One of the earliest first-person shooter games, and
maybe still the coolest, makes its way into the
iTunes app store!
The image is from the front door of the game's official site. You can also find
a truly wonderful story by John Carnack, its designer, on how Wolf3D made its way to the iPod Touch/iPod platform.
More coolness: the developer has released the source code! Tweak away, my pretties! And
expect Doom and Quake soon.
(I'd forgotten that, in 1995, id Software had also released the source code for the original version of
Wolf3D.
When Wolfenstein 3D was released for Mac in the early 90s, it was for many, many years the only game worth playing on that platform, even after later games came along. (Slowly. Until the iTunes app store, Mac games were 100% pathetic. Besides Wolfenstein. Okay, and Myst.)
Looking at it today, what I notice most isn't its primitiveness, but its zen-like simplicity, both visually, and in its objectives: Kill Nazis. Win prizes.
Maybe one of you kids knows who to ask, but if you ask ME, the castle scenes in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (which it certainly should have been) were explicitly inspired by Wolfenstein. I really think so: castle setting, supernatural overtones, lots o' Nazis. In fact, my favorite line in the movie, snarled through gritted teeth, comes as Indy sees who his true hosts are at this castle: "Nazis. I hate those guys."
(I'm
absolutely certain that MechaHitler was the inspiration for the classic
"Mecha-Streisand" episode of South Park. Seen below as she faces defeat by Robert Smith of The Cure.
Anyway, you can buy Wolfenstein 3D in the App Store for a tenth of what I paid for it in 1991 or so. Lock and load.
