Wolfenstein (2009) — The Day It Reached Shelves With No Scores Attached

August 18, 2009: a shelf with no scores on it

Hello, this is Toki. Episode 31 of "Today Is Release Day." What I dug up today is Wolfenstein, released in North America on August 18, 2009. That makes it exactly 17 years ago today.

Developed by Raven Software, published by Activision, for Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Australia got it on August 19 and Europe on August 21, a few days out of step. The engine is an enhanced version of id Software's id Tech 4, with depth of field, soft shadowing, assorted post-processing and Havok physics added on.

From the thumbnail of "Wolfenstein Video Review by GameSpot" (YouTube)

The strange thing about this particular day was not inside the game but outside it, on the shelf. On August 18, the day it went on sale, there was almost nothing written about it that you could read.

What kind of game it was — pushing the Veil open

It is set in the German town of Isenstadt during the Second World War. The player is B. J. Blazkowicz, the same protagonist as in Wolfenstein 3D (1992), chasing down the crystals the Nazis are digging up, called Nachtsonne. The town itself works as a hub you head out from on missions.

The central mechanic is the "Veil" — the barrier separating Earth from another dimension known as the Black Sun — which Blazkowicz can push open for a while. Step across and you can slow the flow of time to get through a place you otherwise could not, see things that are normally invisible, or strip the protection off shielded enemies. In conception it runs continuous with the dimension-hopping of Prey (2006), built on the same id Tech 4.

So it was a game about shooting that also asked you, before you fired, which of the two worlds you wanted to fire from. The multiplayer was handled by Endrant Studios and built around classes.

How it was received at the time — the "no reviews" article came first

On release day, August 18, 2009, what TechCrunch published was not a verdict on the game but a piece to the effect that Wolfenstein was out today and good luck finding any reviews. The article noted that "it is suspicious, however, not to see any of the other sites (IGN and the like) with reviews," and quoted one of the few notices it could find — the Guardian's "good, bloody fun." On day one, the absence of scores became the story rather than the scores. That preserves the mood of the moment rather well.

The verdicts arrived over the following days. Kevin VanOrd's GameSpot review, dated August 21, gave it 7.5/10: "fantastic boss fights," "the guns are fun to shoot" — and yet, taken as a whole, it felt "just plain old," with "a bunch of little issues" that "add up over time," down to how doors behaved and where checkpoints fell.

Game Informer, dated September 27, gave it 7.25/10 and put it sharply: "Grinding through waves of predictable enemies in corridors is no way to pay homage to the franchise's unquestioned legacy in the genre." Britain's Edge gave the PlayStation 3 version 5/10; the Daily Telegraph 7/10, calling it "a game that swings wildly in quality on an almost minute-by-minute basis"; 411Mania 8/10; the A.V. Club a C+. The spread itself was the review.

Commercially it struggled: roughly 100,000 copies across all platforms in the first month. Activision responded with layoffs at Raven Software, and Endrant Studios, which had built the multiplayer, also downsized once its work was done.

Looking back from 17 years later

Placed above is GameSpot's video review of the game ("Wolfenstein Video Review by GameSpot," YouTube). In a few minutes you can see the town of Isenstadt and the way the screen's colour shifts the moment the Veil opens.

This became the last Wolfenstein Activision ever published. It was also the last title id Software saw released while still an independent company — ZeniMax Media's acquisition of id had happened only two months earlier, in June 2009.

The series was restarted in 2014 with MachineGames' Wolfenstein: The New Order. This 2009 game, meanwhile, was pulled from digital storefronts that same year over rights issues between Bethesda and Activision, and has not been purchasable digitally since.

So no, you cannot download it today to mark its 17th anniversary. You have to hunt down a physical copy. A game whose reviews could not be read on release day has become, 17 years later, a game that cannot itself be read off a store page. A strange piece of timing, I think.

In closing

August 18, 2009. Without writing the year down, I never quite feel an article is finished. Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, Return to Castle Wolfenstein in 2001, The New Order in 2014 — and this 2009 release sits almost exactly halfway between the first and the last of those.

Carrying a box to the register with nobody's score published yet, going only on the cover art and the name of the series: do you have a memory of buying something that way?

Until tomorrow's release day, then.