Castle Wolfenstein (Apple, C64 and Atari 8-bit for 1984, IBM PC in 1985)
You know how Michael Jordan was not part of the NBA’s player association licensing deals, and therefore was not in NBA Jam, and certainly not the face of the arcade cabinet or home console boxes? Well, I’ve got great news for you about who is front and center on the box for Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.
I can imagine the euphoria that Midway would have felt if they HAD gotten Michael Jordan. Well, it’s apparently a lot easier to onboard Adolph Hitler as part of your marketing push, because here is what the box looked like for Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.
“We got him!” I am sure someone at Muse Software said when Hitler’s next of kin(?) signed the deal. “We got him. This is going to move inventory.” The in-house artist working on a similar piece of art featuring Josef Mengele put down his pencil. Time to get to the real work. Kind of a blessing in disguise because, before Photoshop, you would have had to draw twins that Mengele experimented on distinctly and separately. I am making all this up, of course, it just surprised me to see that asshole’s face front and center when I started research on the game. Nobody ever got Ken Griffey Jr. on their baseball game, except for the game that signed him directly. He was the main man, the Adolph Hitler of video game baseball to kids growing up. Wait.
Developers were clearly still figuring out controls when this game — back to BCW, now – was created. What I like about it is that it’s a a time capsule of what the simulation genre was and could have been. In fact, I think it is more of a simulation than I think anyone gives it credit for. One of the interactions you can have is to possess identification papers. You’ll be wandering around the Castle and be asked by another Nazi to produce them. You are able to do so, and then the guy says “Heil!” and makes the Nazi salute. I want to stress that an encounter like this is more interesting than the average encounter with Raiders in Fallout 4. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein gets that right. A zillion dollar game from 2015 does not.
Talking more about the controls, the image to the right is a screenshot of what I found in a text file that accompanied the game.
I give Silas Warner credit for not assuming that, on the PC, everyone had a standard IBM keyboard with a number pad. The controls listed allow for the game to be playable on a standard PCjr keyboard (the good on– the “good” one).
But man, “S” to stop is brutal. When you start off in a direction, you just keep going until you hit the “S” key. Not even Asteroids had truly Newtonian motion like BCW does.
The Apple version allows for joystick control, though I haven’t tried it yet. My family had the original Castle Wolfenstein growing up, and the first exposure I had to a foreign language was digital Germans shouting orders at me through the PC Speaker. The sound is just as good here, with the Nazis yelling more things at you, the player. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein expanded horizons, it expanded vocabularies.
Here is a final screenshot – note that if you pick the palette 0 (red, brown, green and black) it kicks you back to the one depicted below for your next run. Bug found, schweinhunds!
- Beyond Castle Wolfenstein was played on an IBM PCjr using the jrIDE card and a genuine IBM PCjr monitor. I played the version that Trixter converted from a PC booter to an executable.