Wolfenstein 3D (2007)
Wolfenstein 3D is a 2007 shooter video game made by id Software and Bethesda Softworks.
Wolfenstein 3D puts B.J. Blazkowicz in a Nazi castle in 1992 and hands him a pistol. The goal is to shoot everyone between him and the exit across six episodes of flat-shaded corridors packed with guards, dogs, and the occasional supernatural detour. id Software's release is credited as the game that established the first-person shooter as a commercial genre. The digital re-release collects all six episodes plus the standalone Spear of Destiny campaign, preserving the original mechanics exactly as shipped, right down to the pixel-art sprites and the MIDI soundtrack.
Quick answers
What is Wolfenstein 3D about?
Wolfenstein 3D puts B.J. Blazkowicz in a Nazi castle in 1992 and hands him a pistol. The goal is to shoot everyone between him and the exit across six episodes of flat-shaded corridors packed with guards, dogs, and the occasional supernatural detour. id Software's release is credited as the game that established the first-person shooter as a commercial genre. The digital re-release collects all six episodes plus the standalone Spear of Destiny campaign, preserving the original mechanics exactly as shipped, right down to the pixel-art sprites and the MIDI soundtrack.
When was Wolfenstein 3D released?
Wolfenstein 3D was released on 3 August 2007.
Who made Wolfenstein 3D?
Wolfenstein 3D was made by id Software and Bethesda Softworks.
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Explore Wolfenstein 3D guides
Wolfenstein 3D in our writing
- Companion guide: First-Person Shooters: The Complete Guide to Gaming Down the Barrel
- Companion guide: id Software: Doom, Quake and the Birth of the Shooter
A few thoughts on Wolfenstein 3D
The DOOM: Original Game Soundtrack represents where id Software's sound design went thirty years after Wolfenstein 3D, from lo-fi MIDI beeps to industrial metal engineered around combat pacing.
Heavy music for a game that never lightens up
Wolfenstein 3D never slows down, guns blazing corridor after corridor while a grim, driving MIDI score pushes the violence along. Leprosy and Leather Teeth match that intensity with raw, unpolished metal, Blade Runner's score trades gunfire for a colder, dystopian kind of dread, and Neil Young's Living With War turns the same anger toward an actual war.
Games built on the tech Wolfenstein 3D helped kick off
Wolfenstein 3D laid down id Software's first-person blueprint, refined a year later into DOOM's faster, meaner take with that same thumping MIDI energy. The technology tree that started there kept growing: Half-Life 2 built on engine work that traces back to id, and Portal and Portal 2 inherited that same lineage, games built on ground Blazkowicz cleared first.
One fighter cutting through wave after wave of enemies
B.J. Blazkowicz doesn't stop to think, he just keeps moving forward through guard after guard until the level is clear. The Punisher: One Last Kill runs on that same one-man-army logic, Kamen Rider throws a single masked hero against an entire evil organization, Attack on Titan puts soldiers up against a threat that outnumbers and outsizes them, and Old Man's War drafts its recruits into a war that never ends.