Who created the game Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
Wolfenstein
The "Wolfenstein" series of video games started with the 1981 stealth-adventure video game "Castle Wolfenstein". It was developed by American programmer Silas Warner, a pioneer in the early eras of video gaming, especially the stealth genre. It was published by his (then) company M.U.S.E. Inc. (Muse Software). The player controls an unnamed American prisoner of war as he steals war files containing information about secret German war plans while avoiding or sometimes killing guards, and tries to escape the fortified Nazi stronghold Castle Wolfenstein, set during World War II. The game is often credited as one of the first video games of the stealth genre, since it focuses more on avoiding or disarming enemies, and killing them is considered a last resort.
Castle Wolfenstein
Silas Warner was inspired to create "Castle Wolfenstein" after seeing the video game "Berzerk" at an arcade, and then watching the 1961 film adaptation of "The Guns of Navarone" on television a few weeks later.
Wolfenstein
The majority of the games follow protagonist William "B.J." Blazkowicz, a Jewish Polish-American Army Sergeant and his fights against the Nazi powers. Earlier titles are centered around Nazis attempting to harness supernatural and occult forces. "The New Order" and its sequel "The New Colossus" are set in an alternate history in which the Axis powers won the Second World War.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
The game was nominated for Best Gaming Performance (Brian Bloom) and Studio of the Year (MachineGames) at the 35th Annual Golden Joystick Awards, though it lost both of them to Ashly Burch in "Horizon Zero Dawn" (Best Gaming Performance) and Nintendo EPD (Studio of the Year). At The Game Awards 2017, "Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus" won the award for "Best Action Game", whereas its other nominations were for "Best Game Direction", "Best Narrative", and "Best Performance" with Brian Bloom. At IGN's Best of 2017 Awards, "Wolfenstein II" won "Best Shooter" and "Best Story", whereas its other nominations were for "Game of the Year", "Best PC Game", "Best Xbox One Game", "Best PlayStation 4 Game", and "Best Graphics". The game was also nominated at "Destructoid"s Game of the Year Awards 2017 for "Best Xbox One Game". In Giant Bomb's Game of the Year 2017 Awards, Hitler's audition scene won the award for "Best "Wolfenstein II" Moment or Sequence", while the scene of B.J.'s return home and confronting his father and the following scene of B.J.'s "execution" and return as a super-soldier became runners-up for the award. The website also classified the game as a runner-up each for the "Best Story" and "Game of the Year" awards. The game was also nominated for "Best Action Game" and "Best Story" at "PC Gamer"s Game of the Year 2017 Awards. It won the award for "Best Campaign" and "Best Character" for Gen. Irene Engel in "Game Informer"s 2017 Shooter of the Year Awards; it also came in the lead for "Best Shooter" in their Reader's Choice Best of 2017 Awards. It also won the Herman Melville Award for Best Writing at the New York Game Awards 2018, whereas its other nominations were for the Big Apple Award for Best Game of the Year, the Tin Pan Alley Award for Best Music in a Game, and the Great White Way Award for Best Acting in a Game with both Brian Bloom and Nina Franoszek. The game was also nominated for "Best Narrative" at the 18th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, for "Excellence in Gameplay" at the 2018 SXSW Gaming Awards, and for "Narrative" at the 14th British Academy Games Awards, and for "Action (Games)" at the 2018 Webby Awards; in addition, it was nominated for "Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition", "Outstanding Achievement in Story", and "Action Game of the Year" at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards; and for "Best Dialogue", "Best Original Instrumental" ("Lontano"), and "Best Game Audio Article, Publication or Broadcast" with "Scoring Wolfenstein II with the Baschet sonic sculptures" at the 16th Annual Game Audio Network Guild Awards; and won the award for "Game, Franchise Action" at the 17th Annual National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards.
Wolfenstein
A sequel to "Castle Wolfenstein", set in World War II during Adolf Hitler's rule as Chancellor of Germany. The objective of the game is to traverse all the levels of the secret Berlin bunker where the Führer is holding secret meetings with his senior staff. The player must retrieve a bomb that the operatives have placed inside the bunker and place it outside the door of the room where Hitler is holding his meeting, a scenario bearing a passing resemblance to the July 20 Plot.
Id Software
id Software became involved in film development when they were in the production team of the film adaption of their "Doom" franchise in 2005. In August 2007, Todd Hollenshead stated at QuakeCon 2007 that a "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" movie is in development which re-teams the "Silent Hill" writer/producer team, Roger Avary as writer and director and Samuel Hadida as producer.
Arrow keys
The style was popularized in competitive play in "Quake" and subsequently "QuakeWorld", notably by professional gamer Dennis Fong, where the advantages of WASD and mouselook were recognised over a purely keyboard-based control system. In the same year that "Castle Wolfenstein" was released, 1981, the game "Wizardry" used the AWD keys for movement in a 3D dungeon. Both the programmers of "Castle Wolfenstein" and "Wizardry" were users of the earlier PLATO system where the game "Moria" used the AWD keys.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Development began in 2010, soon after id Software gave MachineGames the rights for the franchise. The development team envisioned "Wolfenstein: The New Order" as a first-person action-adventure game, taking inspiration from previous games in the series and particularly focusing on the combat and adventure elements. The game attempts to delve into character development of Blazkowicz, unlike its predecessors—a choice from the developers to interest players in the story. They also aimed to portray him in a heroic fashion.
4Kings
4Kings or Four Kings was a professional computer game esports clan/team based in the United Kingdom. The team had players competing in "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", "", "Quake III", "Warcraft III", "Unreal Tournament", "Counter-Strike," "Team Fortress 2 and Shootmania". The most famous member of 4Kings is probably "Warcraft III" player Grubby. Philip Wride was a manager of the team.
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein
Like its predecessor, "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein" is a combination action and adventure game with stealth elements. It is set in World War II during Adolf Hitler's rule as Chancellor of Germany. The objective of the game is to traverse all the levels of the secret Berlin bunker where the Führer is holding secret meetings with his senior staff. The player must retrieve a bomb that the operatives have placed inside the bunker and place it outside the door of the room where Hitler is holding his meeting, a scenario bearing a passing resemblance to the July 20 Plot.
Wolfenstein
It is co-developed by Raven Software and Endrant Studios, published by id Software, distributed by Activision Blizzard and released in 2009 on three major platforms.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
"Return to Castle Wolfenstein" is a reboot of the early first-person shooter "Wolfenstein 3D". It includes a story-based single player campaign (which uses certain themes from the original game), as well as a team-based networked multiplayer mode.
Louis Castle
Castle co-founded Westwood Studios with Brett Sperry in 1985. Castle has multiple credits on notable Westwood games, including Executive Producer, Technical Director, and Art Director for "Blade Runner" (released in 1997) and Executive Producer and Designer for "Monopoly" (released in 1995). Castle is probably best known for his contributions to multiple "Command & Conquer" games, a series originated by Sperry in 1995 with the original PC real-time strategy game "Command & Conquer".
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
In the German version of the game, it avoids making direct reference to Nazi Party and the "Third Reich", in order to comply with strict laws in Germany. The player is not battling Nazis but a secret sect called the "Wolves" led by Heinrich Höller, whose name is a pun of the original character Himmler (Himmler roughly translates as ""Heaven"er", Höller as ""Hell"er"). The Nazi swastika is also not present: the German forces use a Wolfenstein logo which is a combination of a stylized double-headed eagle prominent in most Nazi symbolism, a "W" (standing for Wolfenstein), and the "Quake III: Team Arena" "QIII" logo (the game engine and network code that "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" is based upon). The "W" eagle logo is prominently seen on the cover art for the American version.
Wolfenstein 3D
Ideas from the Deep, now formally established as id Software, used some of these to prototype ideas for their own games. Adrian Carmack used them to push his preferred, dark art style, while John Carmack began to experiment with 3D computer graphics, which until then was largely the purview of flight simulation games such as "Wing Commander" (1990). Carmack found that this was largely due to the limitations of personal computers of the time, which had difficulty displaying a fast action game in 3D due to the number of surfaces it needed to calculate, but felt that the increasing computational power of PCs meant that it may be possible. During 1991, he experimented with limiting the possible surfaces the computer needed to display, creating game levels with walls designed only on a flat grid rather than with arbitrary shapes or angles. He also took the unusual approach of creating the displayed graphics through ray casting, in which only the surfaces visible to the player were calculated rather than the entire area surrounding the player. After six weeks of development, Carmack had created a rudimentary 3D game engine that used animated 2D sprites for enemies. Id Software then used the engine for the April 1991 Softdisk game "Hovertank 3D", in which the player drives a tank through a plane of colored walls and shoots nuclear monsters. In the fall of 1991, after the team—sans Wilbur—had relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, and he had largely finished the engine work for "Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy", Carmack decided to implement a feature from "", a role-playing game in development by Blue Sky Productions. "Ultima Underworld" was planned to display texture-mapped 3D graphics without "Hovertank"s restrictions of flat walls and simple lighting. Deciding that he could add texture mapping without sacrificing the engine's speed or greatly increasing the system requirements as "Underworld" was doing, Carmack enhanced the engine over six weeks from "Hovertank 3D" for another Softdisk game, the November 1991 "Catacomb 3-D". Upon seeing it, Scott Miller of Apogee began to push the team to make a 3D shareware action game.
In November 1991, with the second "Commander Keen" trilogy of episodes nearing completion and their contractual obligations to Softdisk almost finished, id Software sat down to plan out their next major game. Designer Tom Hall, who initially wanted to do a third "Keen" trilogy, recognized that Carmack's programming focus had shifted from the 2D side-scrolling platform game series to 3D action games. After an initial proposal by Hall of a sci-fi project, "It's Green and Pissed", Romero suggested a 3D remake of the 1981 "Castle Wolfenstein". The team was interested in the idea, as Romero, Hall, and John Carmack all had fond memories of the original title and felt the maze-like shooter gameplay fit well with Carmack's 3D game engine, while Adrian Carmack was interested in moving away from the child-friendly art style of "Keen" into something more violent. Encouraged by the reception to his idea, Romero expounded on it by proposing a "loud" and "cool" fast action game where the player could shoot soldiers before dragging and looting their bodies. The core of the gameplay would be fast and simple, for Romero believed that due to the novelty of a 3D game and control scheme, players would not be receptive to more complicated, slow gameplay. He felt the game would occupy a unique place in the industry, which was then dominated by slower simulation and strategy games. Adrian and John Carmack were excited by the prospect, while Hall felt that it was enjoyable enough, and that since he was the company's designer that they could return to his ideas at a later date.
Dark Castle
Dark Castle is a 1986 computer game for the Macintosh published by Silicon Beach Software, later ported to various platforms, where it was published by Three-Sixty Pacific. It was designed and illustrated by Mark Pierce and programmed by Jonathan Gay.
Wolfenstein 3D
"Wolfenstein 3D" won the 1992 Best Arcade game award from "Compute!", the 1992 Most Innovative Game and Best Action Game awards from "VideoGames & Computer Entertainment", the 1992 Reader's Choice - Action/Arcade Game award from "Game Bytes", the 1993 Best Action/Arcade Game, Best Entertainment Software, and People's Choice awards at the Shareware Industry Awards, the 1993 Best Action Game award from "Computer Gaming World", and a Codie award from the Software Publishers Association for Best Action/Arcade Game. It was the first shareware title to win a Codie, and id (with six employees) became the smallest company to ever receive the award. "Wolfenstein 3D" was noted as one of the top games of the year at the 1993 Game Developers Conference.
Wolfenstein RPG
Wolfenstein RPG is a first-person shooter and role-playing video game developed by id Software and Fountainhead Entertainment, released in September 2008 for mobile phones and in May 2009 for iOS
While the original "Wolfenstein 3D" contained Nazi castles full of swastikas and sour-looking Hitler portraits, "Wolfenstein RPG" is decidedly lighter in tone, with mutant chickens, romance novels, and a playful giant named Gunther. Sgt. William "B.J." Blazkowicz of the "Wolfenstein" series of video games, is being held captured by the Axis military. He must now escape his captors and try to save the world by defeating the Paranormal Division. To stop the Axis' diabolically evil Paranormal Division, he must escape prison, navigate towns, and infiltrate Castle Wolfenstein. On his way he can use tools and items he comes across such as boots, fist and toilets. He will inflict serious damage with weapons such as a flamethrower, a rocket launcher, and a Tesla.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
In the United States, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" sold 350,000 copies and earned $17 million by August 2006. It was the country's 48th best-selling computer game between January 2000 and August 2006. Combined sales of all "Wolfenstein" computer games released between January 2000 and August 2006 had reached 660,000 units in the United States by the latter date. "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" received a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom. By January 2002, Activision reported that shipments of "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" to retailers had surpassed one million units.
Castle Wolfenstein
A 1991 "Computer Gaming World" survey of strategy and war games gave "Castle Wolfenstein" one and a half stars out of five. However, in 1996, the magazine named "Castle Wolfenstein" the 116th best game ever.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
"Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" is an online multiplayer game, wherein the players interact with each other over a network, in two teams (Allies and Axis) to defend or destroy mission objectives. The game is playable over the Internet or a Local Area Network. In public games, PunkBuster used to protect the game, however its developer, EvenBalance, discontinued support for the game in October 2011.
There are six officially released maps that are partially based on real locations or events (North African Campaign: Gold Rush, Siwa Oasis, and Atlantic Seawall Battery; Europe Campaign: Rail Gun, Würzburg Radar, and Fuel Dump), as well as hundreds of custom maps made by the gaming community. On most maps, the offense needs to complete a certain set of objectives within a limited amount of time. The defense needs to keep the offense from completing objectives until time runs out. Some objectives may be optional, and some objectives can be carried out by either team. These minor objectives assist the team completing them. Depending on game mode the action will continue on another map (Campaign Mode) or the same map (Objective Mode, Stopwatch Mode, Last Man Standing).
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein is a 1984 World War II stealth game. A direct sequel to "Castle Wolfenstein", it is the second game in the "Wolfenstein" series, and the last installment to be released by original developer Muse Software before the name was revived for a first person shooter in 1991. "Castle Wolfenstein" was written solely by Silas Warner for the Apple II, while the sequel was was developed simultaneously for the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Warner, Eric Ace, and Frank Svoboda III. It was quickly ported to the Atari 8-bit family and MS-DOS.
Castle of Riddles
Castle of Riddles is a text adventure released by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro (in 1982) and Acorn Electron (1984) home computers. The game was written by Peter Killworth and was one of a series of text adventures written for, or ported to the BBC Micro by the same author (others including "Countdown to Doom" and "Philosopher's Quest"). As with all such games, only text is used. The player must use a simple 'verb-noun' format (e.g. 'Go North', 'Get lamp') to control the game. Unlike Killworth's other Acornsoft adventures, "Castle of Riddles" was not updated and reissued by Topologika so became unavailable after 1985 when Acorn Computers (parent company of Acornsoft) pulled out of the games publishing market. Some of the puzzles however were included in the Topologika version of "Philosopher's Quest".
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
A "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" film was announced in 2002 with Rob Cohen attached to direct. Little information has been available since, however, with the exception of a July 20, 2005 IGN interview. The interview discussed the "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" film with id employees. In the interview, Todd Hollenshead indicated that the movie was in the works, though still in the early stages.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
The game uses a modified "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" engine, itself being a heavily modified id Tech 3 engine, which has been open source since 2005. As of the first day of the August 2010 QuakeCon, the entire source code was released under the GNU General Public License v3.
Wolfenstein
It was developed by Fountainhead Entertainment, and published by EA Mobile in 2008, with John Carmack, one of the key people to the original first-person shooter game in the series, reprising his role as the sole programmer.
Castle Wolfenstein
The game is played from a top-down perspective, though the characters are seen upright like in a side-scroller. The player traverses the levels by sneaking past, impersonating, and sometimes even killing Nazi soldiers. "Castle Wolfenstein" can be controlled with a joystick, paddles, or a keyboard.
Wolfenstein 3D
"Wolfenstein 3D" was the second major release by id Software, after the "Commander Keen" series of episodes. In mid-1991, programmer John Carmack experimented with making a fast 3D game engine by restricting the gameplay and viewpoint to a single plane, producing "Hovertank 3D" and "Catacomb 3-D" as prototypes. After a design session prompted the company to shift from the family-friendly "Keen" to a more violent theme, programmer John Romero suggested remaking the 1981 stealth shooter "Castle Wolfenstein" as a fast-paced action game. He and designer Tom Hall designed the game, built on Carmack's engine, to be fast and violent, unlike other computer games on the market at the time. "Wolfenstein 3D" features artwork by Adrian Carmack and sound effects and music by Bobby Prince. The game was released through Apogee in two sets of three episodes under the shareware model, in which the first episode is released for free to drive interest in paying for the rest. An additional episode, "Spear of Destiny", was released as a stand-alone retail title through FormGen.
Gamestah
Gamestah was formed in 2003, after Return to Castle Wolfenstein players with the game-names "Russkie", "Spot" and "D-FENZ" wanted to begin a service for the Australian gaming community, to provide commentary of Return to Castle Wolfenstein matches that took place on gaming ladders such as GameArena and Netspace's "Gamespace" gaming ladder. Gamestah shoutcaster "Stewart "Ej" Brumm" revealed in an interview for TV show Good Game that "before Gamestah, shoutcasting in Australia was a very ad hoc thing." Through time and resources provided by volunteers, Gamestah quickly became well-known through the communities which it had covered extensively. It became approved shoutcasters for GameArena in 2005, and became closely associated with "GameArena" and "AusGamers", both run by Australian games software company Mammoth Media.
Castle Master
Castle Master is a 1990 video game by developer Teque Software Development and published by Incentive Software. It was released for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST and IBM PC.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Both console versions include an additional single player prequel mission, set in the fictional town of Ras El-Hadid in Egypt. The latter half of the level features an extensive underground burial site with many undead enemies, as does the original first mission. This prequel level is likely closer to the developers' true intentions for the story, as indicated by the distinctly Egyptian design of the burial site, including the presence of sand, traps, mummies and hieroglyphs on the walls in some areas (in the original storyline, this site is found in the middle of a German village during the second mission). By contrast, the single player storyline in the Windows version starts at Castle Wolfenstein.
Mick Gordon (composer)
Gordon first began work as a sound designer with Pandemic Studios, where he contributed additional sound design for "Destroy All Humans! 2". In 2013, he scored the first season of the fighting video game, "Killer Instinct", a reboot of the original 1994 title. The following year, Gordon scored the second season of "Killer Instinct" and the action-adventure first-person shooter "" (developed by MachineGames). He returned to the "Wolfenstein" series in 2015 to compose the score for "," a prequel to "."
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
The game is powered by a modified version of the id Tech 3 engine, with changes made to support large outdoor areas. The "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" engine was subsequently used as the foundation for "" (Splash Damage/Activision), "Trinity: The Shatter Effect" (Gray Matter Interactive/Activision) (shown at E3 in 2003, but assumed cancelled) and "Call of Duty" (Infinity Ward/Activision).
Wolfenstein 3D
As development continued, id Software hired their former Softdisk liaison Kevin Cloud as an assistant artist, and moved the company out to Mesquite, Texas, near where Apogee was located. Scott Miller of Apogee was pleased to have his star developers nearby, and agreed to not only increase their royalty rate to 50 percent, but have Apogee create their next game for Softdisk, "ScubaVenture", so that id could focus on "Wolfenstein". The game was intended to be released using Apogee's shareware model of splitting it into three episodes and releasing the first for free, with ten levels per episode. The level maps were designed in 2D using a custom-made program called Tile Editor (TEd), which had been used for the entire "Keen" series as well as several other games. Upon finding out that the team was able to create a level in a single day using the program, Miller convinced them to instead develop six episodes, which could be sold in different-sized packs. Around the same time, the team changed members and structure: id fired probationary president Mark Rein and brought back Jay Wilbur, who had stayed in Shreveport, to be both their CEO and business team; Bobby Prince moved into the office temporarily to record sound effects, while Adrian Carmack moved out of the office to get away from the noise.
Daniel Radcliffe
Radcliffe also performed at the Noël Coward Theatre in the stage play revival of Martin McDonagh's dark comedy "The Cripple of Inishmaan" as the lead, Billy Claven, for which he won the WhatsOnStage Award for Best Actor in a Play. In 2015, Radcliffe starred as Igor in a science fiction horror film "Victor Frankenstein" directed by Paul McGuigan and written by Max Landis, which was based on contemporary adaptations of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel "Frankenstein." He also starred as Sam House, one of the founders of Rockstar Games, in the biographical drama film "The Gamechangers".
Dave Morris (writer)
Morris also co-authored a book on the computer gaming industry, having worked as a game designer for Eidos and Microsoft, and is a former mentor in the American Film Institute's Digital Content Lab. In April 2012, he published an interactive reworking of Frankenstein in which the reader is able to give advice to the first-person narrator of the story.
Rise of the Triad
"Rise of the Triad" began its life as a follow-up to "Wolfenstein 3D" (though it reportedly shares some similarities with Hall's "Doom Bible", which laid out Hall's conception of the video game "Doom" and even shares the name of one of the protagonists). The working titles of the game were "Wolfenstein II" and "Wolfenstein 3D: Rise of the Triad". It was to use the same game engine code as "Wolfenstein 3D", and have new levels, art, and characters. The artwork took around six months to do. As the game was getting into deeper development, project leader Scott Miller was contacted by John Romero, informing Miller that the project had been cancelled. Miller suspected that this was because id Software did not want to draw the spotlight away from their upcoming game, "Doom". In order to keep as many of the numerous game assets the team had already created from going to waste, Tom Hall came up with a new storyline which still incorporated the Nazi themes seen in the Wolfenstein series.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
The initial inspiration for "Wolfenstein: The New Order" came from previous games in the franchise. Senior gameplay designer Andreas Öjerfors said that it was the "super intense immersive combat" that defined the previous games, so MachineGames ensured that this elements was included in "The New Order". The development team refer to the game as a "first-person action adventure", naming this one of the unique defining points of the game. "It is the David vs Goliath theme," Öjerfors explained. "B.J. against a global empire of Nazis." Öjerfors also acknowledged that many aspects of the game's narrative are simply exaggerated elements of the Nazi Party: "The larger than life leaders, strange technology, strange experiments." The team viewed the game as a "dark-roasted blend of drama, mystery, humor." Creative director Jens Matthies explained that they "take perhaps the most iconic first-person shooter franchise in history and push it into a strange new world."
"Wolfenstein: The New Order" is the second game to use id Software's id Tech 5 engine, after "Rage" (2011). The game utilizes the engine to add a large amount of detail to the game world. The team often found it difficult to develop the game with 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second, particularly on complex environments, but "we always made it work somehow", said Matthies. He has also said that the main advantages of the engine is the speed and the detailing, while its biggest disadvantage is dynamic lighting; "on the other hand the static light rendering is really awesome, so you have full radiosity and can do really spectacular-looking things using that," he added. Senior concept artist Axel Torvenius said that one of the main inspirations for the art design of the game was movies from the 1960s, calling out the James Bond movies. The design for the Nazis in the game was influenced by the aesthetics of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War; "it's blended with the style of the 1960s and the fashion ideals of how to express yourself visually," Öjerfors explained. This viewpoint is also influenced by the element of exaggeration, which is common throughout the game's design and has been acknowledged by the team as a development inspiration. Character models can be covered in up to a 256k texture; however, this is not used often in the game on individual characters, due to the difficulty of seeing it from a distance.
Wolfenstein 3D
The Super NES port was completed in three weeks in March 1993 during the development of "Doom", after the contractor who had agreed to do the port proved to have made no progress. This version made use of binary space partitioning rather than raycasting in order to give it speed. Nintendo insisted on censoring the game in accordance with their policies. The port was initially going to have green blood, but the final version had no blood at all. Using the source code of the Super NES port, on a whim John Carmack later converted the game to run on the Atari Jaguar. Atari Corporation approved the conversion for publication and Carmack spent three weeks, assisted by Dave Taylor, improving the port's graphics and quality to what he later claimed was four times more detail than the DOS version. He also removed the changes that Nintendo had insisted on. The SNES version was ported to Japan and released on February 10, 1994 under the name "Wolfenstein 3D: The Claw of Eisenfaust" before being ported back to North America and Europe a little later in 1994. In 1993, Alternate Worlds Technology licensed "Wolfenstein 3D" and converted it into a virtual reality arcade game. The Acorn Archimedes conversion was done in UK by programmer Eddie Edwards and published by Powerslave Software. By 1994, a port for the Sega Megadrive was under development by Imagineer, who intended to release it by September, but it was cancelled due to technical problems. An Atari Lynx version of the game was offered earlier by Atari Corp. for id, but work on the port was never started due to an unrealized deal between the two companies. The 3DO version was released in October 1995 before being ported to Japan for release on December 15, 1995. The Apple IIGS port had been in development since Fall 1994 by programmer Bill Heineman under the Vitesse company, but due to licensing problems, the game was not released until four years later and published by Logicware. The iOS port was done using the OpenGL interface and coded in C. The Android port was titled "Wolfenstein 3D Touch" and published by Beloko Games.
Development of Doom
Following the release of "Spear of Destiny" and the completion of the "ShadowCaster" engine, id Software discussed what their next title would be. They wanted to create another 3D game using Carmack's new engine as a starting point, but were largely tired of "Wolfenstein". Lead designer Tom Hall was especially weary of it, and pushed for the team to make another game in the "Commander Keen" series; the team had created seven episodes in the series in 1990–91 as their first games, but the planned third set of episodes had been dropped in favor of "Wolfenstein 3D". While Carmack was initially interested in the idea, the rest of the team was not. They collectively felt that the platforming gameplay of the series was a poor fit for Carmack's fast-paced 3D engines, and especially after the success of "Wolfenstein" were interested in pursuing more games of that type. Additionally, the other two co-founders of id were not interested in creating another "Keen" game: John Romero, the designer of "Wolfenstein", was not interested in doing another "cutesy" game, and lead artist Adrian Carmack preferred to create art in a darker style than the "Keen" games. John Carmack soon lost interest in "Keen" idea as well, instead coming up with his own concept: a game about using technology to fight demons, inspired by the "Dungeons & Dragons" campaigns the team played, combining the styles of "Evil Dead II" and "Aliens". The concept originally had a working title of "Green and Pissed", which was also the name of a concept Hall had proposed prior to "Wolfenstein", but Carmack soon named the proposed game after a line in the film "The Color of Money": "'What's in the case?' / 'In here? Doom.'"
List of Raven Software games
Raven spent the next decade working on a few original titles such as "Soldier of Fortune", as well as licensed games, including the "Star Wars" games "" (2002) and "" (2003) and the "X-Men" titles "X-Men Legends" (2004) and "" (2006). By 2009, the company had three development teams, and released the licensed title "Wolfenstein" (2009) while working on their first original game since 2002, "Singularity" (2010). Both "Wolfenstein" and "Singularity" sold poorly, however, and Raven laid off employees after each title, consolidating into a single development team by October 2010, shortly after "Singularity"s release. Following the layoffs, Raven focused exclusively as an assistant developer for the "Call of Duty" series, which has the position of lead developer rotate between Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games. Raven was the primary developer on two titles since then: the China-exclusive "Call of Duty Online" (2015), and "" (2016), a remake of the 2007 "" packaged with "". Raven Software has worked on 32 titles since its founding, 10 of them "Call of Duty" titles, including their latest game "" (2017).
Castle of Frankenstein
Castle of Frankenstein was an American horror, science fiction and fantasy film magazine, published between 1962 and 1975 by Calvin Thomas Beck's Gothic Castle Publishing Company, distributed by Kable News. Larry Ivie - who also was cover artist for several early issues - and Ken Beale edited the first three issues. Writer-artist Bhob Stewart edited the magazine from 1963 into the early 1970s. Although promoted and sold as a "monster magazine," readers were aware that "Castle of Frankenstein", at the time, was the only nationally distributed magazine devoted to a legitimate and serious coverage of B movies. In addition to its central focus on classic and current horror films, "Castle of Frankenstein" also devoted pages to amateur filmmakers and fanzines. Its advertising pages sold full-length silent feature films such as "The Lost World" and "".
Wolfenstein 3D
"Wolfenstein 3D" was well received by reviewers upon its release. Chris Lombardi of "Computer Gaming World" praised the "sparse [but] gorgeous", "frighteningly realistic", and "extremely violent" graphics, as well as the immersive sound and music. Noting the violence, he warned "those sensitive to such things to stay home". Lombardi concluded that "Wolfenstein 3D", alongside "Ultima Underworld" released two months prior, was "the first game technologically capable of creating a sufficient element of disbelief–suspension to emotionally immerse the player in a threatening environment", stating that they knew of no other game that could "evoke such intense psychological responses from its players". "Wolfenstein" twice received 5 out of 5 stars in "Dragon" in 1993; Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser termed it "definitely one of the best arcade games ever created for PC", highly praised the graphics and sound, and said that the "fast-paced action" could keep players enthralled for weeks if they were not concerned about the violence. Sandy Petersen, in the first "Eye of the Monitor" column, claimed that "there is nothing else quite like "Wolfenstein"" and that it had "evolved almost beyond recognition" from the original 1981 game. He enthusiastically praised the speed and gameplay, calling it "a fun game with lots of action" and "a fun, fairly mindless romp", though he did note that at higher difficulty settings or later levels it became extremely hard. The "Spear of Destiny" retail episode was also rated highly by "Computer Gaming World"s Bryan A. Walker, who praised the added enemy types, though he noted that it was essentially the same game as the shareware episodes. Formgen's "Spear of Destiny" mission packs "Return to Danger" and "Ultimate Challenge" were reviewed by Paul Hyman of "Computer Gaming World", who praised the updated graphical details and sound, as well as the smooth gameplay, but noted its overall dated graphics and lack of gameplay changes from the original game.
Castle of Frankenstein
In 1999, publisher Dennis Druktenis revived both "Castle of Frankenstein" (releasing 10 more issues) and the original title "Journal of Frankenstein" (releasing five more issues).
Wolfenstein
Two operatives of an allied espionage agency, William "B.J." Blazkowicz and Agent One are captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in Castle Wolfenstein during their attempt to investigate rumours surrounding one of Heinrich Himmler's personal projects, the SS Paranormal Division. Agent One is killed during the interrogation, while Blazkowicz escapes custody, fighting his way out of the castle. As the challenge is still afoot, Blazkowicz discovers that the Nazis are constructing a plan called 'Operation Resurrection', which oversees resurrecting the dead as well as dealing with supernatural elements, using them for their own advantage to win World War II against the Allied power.
Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein 3D is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software and FormGen. Originally released on May 5, 1992 for MS-DOS, it was inspired by the 1981 Muse Software video game "Castle Wolfenstein", and is the third installment in the "Wolfenstein" series. In "Wolfenstein 3D", the player assumes the role of Allied spy William "B.J." Blazkowicz during World War II as he escapes from the Nazi German prison Castle Wolfenstein and carries out a series of crucial missions against the Nazis. The player traverses each of the game's levels to find an elevator to the next level or kill a final boss, fighting Nazi soldiers, dogs, and other enemies with knives and a variety of guns.
CJ Carella's WitchCraft
CJ Carella's WitchCraft, or more informally WitchCraft (), is a modern horror role-playing game published by Eden Studios, Inc. It is based on the "Unisystem" game system and had been previously published by Myrmidon Press. In both cases it was designed and written by C. J. Carella. "WitchCraft" was the first RPG to use the "Unisystem" game system.
Wolfenstein
The game is a loose remake of "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", with heavy resemblances noticed within the storylines of the two games, as well as the existence of various characters as homages to the ones from the older title. Developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks, the game serves as a stand-alone expansion pack to "", and was released in 2015.
Falkenstein Castle (Pfronten)
The name and background of the castle have inspired "Castle Falkenstein" (abbreviated CF), a steampunk-themed fantasy role-playing game (RPG) designed by Mike Pondsmith and originally published by R. Talsorian Games.
Wolfenstein 3D
Initially the team believed that they would be unable to use the "Wolfenstein" name due to trademark issues, and came up with multiple possible titles. They contacted "Castle Wolfenstein" developer Silas Warner, but learned that Muse Software and successor companies no longer existed and the trademark had lapsed, leaving them the option to use the name "Wolfenstein 3D". The game concept met with immediate approval from Scott Miller of Apogee, who considered id Software his star developer, and he guaranteed id a US$100,000 payment on the project. Mark Rein, who had been brought on a few months prior as id's probationary president, also sold the idea of doing a retail "Wolfenstein" project to FormGen, which had published id's December 1991 "Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter", overcoming the publisher's concerns over "Wolfenstein"s proposed content. This put id in the unique position of selling simultaneously to the shareware and retail markets.
Romero and Hall designed the gameplay and aesthetics; Romero wanted the goal to be "to mow down Nazis", with the suspense of storming a Nazi bunker full of SS soldiers and Hitler himself, as well as dogs, blood "like you never see in games", and straightforward, lethal weapons. Hall designed the levels while also adding collectible objects in the form of treasure and food for health items. Carmack programmed "the core" of the game's engine in a month; he added a few features to the "Wolfenstein 3D" engine from "Catacomb 3-D", including support for doors and decorative non-wall objects, but primarily focused on making the game run smoother and faster with higher-resolution graphics. The graphics for the game were planned to be in 16 color EGA, but were changed to 256 color VGA four months before release. Romero in turn worked on building a game with the engine, removing elements of the initial design, like looting enemy bodies, that he felt interrupted the flow of fast gameplay. The sprites for the enemies and objects were hand drawn at eight different angles by Adrian Carmack. Initially the team had an external artist who assisted him and created animated wall textures, but the team felt that the quality was poor and did not use it in the game. The level design, by Romero and Hall, due to the grid-based level design, took some inspiration from "Pac-Man", and paid homage with a hidden "Pac-Man" level. The team ensured that the presentation of the game created the atmosphere that they wanted, adding violent animations by Adrian Carmack for enemies being shot and music and sound effects by "Keen" composer Bobby Prince to make the guns sound exciting. With the aid of a 16-bit sampler keyboard and cassette recorder, Bobby Prince composed realistic sounds from a shooting range in addition to Foley sounds. The development team along with Scott Miller did the voicing for the enemies.
Todd Breitenstein
Todd A. Breitenstein (March 3, 1966 – March 24, 2013) was a game designer.
For two years beginning in 2000, Todd Breitenstein worked for Cincinnati-based United States Playing Card Company's game division. In 2002, he and his wife Kerry started the game company Twilight Creations, of which he was president. He designed the board game "Zombies!!!"
John Carmack
John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is an American computer programmer, video game developer and engineer. He co-founded id Software. Carmack was the lead programmer of the "id Software" video games "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", "Quake", "Rage" and their sequels. Carmack is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes. In August 2013, Carmack took the position of CTO at Oculus VR.
Wolfenstein (2009 video game)
Four promotional motion comics, each about three minutes long, were released. Each was based on a particular installment in the "Wolfenstein" series and served as a nostalgic reminder. The first one recreated "Wolfenstein 3D"s escape from Castle Wolfenstein, the Hans Grosse killing and the final battle against Adolf Hitler. The second was based upon "Wolfenstein 3D"s prequel game "Spear of Destiny", and recreated its final battle, in which B.J. fights the cybernetic Death Knight and the Angel of Death for control of the Spear. The third comic was based on "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" and recreated the battle with Olaric, the destruction of an experimental V2 rocket and later the final battle against Heinrich I. The fourth comic was based on the "Wolfenstein"s own cinematic introduction and shows B.J. infiltrating a Nazi battleship and stealing the first Thule medallion.
Wolfenstein
Originally planned to be released as an expansion pack to "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", the game was instead released as a free to play multiplayer title. It has no storyline or single player campaign mode. Instead, it has an expanded edition of the previous game's multiplayer. It was developed by Splash Damage and published by Activision. A commercial follow-up, called "" was released in 2007 by the same group.
Crusader: No Remorse
"Crusader: No Remorse" was developed by Loose Cannon Productions, a division of Origin Systems. It was directed by Tony Zurovec, whose chief inspiration for the game was "Castle Wolfenstein". The game uses an advanced version of the "" isometric view engine featuring full SVGA graphics. The game's audio uses a specially made engine, called Asylum Sound System, which employs MOD files rather than General MIDI, in order to provide good quality without relying on expensive hardware. Each mission and intermission level has its own track. The soundtracks for both games were composed by Andrew Sega and Dan Grandpre of the now-defunct Straylight Productions.
Frankenstein (video game)
"Frankenstein" is a standard text adventure with static graphics in some locations to set the scene. It is similar to the earlier game "Dracula", which was produced by the same author. It is divided in three parts; the player takes the role of Dr. Frankenstein in the first two, and of his monster in the third.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
This gameplay was later reutilized in a full-fledged commercial game "" set in id Software's "Quake" universe. A semi-sequel called "Wolfenstein" was developed by Raven Software and id Software and published by Activision, and released on August 18, 2009. A sequel titled "" and a standalone prequel expansion titled "" have also been released in 2014 and 2015. The Old Blood references RTCW with characters with similar names and the X-labs being mentioned.
Christopher Howard Wolf
Christopher Howard Wolf (born September 21, 1979) is an American independent game developer and writer. He is the founder of independent game company WRONG Games, for which he works as a game designer. He is known for work on the games DragonSpires, I'm O.K - A Murder Simulator, Hell Rising, and Scroll Wars. He also authored a graphic novel retelling the story of Nosferatu, and has appeared on Dawson's Creek and in the English dubbing of You're Under Arrest!. Currently, he now runs a horror story website called "Slimebeast", which has released several "Creepypastas" including "Funnymouth", "Whimsywood", "Lost Episodes", its sequel "Sid's Video", "Abandoned by Disney" its sequels "Room Zero" and "Corruptus", and prequel "A Few Suggestions".
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
The existence of "Wolfenstein: The Old Blood" was first acknowledged by Bethesda Softworks on 4 March 2015, through the release of an announcement trailer. Footage of the game was showcased at PAX East on 6–7 March 2015. Though initially announced to only be available digitally, it was later confirmed that the game would also receive a physical retail release in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
B.J. Blazkowicz
B.J. Blazkowicz entered the "Wolfenstein" series with "Wolfenstein 3D" in 1992. The motion comic series created to promote 2009's "Wolfenstein" claims a continuous (partially retconned) timeline with "Wolfenstein 3D", "Spear of Destiny", "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", and finally "Wolfenstein" (later continued in "", "" and "").
Wolfgang Engel
Engel then founded Confetti Interactive and Confetti Games in 2009, where he serves as CEO. Confetti is a think-tank for real-time graphics research in the videogame and movie industry, graphics tools developer, and programming services company. Tools Engel has helped develop for the company include Aura, a global illumination system; Ephemeris, a skybox/skydome system; and PixelPuzzle, a Post FX pipeline system. As a part of his role with Confetti, Engel works with external clients, and provides consultations to other game developers. Confetti contributed to games including "Tomb Raider", "Battlefield 4", "Murdered Soul Suspect", "Star Citizen", "Dirt 4", "Vainglory", "Transistor", "Call of Duty Black Ops 3", "Battlefield 1", "Mafia 3", "Quake Champions", and "Phyre".
Wolfenstein: The New Order
After developer MachineGames was founded, the employees all began brainstorming ideas, and pitching them to publishers. In June 2009, MachineGames owner ZeniMax Media acquired id Software and all of its property, including "Doom", "Quake" and "Wolfenstein". Bethesda Softworks, who had previously declined a pitch from MachineGames, suggested that they develop a new game from a franchise acquired by ZeniMax. MachineGames inquired about developing a new game in the "Wolfenstein" series; the studio visited id Software, who approved of MachineGames' request for a new "Wolfenstein" game. By November 2010, paperwork was signed, allowing MachineGames to develop "Wolfenstein: The New Order". Preliminary development lasted approximately three years.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
The game was nominated at 2002 Game Developers Choice Awards in the "Excellence in Programming" category (Sherman Archibald, John Carmack, and Ryan Feltrin).
Dark Castle
"Dark Castle" is a platform game where a young hero named Duncan tries to make his way to the evil Black Knight, dodging objects as well as solving occasional puzzles. The game is notable for its use of sampled sounds to great effect. A sequel titled "Beyond Dark Castle" was released in 1987. A second sequel, "Return to Dark Castle", was announced in 2000, but it was not released until March 14, 2008.
Galencia
Galencia is a 2017 computer game created as a tribute to the 1979 game Galaxian, created in a retrogaming style. The game was developed by Jason Aldred, and is available in Commodore 64 and Windows versions (via Steam).
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
In March 2008, the United States Department of State published a report to Congress, "Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism", that described "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" as an "anti-Semitic video game" with no qualifications. The report picked up on an article originally written in 2002 by Jonathan Kay of the New York Times regarding the recent introduction of "Nazi protagonists" in the online gaming market (referring specifically to "Day of Defeat" and Wolfenstein). The article was published just 19 days before "" was released which shares many similar features, and Nazis as playable characters in multiplayer.
Wolfenstein (2009 video game)
A follow-up, "", was developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks. It launched on May 20, 2014 in the U.S. on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows platforms. The ninth installment takes place during the 1960s in an alternate history world where the Nazis won World War II. Players again take the role of Blazkowicz.
The Castles of Dr. Creep
A game enthusiast worked on a faithful game engine remake for the game since 2010 via reverse engineering, source code is on GitHub under the GPLv3. The remake got released on Steam by the original author and the remake author in September 2016. Available for PC (Windows, OS X, and Linux platform) it is sold for $2.99.
Wolfenstein
The game is noted for popularizing the first-person shooter genre, released in 1992, developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software.
David Jones (video game developer)
David Scott Jones (born October 1965) is a Scottish video game programmer and entrepreneur who co-founded video game developers DMA Design (now Rockstar North) in 1987, Realtime Worlds in 2002, and Cloudgine in 2012. Jones created "Lemmings" and "Grand Theft Auto", which both spawned many successful sequels. He also created the "Crackdown" franchise for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles, and the open-ended massively multiplayer online game, "".
The Cave (video game)
Ron Gilbert has been working with adventure games since his days at LucasArts, including several collaborations with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman; together, they developed games like "Maniac Mansion", its sequel "Day of the Tentacle", and the first games in the "Monkey Island" series. Gilbert left LucasArts in 1992, initially creating his own development studio but then moving on to other games, including contributing to Telltale Games' episodic series, "Tales of Monkey Island" based on the LucasArts series. Meanwhile, Schafer would stay with LucasArts until the adventure game market fell in the late 1990s, and created his own studio, Double Fine Productions, with several of the former LucasArts developers. Though Double Fine struggled with well-received but financially unsuccessful titles "Psychonauts" and "Brütal Legend", it became successful in marketing four smaller games developed during an "Amnesia Fortnight" period in "Brütal Legend"s development between 2010 and 2011.
Wolfenstein: Ray Traced
Wolfenstein: Ray Traced is a research project from Intel Corporation that applied a ray tracing renderer to the game content of Wolfenstein (2009). The possibility of using ray tracing for this game in real-time has been demonstrated with a cloud-based rendering approach.
Wolfenstein 3D
"Wolfenstein 3D" was a critical and commercial success, garnering numerous awards and selling over 200,000 copies by the end of 1993. It is widely regarded as having helped popularize the first-person shooter genre and establishing the standard of fast-paced action and technical prowess for many subsequent games in the genre, as well as showcasing the viability of the shareware publishing model at the time. FormGen developed an additional two episodes for the game, while Apogee released a pack of over 800 fan-created levels. Id Software never returned to the series, but did license the engine to numerous other titles before releasing the source code for free in 1995, and multiple other games in the "Wolfenstein" series have been developed by other companies since 2001.
Castle Falkenstein (role-playing game)
Castle Falkenstein (abbreviated CF) is a steampunk-themed fantasy role-playing game (RPG) designed by Mike Pondsmith and originally published by R. Talsorian Games. The game is named for a legendary unbuilt castle in the Bavarian Alps. Players play the roles of gallant adventurers, facing the intrigue and derring-do of Victorian adventures such as "The Prisoner of Zenda".
Castle Falkenstein (role-playing game)
A "GURPS" version ("GURPS Castle Falkenstein") and a supplement were later published by Steve Jackson Games. "GURPS Castle Falkenstein" was published in 2000.
Charles Cecil
In 1989, when Cecil was still working at Activison, he decided to set up his own development studio. He contacted Tony Warriner, who had worked with him at Artic Computing and Paragon Programming, and Warriner brought in a fellow programmer, David Sykes. Together with Noirin Carmody, his then-partner and General Manager at Activision UK, they founded Revolution Software (March 1990). The company was originally located in Hull, but moved to York in 1994. Besides becoming Revolution's managing director, Cecil would focus from the start on writing and design. At that time the graphic adventure genre was dominated by LucasArts and Sierra On-Line, and they wanted to create something in between, an adventure game that didn't take itself too seriously, but did have a serious story. For Revolution's first title, Cecil conceived with others an innovative game engine, called Virtual Theatre, and the engine itself was designed by Tony Warriner. The result was Lure of the Temptress (1992), and though it was their first product, it became one of the successful games that would follow. For the second title, Beneath a Steel Sky (1994), often referred to as a cult classic, Cecil contacted comic book artist Dave Gibbons. He had met Gibbons when he was still at Activision, and he admired Gibbons's work on "Watchmen". Gibbons became involved in the design of the game, and their collaboration would inspire Cecil's next move.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is a free and open-source multiplayer first-person shooter video game set during World War II. It was originally planned to be released as a commercial expansion pack to "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" and later as a standalone game. However, due to problems with the single-player aspect, the multiplayer portion was released on 29 May 2003 as a freeware standalone game. In January 2004, the source code for the game logic (not the game engine) was released to the benefit of its modding community.
Castle Falkenstein (role-playing game)
"Castle Falkenstein" was ranked 45th in the 1996 reader poll of "Arcane" magazine to determine the 50 most popular roleplaying games of all time. The UK magazine's editor Paul Pettengale commented: ""Castle Falkenstein" is one of those games that people tend to either love or hate. It has a unique atmosphere, combining alternate history, celtic mythology, steampunk and a somewhat whimsical, fairy-tale feel. Likewise, the rulebook itself is quite different from many, being laid out as a novel, with important information pulled out in sidebars, and the rules coming later. This reflects the main thrust of the system, which is heavily geared towards roleplaying and storytelling over game mechanics and numbers, and drops dice in favour of a couple of packs of playing cards."
Castle Adventure
Castle Adventure is an adventure game designed by Kevin Bales and originally released in . It was also illegally included in Keypunch's "Swords and Sorcery" under the title "Golden Wombat". It is compiled from Microsoft BASIC; however the source has never been released.
ShadowCaster
The "ShadowCaster" game engine, a successor of the "Wolfenstein 3D" engine and a predecessor of the "Doom" engine, was written by id Software's John Carmack and licensed to Raven Software. Carmack wrote the "ShadowCaster" 3D engine during his technology research after id Software completed "Wolfenstein 3D". The engine features diminished lighting, texture-mapped floors and ceilings, walls with variable heights and sloped floors. The engine was "about half as fast as that of "Wolfenstein"" but fit the exploration of "ShadowCaster" rather than the fast-paced action of "Doom".
Mike Pondsmith
Michael Alyn Pondsmith is an American roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He is best known for his work for the publisher R. Talsorian Games, where he developed a majority of the company's role-playing game lines since the company's founding in 1982. Pondsmith is credited as an author of several RPG lines, including "Mekton" (1984), "Cyberpunk" (1988) and "Castle Falkenstein" (1994). He also contributed to the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures lines of the "Dungeons & Dragons" role-playing game, worked in various capacities on video games, and authored or co-created several board games. Pondsmith also worked as an instructor at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.
Louis Castle
Castle took a detour out of the video gaming industry to serve as Chief Strategy Officer for Shufflemaster (which became SHFL entertainment) in late 2011. He returned to video games as Creative Director for Kixeye's "War Commander: Rogue Assault" which launched worldwide in 2016.
Castle Wolfenstein
With an emphasis on trying to avoid detection for as long as possible, "Castle Wolfenstein" and its sequel are considered by gamers to be prototypical stealth-based games—some of the first in a genre that would not gain popularity until the late 1990s.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
The source code for "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" and "Enemy Territory" was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) on August 12, 2010. The "ioquake3" developers at icculus.org announced the start of respective engine projects soon after.
Castle Wolfenstein
Castle Wolfenstein is a stealth-based action-adventure shooter video game developed by Muse Software for the Apple II. It was released in 1981 and ported to MS-DOS, the Atari 8-bit family, and the Commodore 64. "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein" is its sequel.
Return to Dark Castle
Return to Dark Castle is a 2008 platform game for Mac OS X developed by Z Sculpt. It is the third and final game in the Dark Castle series, following "Dark Castle" (1986) and "Beyond Dark Castle" (1987). Development on the game, begun in 1996, was notoriously protracted, and the game was often labeled vaporware. "Return to Dark Castle" was originally scheduled to be released in Winter 2000, but was not released until March 14, 2008. It brought colour to the original black and white graphics, and integrated the gameplay and levels of both the original games.
World Cyber Games 2005
Stuart's gaming passion is deeply rooted in ID's Wolfenstein series. Stuart has been prominent in the Return to Castle Wolfenstein and communities for many years. More recently, he's ventured out into the world of gaming and has dabbled in Counter-Strike, Quake, and Real Time Strategy games. The WCG Grand Finals in San Francisco in 2004 was Stuart's first LAN event, but he is eager to return to the event that gave him a chance to see how amazing competitive LANs can be! Stuart provided commentary for and FIFA in San Francisco.
Wolfenstein (2009 video game)
Shortly after the move, Caroline Becker is captured and held in a nearby castle. Blazkowicz helps the Kreisau Circle stage a rescue mission. He confronts Zetta's replacement, "Obergruppenführer" Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse, who is eager for revenge after Blazkowicz destroyed his Übersoldat-program in "Return to Castle Wolfenstein". During a struggle, Caroline appears to be killed by Hans Grosse, Deathshead's henchman. Upon Blazkowicz's return to Isenstadt, Stefan Krieg informs him that he has killed his brother, Anton, thinking he was the mole and betrayed both Blazkowicz and Caroline. Blazkowicz then finds out that a Nazi superweapon, powered by Black Sun energy, is about to be fired at the city from a zeppelin that has been hovering over the city since Blazkowicz first arrived in Isenstadt. He boards the airship, where he discovers that Dr. Alexandrov was the real traitor all along. Alexandrov's treachery is rewarded only by an execution at the hand of Hans Grosse. In order to prepare the weapon, Deathshead and Grosse enter the Black Sun through a portal that Nazi scientists had excavated and reassembled. Blazkowicz jumps in after them. In the Black Sun, he encounters Hans Grosse guarding the machine that powers Deathshead's superweapon. Grosse greets him in a mechanical suit outfitted with two chainguns (recreating his earlier appearance in "Wolfenstein 3D"), and a Thule Medallion identical to Blazkowicz's. Blazkowicz kills Grosse by jamming the "Nachtsonne" crystals from his medallion into Grosse's. He then destroys the machine, but Deathshead flees through the portal before B.J. can capture him. The explosion takes out the portal and destabilizes the zeppelin, effectively destroying all ways of accessing the Black Sun Dimension. B.J grabs onto a parachute and leaps from the railing. Shortly afterward, the zeppelin falls from the sky and B.J witnesses as it crashes into the distant castle, severely damaging the castle in a giant series of explosions. In a post-credits cutscene, a wounded Deathshead is seen clambering out of the burning zeppelin and castle debris, screaming in frustration.
Splash Damage
Following Market Garden's success, Activision and id Software asked Splash Damage to produce three additional multiplayer maps for the "Return to Castle Wolfenstein Game of the Year Edition". The same year, Splash Damage partnered with the two companies to develop "", a stand-alone expansion based on "Return to Castle Wolfenstein". The Windows version of "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" was released online for free on 29 May 2003, with Linux and Mac versions following later. "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" won several Game of the Year and Editor's Choice awards and remains one of the most popular online first-person shooter titles.
Missile Command
Contemporary "Missile Command" clones include "Missile Defense" (1981) for the Apple II, "Stratos" (1982) for the TRS-80, "Repulsar" (1983) for the ZX Spectrum, and "Barrage" (1983) for the TI-99/4A. Silas Warner programmed the 1980 clone "ABM" for the Apple II several years before writing "Castle Wolfenstein". Similarly, John Field programmed the "Missile Command"-like game "ICBM" (1981), then went on to create "Axis Assassin", one of the first five games published by Electronic Arts.
Frankenstein: The Monster Returns
Frankenstein: The Monster Returns is a Nintendo Entertainment System action video game developed by Tose and published by Bandai in 1991 exclusively in North America.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Mick Gordon, who previously composed the 2016 reboot of "Doom", returned to score "Wolfenstein II" along with newcomer, Martin Sieg Andersen, who previously composed the puzzle-platformer video game, "Inside", along with special music contributions by Fredrik Thordendal, Pedro Macedo Camacho, who previously worked on Star Citizen and Christoffer Larsson. The official soundtrack was released digitally on 19 June 2018. Like the other game, the music is primarily industrial, with distorted synthesizers and reverbed electric guitars, with some rock influence.
Jeff Laubenstein
Jeff Laubenstein has worked for several major Fantasy Game companies, including FASA, White Wolf, and Wizards of the Coast. He has been working in the field since the mid 80s. He was the art director on the Earthdawn project. Most of the Earthdawn books contained at least several of his contributions. In the early Shadowrun game books, his work featured prominently, illustrating nearly all of the NPC portraits.
Mike Pondsmith
In 1994, R. Talsorian Games released Pondsmith's steampunk-themed fantasy role-playing game titled "Castle Falkenstein". The game's mechanics were based on playing cards, instead of dice, and geared towards live action role-playing. "Castle Falkenstein" remains Pondsmith's most critically acclaimed game to date with the 1994 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules, and the 1995 Nigel D. Findley Memorial Award for Best Role-Playing Product recognitions. In 2000, "Castle Fankenstein" was adapted to the "GURPS" system by James Cambias and Phil Masters, and released by "Steve Jackson Games".
Wolfenstein
Like its predecessor, the game is a combination of action-adventure and stealth-based side-scroller, developed and published by Muse Software, and released in 1984. After the death of the original designer of the program, the widow of Silas Warner has released a ported version of the game, as well as its reconstructed source code in his honour in 2004.
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is an action-adventure first-person shooter video game developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was released on 5 May 2015 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The game is a stand-alone title in the "Wolfenstein" series and a prequel to 2014's "", set in an alternate-history 1946. The single-player story follows war veteran William "B.J." Blazkowicz and his efforts to discover the locations of a Nazi compound. Development began in 2014, soon after the release of "The New Order".
Darkstone: Evil Reigns
Darkstone: Evil Reigns (Darkstone in North America) is an action role-playing video game developed by Delphine Software International for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation. In 2014, the French publisher Anuman Interactive launched a remake available on iPad, iPhone and Android, with the cooperation of the original game's author Paul Cuisset.
Cyberdemon
In the action role-playing game "Doom RPG", the Cyberdemon is created by an occultist scientist Kronos. In "Wolfenstein RPG", the Cyberdemon appears as the Harbinger of Doom, summoned by the Nazis at Castle Wolfenstein during World War II. American commando William "B.J." Blazkowicz defeats it using the Spear of Destiny, destroying its right leg and left arm, and the Harbinger vows that it would have a rematch with Blazkowicz's descendent in the future, which happens when Stan Blazkowicz faces it in "Doom II RPG".
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
There are many different releases of "Return to Castle Wolfenstein". The original release, version 1.0, came in a game box featuring a book-like flap. A Collector's Edition, packaged in a metal case, was released at the same time. The contents of the Collector's Edition changed depending on when it was purchased and could include a poster and fabric patch, a poster and a bonus CD, or just the bonus CD. The Game of the Year Edition (2002 - v.1.33) came with the original "Wolfenstein 3D", game demos, and seven new multiplayer maps (Trenchtoast, Tram Siege, Ice, Chateau, Keep, The Damned, and Rocket.) The Platinum Edition (2004 - v.1.41) included "", a stand-alone multiplayer expansion, and "Wolfenstein 3D". "Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War" also came with the original "Wolfenstein 3D" as an unlockable after beating the campaign, and included some enhancements like surround sound.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
After studying the documents captured by Blazkowicz, the OSA has become aware of a scheme codenamed 'Operation: Resurrection', a plan to resurrect Heinrich I, a legendary and powerful Saxon warlock-king from 943 AD. Despite the skepticism of senior Allied commanders, the OSA parachutes Blazkowicz back near Castle Wolfenstein, at the Bramburg Dam, where he fights his way until he arrives at the village town of Paderborn. After assassinating all the senior officers of the SS Paranormal Division present there for the resurrection, Blazkowicz fights his way through Chateau Schufstaffel and into the grounds beyond. After fighting two more "Übersoldaten", Blazkowicz enters an excavation site near Castle Wolfenstein.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Each class specializes in a certain aspect of the game, and an effective team will balance players out using all four classes, such as a soldier for blasting through enemy defences, a medic for supporting the team and keeping them alive (Soldier making up for the lack of firepower with medics, medics making up for the lack of health), a Lieutenant to resupply teammates with ammo (especially soldiers) and engineers to complete the objective, having their way cleared by the soldier which is then supported by the Lieutenant.