Here’s Why Wolfenstein 3D Changed Dog Enemies To Rats

Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES originally had dogs instead of rats, but Nintendo forced developer id Software to change it.

Back in the day, you might have played Wolfenstein 3D on the SNES and thought ‘rats are kind of a weird enemy.’ You’d be right, as originally, it was meant to be dogs that tried to attack BJ Blazkowicz. But Nintendo is as Nintendo does, and the company’s censors required that the dogs be changed into something else.

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why were they changed?

Now, in a clip from FPS: First Person Shoot, a documentary all about how the genre got its start, dives into how this happened (via IGN). “We knew we would have to get rid of some of the Nazi paraphernalia due to the fact that they wanted to sell the game in Germany,” recalled programmer Becky Heineman.

But the most notable thing was that we had German Shepherds in the original version of Wolfenstein 3D come ahead and bite you, and Nintendo’s censors were totally like, ‘You can’t shoot dogs.’ So we had to change them to rats.

Of course, Nintendo weren’t happy with how the rats looked either. As it pointed out how it looked like the rats’ mouths were bleeding. While the team tried to argue that the red smudge was just the tongue, Nintendo weren’t having it.

So we had to remove the tongues from the rats because it reminded Nintendo of blood,” Heineman says. “The censors made our lives miserable. So we had to do several versions before Nintendo said, ‘Okay, you can ship this.'”

It likely wasn’t even worth it in the end. As the SNES port of the game was panned by both critics and fans. 

If you find yourself craving some classic FPS action like Wolfenstein 3D, but with some British flair, you should definitely check out Duke Smoochem.

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Featured Image Credit: id Software