“They survive a world war, and then get totalled by oily-handed game developers,” he kindly didn’t say out loud. It really is a lot easier to bounce around a map doing headshots than to physically handle an FG42, an MG42, a K98 with Gewehrgranatgerät grenade launcher attachment, a Garand M1, an M1 Carbine or a M3 SMG without dropping them and eliciting a pained expression from the curator. We arranged a visit to the Imperial War Museum where their curator of small arms very kindly let us handle some of their amazing collection of historical fire arms.
It’s still clad in its crocodile-epidermis-esque Zimmerit anti-magnetic mine coating, punctured by an ominously perfect group of penetrating 17 pounder holes at the right rear. And we’d seen one of the few surviving Jagds at the Imperial War Museum. One day I’ll get a bridge-layer tank into a game, but that day has yet to dawn.Īnd speaking of tanks, no, the Jagdpanther in Gold Rush (and hiding in a parking bay in Siwa Oasis) didn’t actually see service in North Africa but dammit, it was so fantastically low-poly and TANKY.
We should probably come up with a shorter name for that. Maps like Fuel Dump were continually evolved during development based on play-testing feedbackįuel Dump, as alert gamers detected, was built on a single player level from Return To Castle Wolfenstein and featured a Churchill AVRE tank serving as the Thing-You-Needed-To-Get-Into-Position-To-Blow-Something-Up-That-You-Couldn’t-Just-Blow-Up-With-A-Demo-Charge. Seawall Battery was called Siegfried but largely based on the Friedrich August 30.5cm battery.Siwa Oasis had elements of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.Gold Rush was Kelly’s Heroes, adapted to North Africa.The plan was that every map in W:ET would be based either on an iconic WWII movie, or an actual historical event: It turns out that the geometry that protects you from line of sight and splash damage fire works equally well in reality, or on the virtual battlefield. Perhaps the stuff that ended up being most useful was the wealth of visual detail on Atlantic Wall defensive positions, bunkers, casemates etc. As a way of getting high resolution images before our eyeballs in the office, it now seems hilariously long-winded. I remember feeling enormously smug for having tracked down the UK distributor of Schiffer military reference books, stalking their shelves, buying a select spread and huffing and puffing back across Chiswick bridge with them stacked precariously on my bicycle. We were better off getting reference books. Back then, the web was resolutely low-res, and mainly lived in Geocities. Nowadays almost all the photo reference you’re likely to need for most games is all up here, on the intertubes, in a glorious high-resolution browser window like this one. It seems very odd to think of just ten years ago as a fantastical olde-timey world, but the narrowband pre-Wikipedia age was…well, different. The Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory team in 2002 I should stress at the outset, other, smarter people made the actual maps, I was just adjacent while they made them, so my recollections of the process are neither expert nor precise. I think I’m pretty sure that not one of my ideas resulted in a playable map.
As the newly resident damp-palmed weapons bore and history nerd, it was my job to come up with photo reference, additional details and vaporous notions for other maps that the level designers would smile kindly at before pointing out all the various ways my idea was impractical and no good. Most of the map ideas had already been had, and people who actually knew what they were doing were turning them into playable virtual reality. When I came aboard the good ship Splash Damage in 2002-no-that-cannot-be-that-would-make-it-ten-years-ago-oh-god-am-I-really-that-old-yes-yes-you-are-in-fact-you-look-older, work on Wolf:ET was well underway. In light of Wolf ET’s 9th anniversary, we thought it’d be fun to share some Wolfentrivia with you, including the events (many of them real!) that inspired the missions in the game, the weapon research, and a few other, previously unknown development nuggets. Much of this falls to our Lead Writer Ed ‘BongoBoy’ Stern, who first joined the company during development of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to handle writing and research duties. A big part of creating our games is the research that goes into them to ensure everything is consistent, plausible, and authentic.
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