planet romero

Hey, I’m wildweasel, one of the article-writing folks from the gaming “encyclopedia”, Hardcore Gaming 101. My current project is an exhaustive, all-encompassing article on all things Wolfenstein, from the Muse Software games on the Apple II, to the million-and-a-half ports of Wolfenstein 3D, to the 2009 game by Raven Software and potentially beyond.

In my studies (if you can call it that), I’ve happened upon a number of…shall we say, “oddities” relating to the series. There’s a fan-made Apple II “movie” called Beyond Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, where the player gets arrested by the Nazis and calls a bunch of other video game characters like Ultima’s Avatar to bail him out. There’s the rather well-made Apple IIgs port of Wolfenstein 3D. And then there’s the one that I’m the most confused about: a project called Wolfenstein VR, an arcade virtual-reality game by Alternate Worlds Technologies.

I’m kind of hoping I can get Mr. Romero to notice this thread, as I’ve got a few questions that I wonder if he can answer. (Or maybe I should track down Todd instead…meh, I’ll try this first. Couldn’t hurt.)

So here’s what I know. Wolfenstein VR was part of a project by AWT to create arcade VR games running on the Wolfenstein engine. There’s three titles that I know of: Wolfenstein VR, Blake Stone VR, and an all new one called Cybertag, which could be played in multiplayer with linked machines. I’ve found footage of Cybertag on Youtube which briefly shows the Wolfenstein VR title screen, and I’ve also been in touch with a former AWT employee named Tom Roe, who designed the artwork for Cybertag, but says that he didn’t get hired until after Wolfenstein had already been finished.

What I would like to try to figure out, though, was how close Wolfenstein VR was to its PC counterpart. Mr. Roe has already mentioned to me a couple of the changes – notably that all blood in the game was turned green, and possibly that the Nazi references were removed as well. I wonder, would John Romero or anybody else know anything else about this?

Another thing I’d like to know: from reading the book “Masters of Doom” and from watching John and Tom’s GDC postmortem of Doom, it sounds like id Software’s relationship with Imagineer (publishers of the SNES port of Wolfenstein) wasn’t so great. Or was that solely because of the independent contractor that was hired to make the port? Were there any complications regarding the port to NEC PC-9801, also published by Imagineer? That seems to be more of a straight port, just with text translated to Japanese, since to the best of my knowledge, the PC-9801 is pretty closely related to an actual IBM-compatible PC…

On a side note, the Wolfenstein series article may be going up on HG101′s site in a number of weeks – I have no clear estimate of when exactly, but I’ll report back when it’s available. Fans of the series may find a number of surprises in my coverage.