There’s lots of announcements made during an E3 week, both during the event itself and ‘accidentally’ leaked beforehand. It makes it really hard to keep track of what’s going on, to be honest – although we do our best to keep you appraised – but it’s no wonder things get missed, especially when great things aren’t even shown in the main staged conferences.
And then there’s Bethesda, the sneaky so and so, who are even burrowing things into their E3 2016 conference to see if anybody notices. Thankfully, somebody did, and it looks like another Wolfenstein sequel.
In a rather cute callback to the history of PC gaming, when running games in Windows was a nightmare non-starter and MS DOS was king, Bethesda displayed a mock directory structure of the history of id Software games. id Software are an acquired subsidiary of Bethesda (the publisher, not the development shop) and have been responsible for the venerable founding first-person duo of Wolfenstein and Doom; not to mention, sneaking in at the top of the list, the game that started it all: Commander Keen.
We’re looking at a list of the original release dates, plus the corresponding modern reboots. Doom has literally just been rebooted, and the Wolfenstein series was rebooted with The New Order back in 2014, but there’s an additional entry in the listings – shown simply as ‘New_Colossus’ – and judging by the order of progression, it looks like it’s going to be a Wolfenstein sequel, following on from 2015’s The Old Blood.
The release date is also obfuscated – those sneaky blighters – but if New Colossus is a new Wolfenstein sequel (and it sure sounds like it; The New Colossus is a poem from the ending of Wolfenstein: The New Order) then expect to see more of William Joseph ‘B.J.’ Blazkowicz in the next couple of years.
Sadly, no news on a Commander Keen reboot just yet.