With Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity soaring, the id boys started eyeing the territory of the boxed publishers greedily.
And when Carmack put his foot down, he always got his way at the end of the day, he was the one irreplaceable member of the id collective, and every one of the others knew it. (The most popular of them all filled the corridors of the Nazi headquarters with facsimiles of the sickly sweet, thuddingly unclever, unbelievably grating children’s-television character Barney the Dinosaur and let you take out your frustrations with an automatic weapon.) The id boys debated fiercely among themselves whether they should crack down on the modders, but John Carmack, who had read Steven Levy’s landmark book Hackers at an impressionable age and thoroughly absorbed its heroes’ ethos of openness and transparency, insisted that people be allowed to do whatever they wished with his creation. The game’s levels were stored in a rather easily decipherable format: the “WAD” file, standing for “Where’s All the Data?” Enterprising hackers were soon writing and distributing their own level editors, along with custom levels. One telling sign of its influence - and of the way that it was just a fundamentally different type of game than The 7th Guest, that stately multimedia showpiece - is the modding scene that sprang up around it. And yet Wolfenstein 3D‘s impact would prove even more earthshaking than that of The 7th Guest in the long run. It thus seems reasonable to assume that the total number of Wolfenstein 3D players reached well into seven digits, putting the game’s exposure on a par with The 7th Guest, the boxed industry’s biggest hit of 1993, the game generally agreed to have put CD-ROM on the map. Most people who acquired the free episode were content with it alone, or couldn’t afford to buy the other installments, or had friends who had bought them already and were happy to share.
Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid episodes, yet that number hardly begins to express the game’s real reach. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard.
The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity during 19 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model.
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