Brace yourself, ‘Wolfenstein 3’ is coming! How a ’90s video game nurtured a generation of FPS gamers in India

Kids in Europe and North America may have been accustomed to the stories of the horrors inflicted upon their older generations by Nazi Germany, but children growing up in the 1990s in India did not get to know more about it till we opened our Class 9 history textbooks. In an age where the internet had yet to percolate into the daily lives of teenagers, many of us had our first introduction to Nazis as the bad guys in this epic game called Wolfenstein 3D.

How id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, an MS-DOS game released in 1992 that could run on early Windows 95 through Windows NT, got itself into almost every computer I know of—the one in the internet cafe to the AC computer labs at school where you had to remove your shoes to get in, as if it was a religious place of prayer—still eludes me. But it was there. And we all played it.  

Wolfenstein 3D  was a revelation for me as a young boy peeking into the wardrobe that would eventually take me to the Narnia of gaming. It was a major upgrade over Contra 2, and the best part, despite its massive pixelated visuals, the first-person shooting mechanics just engrossed you. You were all in.

The game became part of gaming history. It, along with DOOM, helped define the modern FPS genre that eventually gave us hits like Far Cry, Counter-Strike and Call of Duty. But its most important legacy was cultural: Wolfenstein 3D made fighting Nazis its central video-game fantasy, especially at a time when the medium was still finding its mainstream identity.

The series returned in 2001 with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, this time developed by Gray Matter Interactive and published by Activision for Windows.

MachineGames revived the franchise in 2014 with Wolfenstein: The New Order, published by Bethesda. Released for Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, it reimagined William Joseph “BJ” Blazkowicz in an alternate 1960s where Nazi Germany won the Second World War.  Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus followed this up in 2017, built on the id Tech 6 engine. By then, id Software came under the umbrella of Bethesda. By 2021, Microsoft acquired Bethesda.

But none of it could match the cultural impact of Wolfenstein 3D in India. Arun B., now 37, recalls going to the now-defunct "Trinity Internet Cafe" in Thiruvananthapuram on his walk back home to get his weekly 30-minute fix of playing Wolfenstein 3D. "I was obsessed with the game. I still play Modern Warfare, but my love began with this game."

Like Arun and I, many millennial gamers will tell you that Wolfenstein 3D was not just any game. It was not just about offing pixelated Nazis in mindless combat. It was about resistance, about trauma, and the shared zeal across the world against dictatorship. Fighting authoritarian power was the central theme.

And now, after years, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma revealed a teaser—a photo of the script—for the latest entry in the series, Wolfenstein 3. The announcement has already created a buzz all around social media, but its significance and impact on gamers who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s is something else.

Wolfenstein 3 is being developed by Sweden-based Machine Games and will be published by Bethesda. A photo posted by Machine Games suggests that Brian Bloom might reprise his role as BJ and Debra Wilson might return as Grace Walker.

We are yet to obtain more information on whether it would be an Xbox exclusive or not—but given Bethesda's history, we might see this on PC and even on the PlayStation. For now, we are wishlisting Wolfenstein 3.