Castle Wolfenstein

Castle Wolfenstein is a two-dimensional action-adventure game played from a top-down perspective using a keyboard, joystick, or paddles. It has also been described as a maze game. There are eight difficulty levels in the game that are determined by the player's rank. The player takes the role of an Allied spy that has been captured by Nazis and imprisoned in a dungeon within Castle Wolfenstein for interrogation by the SS Stormtroopers.

While the spy is waiting for interrogation, a dying prisoner emerges from a hiding place and hands the player a fully loaded pistol with 10 rounds, and three grenades before dying. The objective is to escape from the castle and if the player finds the battle plans before escaping, they will be promoted and the complexity of the subsequent run will be increased, while the castle's layout changes and the game starts again.

Castle Wolfenstein was developed by Silas Warner at Muse Software and the game's cover art was drawn by John Benson.

The game was initially conceptualized as a game set in the mid-1980s in what Warner describes as "a guy running around rooms" and did not know how to develop the game further. He was uninterested in using space as a setting due to his belief that there were so many of them on the market. The concept changed after Warner watched the 1961 British-American war film The Guns of Navarone and was amazed by the Allied commandos who broke into a German fortress to destroy the German artillery battery. Within the same day, he played Berzerk, a multidirectional shooter arcade video game in which the player navigates through a maze with laser-shooting robots.

According to Harvey Bernstein of Antic, after its release, Castle Wolfenstein "quickly shot to the top of the charts" and became "one of the most popular games for any microcomputer". In the October 1982 issue of Computer Gaming World, associate publisher and game merchandiser Dana Lombardy released an incomplete list of top-selling games as of 30 June 1982, where the game landed in 13th place with 20,000 copies sold. The game ultimately sold about 50,000 copies by 1983.

Creative Computing Video and Arcade Games's Andrew Brill complained about the Apple version's slow gameplay, which according to Brill is mainly due to the time taken to open chests that contain "completely useless" items, which Brill regarded as the game's "most frustrating feature", but added "thrill of the escape" is "worth the wait". , reviewing the game's Commodore 64 version, also complained about Castle Wolfenstein's slow gameplay, especially the long time it took to open the chests. He also stated that each room must be loaded from the floppy disk, causing a lag when each room is entered. Herring also mentioned a bug, in which if the player character bumps into a wall, the screen "goes into hysterics for a few seconds".

In 1984, Muse Software released a sequel, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, with similar graphics and gameplay. It adds some new features, such as the use of a knife, the ability to bribe guards, and a pass system in which guards periodically summon the player character and ask him or her to show the correct pass.

Castle Wolfenstein directly influenced the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D developed by id Software. John Romero stated the original idea was to create a 3D Castle Wolfenstein but did not have the rights to the game during development. Many options for the game's title were proposed and rejected and, eventually, id Software bought the rights to use Wolfenstein from Silas Warner. The original concept of Wolfenstein 3D changed significantly because the developers decided the core of the gameplay would be fast and simple so features such as the ability to drag and loot fallen enemy soldiers were withdrawn. Further development by other studios led to the emergence of one of the longest-living video game series; as of 2021, there are 13 Wolfenstein games, the most recent of which, Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, are spin-offs released in 2019.