphic content. Id’s response? Lean into it. Adrian added skeletons, gore, and bloodstained walls. Hall and Romero incorporated enemy screams in German and a “Death Cam” that replayed the final boss kill. They even added “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi anthem, to the opening screen. Carmack, after months of resisting, finally added push-wall secrets—one of Hall’s long-standing requests. Hall also implemented cheat codes and wrote the game’s backstory.
After a month of final playtesting, the first shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D was uploaded by id and Apogee to bulletin boards on May 5, 1992. The remaining episodes followed shortly. Total development time: about six months. Total cost: roughly $25,000 in salaries and rent, plus $6,500 for Carmack’s development PC and $5,000 for the trademark rights.
Following Wolfenstein 's release, the id team—except John Carmack—worked on Spear of Destiny , a one-episode prequel. It reused the same engine, introduced new content, and was finished in just two months. Released by FormGen in September 1992, the game stirred mild controversy due to its use of religious relics, though Romero compared it to Indiana Jones . While the rest of the team built Spear , Carmack began experimenting with a new graphics engine—one that would soon power id’s next revolution: Doom.
Why Wolfenstein 3D’s System Was a Technical Marvel Ahead of Its Time
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When Wolfenstein 3D hit the scene in 1992, it didn’t just change how we played games — it rewrote the rulebook on how games could be built. While the media focused on its controversial content, what really set *Wolfenstein 3D* apart was its pioneering software architecture. This wasn’t just a game. It was a masterclass in overcoming technical limitations, efficient system design, and ingenious engineering — and it laid the groundwork for the future of real-time 3D games. Back in the early '90s, game development largely meant building for consoles. Consoles were predictable, with standard hardware and minimal variation. PCs, on the other hand, were chaotic — inconsistent hardware, operating systems not made for gaming, and user environments that were anything but plug-and-play. So when id Software set out to build a fast, fluid first-person shooter on PC, they were venturing into the unknown. But that decision also gave them two massive advantages:
- A faster CPU for real-time rendering.
- A 256KB VGA frame buffer, offering more visual potential than consoles.
They didn’t choose the hard road just for fun — they chose it because it offered raw power.
A Modular, Layered Engine
The *Wolfenstein 3D* engine was split into three core parts:
- 1. 2D Engine – For menus and interface.
- 2. 3D Engine – The heart of the game, the real-time renderer.
- 3. Sound Engine – Running in parallel with either of the above, using a clever workaround called the heartbeat system (more on that later).
What’s elegant is how id Software enforced strict boundaries. Components didn’t talk directly to the hardware. Instead, they used a layered system:
- The WL (high-level) layer handled game logic.
- The IT (low-level) layer handled hardware interaction through "managers".
- Beneath that: the raw hardware (RAM, VGA, keyboard, etc).
This architecture — like a modern abstraction layer — wasn’t just clean; it was scalable and reusable. The IT layer was actually ported from their previous game Catacomb 3D. In modern terms, they built a game framework before game frameworks were even a thing.
The Main Loop and Boot Process
Booting Wolfenstein 3D wasn’t just launching a game — it was an orchestration:
- System check (386 CPU? Enough RAM?)
- Manager initialization (memory, video, input, sound, etc.)
- Asset loading (textures, fonts, etc.)
- Menu rendering (2D) → Gameplay rendering (3D)
The rendering pipeline was smart: draw the full frame in system RAM to avoid screen flicker, then transfer it to VRAM for display via CRT scanlines. Even the startup sequence included a "sign-on" screen showing memory stats — a preemptive UX decision to help users understand system limitations.
Concepts That Pushed Boundaries
Ray Casting
At its core, Wolfenstein 3D isn’t truly 3D — it fakes it. Using ray casting, the engine projects rays from the player’s view to calculate distances to walls and objects, rendering their height based on proximity. It’s efficient, it works, and it let them simulate a 3D world using 2D logic.
Fisheye Correction
Ray casting introduces distortion when the angle between rays and walls becomes too steep — a "fisheye" effect. id Software solved this by correcting the rendering math. It’s not just a cosmetic tweak; similar techniques are now used in robotics and surveillance software for lens distortion correction.
Heartbeats
Without threads or background processes, the game needed a way to manage time. Enter the **heartbeat system** — a manual timing mechanism that simulated a clock using ticks. Think of it as a primitive event loop or scheduler — essential for animation, sound timing, and game logic synchronization.
Pseudo-Random Number Generator
Instead of wasting CPU cycles calculating randomness, the game simply read values from a pre-filled lookup table. It was fast, predictable, and good enough. This trade-off — performance over perfection — is something modern devs should remember. Optimization starts with knowing what doesn’t need optimizing.
Wolfenstein 3D wasn’t just a technical achievement — it was an elegant system built in a messy era. With nothing but CPUs, VGA cards, and a vision, id Software showed that architecture matters. They laid the foundation for games like DOOM, Quake, and the modern FPS genre. So next time you're deep in a project — game or not — remember: sometimes the best solutions come from the past. And sometimes, shooting pixelated Nazis in a faux-3D maze is the best way to understand modern systems engineering. Wolfenstein 3D wasn’t just ahead of its time. It defined its time.