Wolfenstein 3-D wasn't my first 3-D shooter I've ever played. I was well into the colourful mazes of Blake Stone, when a kid who was living in the same building as my father had workshop told us about a similar game to Blake, that had you as a soldier in dungeons, shooting Germans and their attack dogs... soon we got a floppy with the game, and we also become badly addicted to it.

If you are starting reading this series of articles, I want to note I am not going into history of id Software, them developing the games, explaining the same stuff others did. If you give the slightest shit about that, you should read "Masters of Doom" or fuck, just watch some video on YouTube about it. We're clear? Good.

I always liked Wolf3D for it's own brand of peculiar atmosphere. The game was colourful, but not as vivid as Blake Stone. I like everything about it. The design of the menus, the sounds of switching stuff in options, the moody tune that plays in the background. The gameplay itself was of course simpler than BStone, but also much rawer and thus more arcade. It was you against the whole army, and you were given some precise tools to help you get to the end. 60 levels (yea, we had the full game, luckily) seemed like an impossible task to ever realize. Luckily, on the floppy we also had set of saved games from various points in the game. I distinctly remember loading one of them, and showing one of the level from the fourth episode - room full of dead bodies, the chaingun with some small amount of ammo left, 4% of health. The level was finished, what was saved was the proof of incredible carnage that happened seconds before. Awesome.

When I am writing  this, I am not actually sure if I ever went through all the leves. I definitely finished the "first game", episodes 1-3, where you memorably kill the shit out of Hitler at the end, but I don't think I ever had enough patience for the next dose of mazes. The fifth episode, my favourite from the childhood days, because it had some rather sensible and easy to follow level design, I could do that one probably in half an hour. But the 4th and the 6th one? With infamous that E6M1 level? Maybe someday, and definitely not with just DOSBox and whatever my brain has left of visual memory to remember where to go and where to use they keys. ECWolf was developed for a reason.

I haven't played through Spear of Destiny until the next millenium, somewhere in 2003 or 2004, after getting a random CD filled with old games, Planet Strike and Dangerous Dave being the most pleasant surprises. I don't remember much of SoD, except some of the bosses, and of course, the famous last level. When I was a kid, I had this friend, Daniel, who was the biggest liar since the previous lying kid I knew. His uncle was working in Lego factory, he had a super modern computer that had ALL the games, you know the type. And he told me that not only Wolfenstein had a sequel, but also in the finale you grabbed a magic spear, the whole level changed and you were fighting a demon!!! Yeah sure buddy lol

Oh, and the "Lost Episodes"... Never understood why they made everything blue, including the guns and dogs. Maybe to make the game look more attractive and "new" on the screenshots on back of the box? Who knows.

Wolfenstein 3-D also has a looong history of mods and additional levels behind it, which makes it even cooler to me. Nowadays people probably only recognize those meme-before-meme mods from the 90's like the one where you shoot Beavis and Butthead and Barney the dinosaur is the last boss, or the ridiculously bad "Evil Blood" hack... but there were actually really solid levelsets done as early as 1993, with some clever ideas. There were also a ton of totally goofy and stupid ones. I should make a separate section showcase of some of those idiotisms... some day...