That species, so ever-present in modern video gaming, can rightfully and reasonably claim Sergeant Blazkowicz as its progenitor. It is still a wild fantasy of Nazi fighting - a shooter driven by the constant machine gun chatter of ending lives for a righteous cause - but it also stands as a surprisingly deep and heartfelt deconstruction of the White American Gun-Bro. And killing Nazis is what Americans are supposed to do.īut Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is different. Establishing their badness requires no narrative explanation and murdering them by the zeppelin-load comes with no attendant guilt or dissonance because they're, you know, Nazis. himself is not much different: A white guy with a gun, deathless and simple, who hates Nazis because Nazis are bad. He kills giant, dieselpunk Nazi mecha and Nazi zombies. Using everything from his bare hands to laser cannons, he kills every Nazi he sees. fights his way across Castle Wolfenstein, Germany, Austria, Poland, England and the moon. With each succeeding generation of technology, sergeant Blazkowicz (and the world he inhabits) has become rounder, grittier, more complex, spawning alternate-alternate histories and radical re-imaginings where B.J. Over the course of games upon games, B.J. back then, there was just him, a Mauser pistol, some hand grenades and Nazis to kill.Īnd that was enough. Narrative investment in videogames is a relatively recent development - a function of time, technology and maturation of the art form the difference between cave paintings and Breaking Bad.
Back in 1981, in his first top-down, DOS incarnation, B.J. A spy tasked with escaping imprisonment by the German army during WWII. Blazkowicz, hero of the Castle Wolfenstein series, was just a rough collection of pixels that excelled at exactly one thing: killing Nazis.
So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games.
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