Watch On
Where your average modder looks at a videogame and asks themselves “what could I add to this experience,” Isowulf creator LoGeKyl approached the classic Wolfenstein 3D with a slightly different perspective: “What if this was an entirely different, and worse, game entirely?”
I say “worse” not to diminish the quality of LoGeKyl’s work in the slightest, but because the pitch—”A faithful re-creation of the original Wolfenstein 3D… but viewed from an isometric perspective” makes me imagine an alternate version of the ’90s where id Software followed up the 2D Commander Keen platformers with some sort of top-down puzzle-action game that was a lot closer to the original 1980s Castle Wolfenstein. Without putting the “3D” in Wolf3D, would id have ever made Doom, giving us the gift of the first-person shooter? Surely not!
With that pessimistic prognosticating out of the way, I have to say LoGeKyl’s mod is still quite cool, especially as it was directly inspired by his love for the early days of id Software. “What made Wolfenstein 3D special to me was that it was one of the first times I realized that people made games,” he writes on Isowulf’s ModDB page. “The credits were right there: John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall. (Wait—aren’t these the same names I saw on Commander Keen!?) From that moment on, making games was all I ever wanted to do.”
LoGeKyl writes that he listens to audiobook versions of Masters of Doom or Romero’s autobiography Doom Guy whenever he’s getting ready to start a new project, and for this one he wanted to explore how well Wolfenstein 3D’s design would work in another form, with the camera pulled out and tilted to make a sort of shooter-Diablo.
“As it turns out, John Romero and Tom Hall’s original design still holds up, even from a completely different perspective. I figured I’d have to tweak movement speeds, enemy AI, maybe switch from hit-scan to projectiles—but nope. It all just works.”
His only addition, graphics-wise, was a sprite of B.J. Blazkowicz, since the first-person game naturally didn’t include one beyond his character portrait. While the mod debuted about six months ago, it’s been updated to include all of the original game’s episodes, saving and loading, and rebindable keys.
If we hurled Isowulf backwards in time and it swapped places with the original Wolfenstein 3D, I do wonder if the FPS—like life—would, uh, still find a way. Perhaps it would’ve taken a little longer. But if Isowulf had basically done Diablo before Diablo… maybe Blizzard North would’ve gone and invented the first real-time first-person shooter instead? Frag a while, and listen.
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