No first-person shooter had an impact like Wolfenstein 3D back in the day, though getting it on Super Nintendo (SNES) was apparently quite an ordeal.
In a clip from FPS: First Person Shooter, an upcoming documentary all about the genre, legendary programmer Becky Heineman explains that porting iD Software’s seminal shooter onto the SNES was tough (Thanks, IGN). Not only because the hardware lacked horsepower but also due to Nintendo’s censorship team, which wasn’t into the Nazi imagery and gory deaths. Remember, this was way before World War 2 games were commonplace.
What’s particularly baffling, though, is Nintendo’s insistence that German Shepherds in Wolfenstein 3D couldn’t be in the SNES version.
“We knew we would have to get rid of some of the Nazi paraphernalia due to the fact that they wanted to sell the game in Germany,” Heineman explains. “But the most notable thing was that we had German Shepherds in the original version of Wolfenstein 3D come ahead and bite you, and Nintendo’s censors were totally like, ‘You can’t shoot dogs.’ So we had to change them to rats.”
Funnier still, the initial rats that iD Software came up with had red tongues, which Nintendo thought resembled blood too much.
“So we had to remove the tongues from the rats because it reminded Nintendo of blood,” Heineman said. “The censors made our lives miserable. So we had to do several versions before Nintendo said, ‘Okay, you can ship this.’”
Watch the snippet from FPS: First Person Shooter below.
First Mother 3, now this.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.