History

Today I thought i'd post some history on how I got interested in Wolfenstein in the first place.

I started playing wolf not long after it was released back in 1992. A friend of mine whom I worked with had this, as he described 'really cool game where you get to shoot Nazi's!'. I went to his place after work one night and we ended up playing straight through until dawn the next day. I was hooked from that day. I got the full verison myself and then Spear of Destiny a year later. I've played them through 100 times by now over I reckon.

Fast forward to 2005, I had the internet but had never realised that there was any sort of community or ways that you could make your own mods by editing the code and such. I had bought a new PC and had misplaced my copies of Wolf and SOD over the years and went looking on the net to see if i could find free copies to download thinking that it may have been released as a free game by now. I came across Luke Strauman's site that had a mod by the name of Himmler's SS on there. I was thinking, wow this guy is cool, he's made his own Wolfenstein mods! I downloaded it and couldn't believe how different things looked to the original game but still had the same wolf feel. The next day upon further searching I came across Brian Lowe's site and realised that there was inded some sort of community of 'Wolfers' who had been making their own mods and releasing them. I started downloading mods like crazy (I now have over 550!). I then found a Wolf editor and thought that I'd have a go at making my own levels. It took me weeks to get everything to work. I started fooling around with making levels, at first by just modifying the original Wolf levels and then moved onto making my own from scratch.

This led me into starting Escape from Castle Holle in September 2005. I then tried to compile the code and make some changes, for the life of me I couldn't work the damn thing out. It didn't help that I hadn't worked in Dos for 10 years and couldn't even remember the most basic of commands! A friend at work gave me a quick reminder on Dos usage and not long after that I was able to get the code compiled. From the first time I made some changes to a Wolf level and then went into the game and saw them I just couldn't get enough. I was addicted, and still am.

It's now August 2006 and Escape from Castle Holle has grown into this massive project with huge changes to just about everything. I'm just working on some more coding changes and got about 10 levels to complete then it should be done. I released a mod titled Hitlerworld back in February 2006 that was only 3 levels and was made in 6 days. The levels are really crappy and so are a lot of the walls. I plan to rectify this be making a version 2 at some stage with everything done properly, but that is quite a while off.

My interst in Wolfing stays pretty steady these days, some days a level just flows out of me and some days I just can't make them to save myself. But on the good days the levels come out pretty cool, and when I put those levels together I think it makes a pretty awesome mod, lets hope so anyway! I guess when EFCH is released will be the true test. Thanks for reading.