Castle Wolfenstein
was initially conceptualized by Warner after he saw the 1961 British-American
war film
The  of Navarone
, which follows the efforts of an
Allied
commando
unit as they attempt to destroy a seemingly impregnable German
fortress
.
[5]
[6]
That same day, Warner played the
multi-directional shooter
arcade game
,
Berzerk
, in which the player navigates through a maze with laser-shooting robots.
[7]
After playing the game, Warner thought about taking the design of
Berzerk
and replacing the robots with Nazis.
[8]
He eventually settled on the idea of a game based on the arcade
shoot 'em up
genre, where players dodge enemies with the intent of killing them, but instead changing the objective to escape the enemy guards and their castle, not necessarily to kill and destroy them; this made shooting guards a means to an end and not an end in itself.
[6]
Castle Wolfenstein
is often credited as one of the first video games in the stealth genre, as it focuses more on avoiding or disarming enemies, and killing them is considered a last resort.
[9]
Castle Wolfenstein
was the first computer game to feature
digitized speech
[10]
and influenced the development of other