Thank god the ESRB wasn’t around when I was a kid. Well, even if they were, I don’t think my parents would have paid much attention to them. I had the pleasure of playing Wolfenstein 3D trilogy when I was about 9 years old. Being so young, I didn’t really understand the story. Back then, all I knew about Nazis was that they were the bad guys and they like making zombies out of people.
I’m surprised I wasn’t more scared when playing that game. The barking dogs and regular soldiers weren’t that menacing, but I do remember freaking out at the end of each episode thanks to the bosses.
At the end of the first episode was Hans Grosse, who unnerved me the most. When I first saw him, I was definitely not expecting a giant man with giant machine guns. I didn’t really pay close attention to him when I fought him because I was too busy trying not to die, but I always thought he had machine gun hands, which was terrifying to a 9 year old. Turns out he was just holding machine guns in each hand.
The boss of the second episode was Dr. Schabbs, who was pretty forgettable. He wasn’t so menacing because he was just a bald headed guy in a doctor’s outfit. Back then, I didn’t really understand that he was behind all those awful experiments making zombies, so he was just some generic boss with lots of health to me. I thought it was pretty silly that his weapons of choice were syringes.
The third boss kind of confused me. At that age, I knew who Hitler was and I recognized that the boss was Hitler, but why was he in a robot suit? Mobile Suit Hitler isn’t so frightening now that I think about it, but when I first saw him, I actually turned monitor off. Actually, I don’t think I ever returned to the game after that.
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