Platform:  Apple 2

Developer: Muse Software

Publisher: Muse Software

Release Date (NA): 1981

Genre: Action

Nerd Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed by Old Ben

So Gamefly sent me the latest… Wolfenstein: the New Order.  I stuck it in, and found myself in a first person shooter which kind of reminded me why I never got into Doom.  So I fiddled with it, couldn’t get the hang of it, and sent it back.

But it gave me an idea.  You see, Castle Wolfenstein was one of the first games I ever played.  I mean, ever.  And this venerable game, older than the Nintendo, certainly deserves a review of its own.

How do describe the original.  Hmmmm…

We played it on our first computer… the Apple 2.  And I still get nostalgic when I think about that big, clunky machine.  In school, they were hooked up to all-green monitors, but we had some color by hooking it to an small color TV.  (Not everyone had color TV in those days.  My parents still had a black & white set in their bedroom.)  And this wasn’t an HDMI cable… there was no such thing back then.  But you had to unscrew two um… screws, put the exposed metal crab like wires underneath from a switch box, screw the screws back shut, and… yeah.  Castle Wolfenstein was in high resolution graphics, which in those days meant you had about five or six colors to play around with.  (Low resolution graphics had a whopping 15 colors to choose from, but the smallest dot it could make was a… block that is about the size of… oh… I don’t know,  bigger than any letter I could type, certainly.)

The game was on a floppy disk which in those days really was floppy.  You put it in and you would get this picture:

Nice orange castle, right?  You had a choice of playing with keyboard, joystick or paddles.  Paddles?  Yeah, never play this with paddles.  Joystick if you have them (though in those days, they never really worked right.)  And today, you’re probably gonna be using keyboard if you want to play it on some emulator.  Your rank started at private, but as you won you could go up in rank until you hit field marshal.  Which is where I reset to private, because it was just too darn hard.

Then there’s the instructions.  Every time you played, the game recounted the same story, and you had to sit through this text as the game loaded.  It went like this, in all capital letters.  (This was before the invention of CAPS LOCK and lower case letters were not yet programmed into computers.)

“Welcome to Castle Wolfenstein, mate!  The Nazis brought you here to get information out of you before they kill you.  That’s what this place is for.  If you listen you can hear the screams.  They already worked me over, and I’ll never get out alive, but maybe you can with this gun.  It’s standard issue: Each clip holds ten bullets, and it’s fully loaded.”  (new screen)

“Be careful mate because every room in the castle is guarded.  The regular guards can’t leave their posts without orders, but watch out for the SS Stormtroopers.  They’re the ones in the bulletproof vests, and they’re like bloody hounds.  Once they get on your trail they won’t stop chasing you until you kill them, and you almost need a grenade to do that.” (new screen)

“Castle Wolfenstein is full of supplies too.  I know one chap who found a whole German uniform and almost sneaked out past the guards.  He might have made it if he hadn’t shot some poor sod and got the SS on his trail.  If you can’t open a supply chest, try shooting it open.  Now I wouldn’t go shooting at chests full of explosives.”  (new screen)

“One more thing:  The battle plans for operation Rhinegold are hidden somewhere in the castle.  I’m sure you know what it will mean to the Allied High Command if we can get our hands on those….  they’re coming for me!  Good luck!”    AAAIIIIEEEEEEGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!”

Yeah.  It’s been thirty years and I still remember the loading screen almost verbatim.  I didn’t look any of that up.  After a while, the disk would start to malfunction, and it would have an error about halfway through.  So you would reboot the program, do it again, and it would give you the “resuming where you left off,” and get back to the action.  Did I mention?  This game had a save feature, almost unheard of at the time.  But all this writing to the disk is probably what made it buggy after a while.

So… how did it work?  Um….

You’re a guy with a gun.  You have ten bullets.  There are orange Nazis around you, marching back and forth.  They’ll ignore you until you move.  Then they’ll either shoot you dead, or grab you, giving you the “You’re caught!” message, and it’s game over.

Of course, you could shoot them first.  You’ll get a pleasing little “Aeiaaa!” scream, and then get into the business of looting.  Castle Wolfenstein had a lot of looting.  Guards carry bullets, grenades, and keys.  Chests took a long time to open.  Point your gun at one, hit the space bar, and you would get a message like: “You must wait 235 seconds for this chest to open.”  Shooting might reduce the wait time… or just waste all your bullets.

Once the chest opened, you could find bullets, grenades, bullet proof vets (harder to get shot), uniforms (the guards will ignore you until you take hostile action).  Also in chests was a bunch of useless crap:  cannonballs (can’t carry them, but you can shoot them if you’re suicidal) saurkraut, bratwurst, schanppes, some other alcoholic beverage I’m not even going to try to spell, and the war plans!  Alright, the war plans aren’t exactly useless.  There’s only one chest with them in the whole castle, and if you find them, you’re pretty much guaranteed a promotion if you escape.  Other than that, they’re a pain to find.

The game really gets yours adrenaline pumping when you run into the SS stormtroopers (Yeah, I suppose this game takes place after Hitler purged the infamous SA brownshirts).  First of all, they wear bulletproof vests, so you’ll probably be throwing grenades instead of firing bullets… which are pretty inacurrate, and usually just destroy the wall behind them.  Plus, they can see through your uniform, so there’s no hiding.  And most scary, they follow you.  If you shoot a normal guard and flee the scene, leaving a survivor behind, he curses you but stays where he is.  (Video game logic?  Can’t leave their posts without orders?  Even when you killed his buddy?  Yeah.)  But the SS will pop out at you several rooms later, when you’re least expecting it.  Then you probably will panic so much that you bump into a wall, get stunned, caught, and sent to Dr. Mengele to toy with.

Good stuff.

Castle Wolfenstein did make a sequel… Beyond Castle Wolfenstein which was much more streamlined, and is worthy of its own review.  Castle Smurfenstein replaced the Nazis with smurfs and was uh… pretty funny.

When Castle Wolfenstein’s developer, Muse Software, went bankrupt, Castle Wolfensteinbecame abandoned software.  Id Software picked it up, remade it into a three dimensional shooter.  Legend has it that they didn’t have to pay a dime for the trademark.  Now it looks like they rewrote the end of World War 2, and through you into some strange world that doesn’t quite have the romance of Skyrim.

But hey, I suppose it’s a type of cultural evolution.  Just like Rome incorporated the ideals of Greece, and America some of the ideas of Rome, Id developers enjoyed the original game so much that they made Wolfenstein 3-d to good success, and are still riding the wave high.  Out of all the old Apple games I can get enough nostalgia twinges for to actually play, Castle Wolfenstein is among the top of the list.