At this year's E3, Bethesda Softworks very quietly teased a new Wolfenstein game. A screen of a DOS-style directory that kicked off the studio's pre-E3 conference listed the three Wolfenstein titles relevant to Bethesda's run with the game—Wolf3D, The New Order, and The Old Blood—and a fourth, New Colossus, which of course nobody had ever heard of. New Colossus is the title of the famous poem that reads, in part, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free," that hero BJ Blazkowicz quotes during the game's tear-jerking close.
It was an obvious Wolfenstein tease that ended in frustration: Nothing else happened. Bethesda said nada about a sequel, and in fact didn't even acknowledge the presence of the tease at all. The whole thing blew over, largely unnoticed and quickly forgotten. But Blazkowicz voice actor Brian Bloom brought it up again in a recent interview with Two Left Sticks, in which he was very careful to not say that Bethesda is not not working on a new Wolfenstein game, and may not in fact already be not doing that right at this very moment.
"I’ll be safe with this answer. If you look at Bethesda’s E3 2016 lineup there was a title hinted at in a cool way. It sparked a bit of wildfire. That subtle, very simple DOS language, going through the titles. Perhaps we’re working on that as we speak," he said, not hugely subtley. He also hinted rather strongly that Blazkowicz's tale is not yet concluded. "Whoever BJ Blazkowicz was, in the content we have so far, he’s the articulation of a promise not kept; a country that surrendered while he was in a coma. He’s fighting a war on his own with a very small group of people, completely outgunned and out-manned. A world taken over by the scourge of racism, nazism, and fascism."
Wolfenstein: The New Order is probably the best Wolfenstein game to come along since the original, and BJ Blazkowicz is the ultimate FPS archetype—the well from which all subsequent gun-toting meatheads has sprung. So some future Wolfenstein sequel is very much a "yes, obviously" sort of thing. Even so, it's nice to hear, even unofficially, that it's actually happening, and Bloom's thoughtfulness about the character and the world in which he lives gives me hope that maybe it can be as smart and moving (yes, seriously) as the game that brought him back.
Thanks, Shacknews.
