Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t need much of an introduction. Most people remember the game for its pioneering spirit. It brought the first-person shooter into the public eye and paved the way for successors like Doom to follow. It also stirred up its fair share of controversy for its abundance of Nazi symbols, featuring a rendition of Adolf Hitler as a giant fighting cyborg — including chainguns for arms.

State-of-the-art entertainment, ca. 1992.

State-of-the-art entertainment, ca. 1992.

It was a simpler time in gaming. Of course, that was nearly twenty years ago, and now we’re playing the game that once required a sturdy personal computer on our mobile telephones. What a difference a few presidencies makes!

When a game has been ported countless times to every platform under the sun, purchasing it again has little to do with whether the game is fun to play start-to-finish. In terms of content, this is the exact same Wolfenstein 3D you remember; all six episodes arrived intact. But that’s not the reason Wolfenstein 3D was brought to iPhone.

Instead, it’s a proof of concept — an inquiry into the viability of taking a time-honored game and rebuilding it for a platform it was never intended to exist on: a mobile phone with an exclusively touch-based interface.

Read the rest of this entry »