History of The Nerd Part I #5: Wolfenstein 3D: Pissing off Germany
There are a lot of Nazi movies this year. Valkyrie, Dead Snow, The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Defiance, Miracle at St. Anna – this list goes on and on. I have to wonder, what do the Germans feel about this? I wonder if it’s somewhere along the lines of, “Hey, we gave you more than the holocaust. We make great beer, cars, and industrial music so could you just drop the, ‘we killed 6 million Jews thing?’ We get it, we were assholes once, lets move on.” We Americans just can’t seem to drop it. In fact, we always find a ways to tell the Germans that they were assholes. Take the videogame industry for example. It seems that almost every first person shooter has your sights locked on a pointy-helmeted, red-arm-banded, kraut eater. Normally Germany just assumes the position and “takes it,” but there have been occasions where Germany gets pissed off. And there is nothing scarier than a pissed off Germany (Well, except pissed off Muslims). This was the case with the game Wolfenstein 3D.
The original Castle Wolfenstein was created in 1982 and published by Muse Software. It had the eye-popping visuals like blocks and people that looked like…blocks. But it was the first game to incorporate the WWII theme and adult oriented content. Since then, the video game industry continues to return to the well repeatedly as if they were crazy bitches at a wedding dress sale.
Castle Wolfenstein inspired id Software to create their own Nazi themed video game in 1992, and by inspired I mean steal. Id Software’s game was to be called Wolfenstien 3D.
Ok, they didn’t really steal because Muse Software went under in 1987 and they went and obtained permission to use the Wolfenstein name. It just would have been more fun if they did steal. What they did do was create a game that was high octane, heart pumping action because the actually figured out how to make it play fast. Before Wolfenstein 3D, games like Ultima Underworld needed fairly high-end hardware to play at a decent render rate. What programmer John Carmack would do was to sacrifice some of the graphical elements, like ceilings or floor height changes and lighting for performance. This allowed lower end systems to run the game allowing and even larger audience to leave a German youth in a pool of digital blood. Where John and id Software would run into trouble in Germany was the use of the Swastika and the use of the Nazi Party anthem, Horst-Wessel-Lied, as the theme music.
The use of Nazi imagery and music was, and still is, strictly regulated in Germany. To violate these regulations is a federal offense. In 1994 the PC version of the game was confiscated following a verdict by the Amtsgericht München on January 25, 1994. Just imagine German police officers coming into a person’s business or home and talking away property seems like history repeating itself. I wonder if they asked for “papers” when they did it. The Atari Jaguar release was the next to be confiscated following a verdict by the Amtsgericht Berlin Tiergarten on December 7, 1994. This was less of a blow than the court thought it would be because there were only two people in the whole of Germany that actually bought an Atari Jaguar. Nintendo smelling what was blowing downwind decided to modify the SNES version to not include any Swastikas or Nazi references. They didn’t stop there, then went in and neutered the game as much as they possibly could so that no one would ever be offended or have any fun. Blood was replaced with sweat (which is actually more disturbing to me.) to make it less violent and mutant rats replaced all the attack dogs. There was a complaint by animal-rights activist so the dogs had to go. They said it was immoral for a game to require a player to kill dogs, never mind that you are gunning down people and that mutant rats have feelings too.
Needless to say the SNES versions did not sell as well as the PC version.
Of course all the controversy did nothing to stop the fire that is “violence and offensiveness in videogames” – it fueled it. Kids are always going to want to play the game or listen to the music or wear the clothes that their parents don’t want them to. In fact id Software’s next game was Doom, a game where the player is sent to Hell. I’m sure Germany and Germans would like the world to get over WWII already, but for us Americans it was the last “good” war. America today seems less like a “city on a hill” – a beacon of freedom and democracy – and more like a spoiled child with too much money and power. The rest of the world hates us and we know it. So why wouldn’t we want to return to a time where things were simple: Americans were heroes and Nazis were villains.
