Like practically everyone who owned a PC in the early ’90s, I tore through the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D shortly after it came out. At the time, the game’s mere existence seemed like a magic trick, offering a smooth-scrolling first-person perspective that was unlike pretty much anything I had ever seen.

Strictly speaking, the game might have been ironically two-dimensional (lacking even the simulated gameplay “height” of follow-up Doom), but the sense of depth conveyed by the viewpoint was simply mind-blowing. Coming back to Wolfenstein 3D in 2026 feels quite a bit different.

The initial magic trick of the game’s perspective has worn off after nearly 35 years of playing the countless first-person shooters it inspired. And the advancements in shooter design since 1992 make some of the decisions id Software made for its first experiment in the genre feel a bit archaic from a modern perspective.

Still, it’s fascinating to look back at Wolfenstein 3D today and see the seeds that would sprout into one of gaming’s most popular genres. Playing it today feels like going to a car museum and taking a Model T for a spin, with all the confusion and danger that entails.

Where am I? Right off the bat, Wolfenstein 3D’s biggest limitation stems from the walls themselves, which all sit at stark 90-degree angles from each other. As you might expect, that leads to a lot of big, rectangular rooms and arrow-straight hallways with sharp turns.

The level designers did their best to be imaginative within this limitation. There are plenty of maze-like branching pathways, zig-zagging walls that approximate diagonals, and low barriers that let you see into portions of the map you can’t yet access. But there’s only so much even the best designers can do with such a limited toolset. Wolfenstein 3D just feels unbearably blocky today.