Reading The Game: Wolfenstein II
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. 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.
In the beginning, B.J. Blazkowicz, hero of the Castle Wolfenstein series, was just a rough collection of pixels that excelled at exactly one thing: killing Nazis.
He was blocky, chunky, flat. A spy tasked with escaping imprisonment by the German army during WWII. Back in 1981, in his first top-down, DOS incarnation, B.J. didn't even have a name. He certainly had no story. 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 . But for B.J. back then, there
