Castle Wolfenstein
Name: Castle Wolfenstein
Programmer(s): Silas Warner
Publisher: Muse
Year: 1981
Description:
One of the first Apple 2 games to use digitized voices for sound effects, Castle Wolfenstein was also one of the first edge of your seat video games. Published by Muse Software in 1981 it was later followed by Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. The point of the game is simple. Find the "plans" and escape from Castle Wolfenstein.
This room maze play game is similar to [Bezerk] of the arcade, only with a lot more anxiety and key stumbling. Or [Adventure for the Atari 2600] only with a tad better graphics and no ANNOYING bats. The castle is made up of about 64 rooms, each room containing a mix of guards, locked chests, doors and stairwells. The guards yelled out in German digitized voices, crude in today's standards, but cutting edge in 1981. Halt... Kaput....Auchtun.. AAaaieeeee... and, my favorite, Schwein Hund... plus a few other hard to figure out words.
There are two kinds of guards in the castle. Normal guards and SS guards. Normal guards are all brown and easy to kill with one or two bullets. SS Guards are also brown, but with the addition of a white SS bulletproof vest. This makes them a ton harder to kill taking four or five bullets or a grenade.
The "quest" in the game is to find the plans and escape. The plans are hidden in one of the upper levels of the castle in a locked chest. There are hundreds of chests throughout the game and most of them are locked. You, as a master spy, can pick the locks on the chests, however, it takes time. You can shoot the chests to reduce the amount of time it takes to pick the lock but that means you also waste a bullet. Times to unlock the chest vary between 10 seconds and 200+ seconds. All the while SS guards can pop into the room and foil your plans.
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Complete Castle Wolfenstein Walk Through
Inside the chests the player finds different items varying from the totally useful, such as uniforms, bullets & grenades to the totally worthless, like schnapps , sauerkraut & "liebfraumilch", which as a 12 year old I translated to mean "Love Womans Milk" uh.. yeah... only years later did I discover that its a very sweet German wine. [Der Braumeister]
The game is controlled with 18 different keys, nine for movement and nine for using the gun which often times when an SS guard is running towards you makes it very difficult to point the gun in the right direction and fire off a shot without running into a wall. I can remember as a kid, after clearing out a room in the castle, and having to move on to a new room thinking, where would the guard be? Would he be on the other end of the room, or had the computer randomly selected his position to be two pixels away from where I enter the room?
This was a great game and I would consider it to be the great-granddaddy of all today's first person shooters. If it wasn't for Castle Wolfenstein there would not have been a Castle Wolfenstein 3D... no Doom, no Quake, no Grand Theft Auto, no Halo etc. November 2007
Castle Wolfenstein was a stealth action game released in 1981 for the Apple II computer. Created by Silas Warner and published by Muse Software, it became one of the first games to feature stealth gameplay instead of direct combat.
In Castle Wolfenstein, you play as an Allied prisoner trying to escape from a Nazi castle during World War II. Your main goal is to find secret war plans and escape alive. The game takes place in a randomly generated castle with 60 rooms spread across five floors. Each time you play, the layout changes, making every escape attempt different.
The game introduced several new ideas to video gaming. Instead of fighting every enemy, you could sneak past guards or disguise yourself in Nazi uniforms. You started with only a knife and ten bullets, forcing you to search chests for supplies like guns, grenades, bulletproof vests, and uniforms. Guards would shout "Halt!" in digitized speech, which was rare for 1981. This was one of the first games to use actual human voices.
Combat required strategy since ammunition was limited. You could shoot guards, throw grenades at groups of enemies, or avoid them entirely. SS guards wore bulletproof vests and needed multiple shots or grenades to defeat. If you put on a Nazi uniform, regular guards would ignore you, but SS guards could still spot you as an imposter.
The Apple II version used simple graphics with stick figure characters and basic room layouts. Despite the simple visuals, the game created tension through its sound effects and gameplay. Opening chests took time and made noise that could alert guards. You had to hold down keys to search, adding risk to every action.
Castle Wolfenstein sold over 50,000 copies and inspired many future stealth games. It proved that games didn't need constant action to be exciting. The careful planning and resource management made players think before acting. In 1984, Muse Software released a sequel called Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, where you attempted to bomb Hitler's bunker.
The game's influence extended far beyond the Apple II. In 1992, id Software created Wolfenstein 3D, turning the concept into a fast-paced first-person shooter. However, the original Castle Wolfenstein deserves recognition for pioneering stealth gameplay and showing that computer games could create suspense through careful design rather than just quick reflexes.