Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D

This Day in Gaming, May 5: Wolfenstein 3D: 30th Anniversary

Up until May 5, 1992 the shooter genre had very little to offer. Sure, there were games with shooting episodes, there were even first-person shooter games, but it was Wolfenstein 3D that brought some order to a genre that no one had yet invented, albeit unknowingly. John Carmack and John Romero loved a) fast console games; b) dynamic arcade games; c) the two Castle Wolfenstein games and its creator Silas Warner. The first two points gave the world the Commander Keen series. And thanks to the c) a little later (with Warner’s permission) our birthday boy would be born.

Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D

Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D is the first book by Fabien Sanglard, he wrote it a year before Game Engine Black Book: DOOM, which we already talked about. And just like in book about DOOM, in this work Sanglard decided to talk about a game that was way ahead of its time.

But even though the graphics was incredible for its time, id Software continued to work on improvements. Back in 1992 John Carmack found a way to use integers instead of floating point (there was no hardware support for floating point), and it became one of the turning points in the history of computer game development in general.