These made the level more vast and acted as suitable red herring directions to expand the maze. Many levels in the PC release had areas that held some treasure, maybe some health, but no keys or locked doors. In general, excess “wings” of a level get cut out. As I’ve said before, all Wolfenstein 3D levels look the same to me. The cut-down levels are difficult to describe in any useful manner. They’re all generally welcome tweaks that focus more on quality of life than dramatically shaking up the core gameplay.
Episodes are even restructured to give a mission briefing from FDR, giving some plot to a game that originally had none. All of them share the same core updates – 30 cut-down levels presented in linear order instead of chapters, the addition of the bazooka and flamethrower weapons, a backpack collectible that doubles your ammo count, and the availability of an automap to navigate the trickier levels. All of those are based on the changes and additions made here, with improvements to graphics and sound based on the platform. This version kicks off the “Wolfenstein 2.0” round of ports, which include the Mac, 3DO, and Jaguar. Much like Paul McCartney’s music, id’s worst is still pretty damn good. Remembering that zippy PC hardware wasn’t exactly decorating every room in the house in 1994, this is a very functional console version of the adventures of B.J. Either way, it’s choppy, it’s pixelated, it’s cut down from the original – but it’s definitely playable. One wonders if Carmack could have squeezed out more performance if there was more time, or if this was pretty much the limit of what the SNES was capable of. The result is, objectively, the worst port of Wolfenstein 3D. There’s still plenty of action in the SNES port. Like any of us who procrastinated until the night before a project was due, they pulled the game development equivalent of an overnighter (three weeks) to blast out this port.
Fast forward seven months later, when they learned no progress had been made and the deadline was imminent. id accepted, outsourced the task to a programmer they knew, and promptly forgot about it. It would be the first of countless ports of id’s games – often regardless of whether the system could handle it or not – but money’s money to a company just finding its popularity. A few months after Wolfenstein 3D shipped, id Software got an offer from Japanese publisher Imagineer for cash up front for a Super Famicom port.
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