Return to Castle Wolfenstein turns sixteen today! blog - William Faure

The original game was released on November 19, 2001! B.J. Blazkowicz returned to Castle Wolfenstein sixteen years ago! Yep, already, time flies!

Unfortunately, no anniversary celebration event from us is planned this year, for various reasons related to The Dark Army's development, but you can expect one next year. Everything's explained below!

As you some of you may know, we started with the concept of anniversary events back in 2014, with the thirteenth birthday of the game, but the second edition in 2015 was eventually cancelled, and finally the 2016 celebration ended up being delayed to early 2017, for various schedule-related reasons. Such events were meant to be a simple but effective way of celebrating the game's anniversaries.

Up til now we have done two anniversary events: the 13th, in 2014, and the 15th, in 2016 (delayed 2017). Those two events, videos uploaded to YouTube, are very different from one another, in length, quality, content and format. The first was more or less divided in three parts: past, present and future, notably featuring a retrospective of popular maps and mods with some gameplay cuts, as the second was totally aiming at the future, as it was substantially a series of exclusive teasers/trailers for unreleased maps and mods.

So yeah, we're still struggling to find one solid, perfect format to adopt each year in order to celebrate the anniversaries of this game. But one will be held next year, that's for sure, and it will be under an unprecedented, unexperienced, but definite format, which will be used for future anniversary celebrations, we believe. We sincerely hope you'll enjoy it. Because, yes, we will keep celebrating the anniversaries of this legendary game, as long as its amazing community lives on!

For this year, we have decided not to work on such an event, in order to focus on the development of our mods and try to help our collaborators. Just recently, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the RTCWCoop mod in our way, with the release of the Anniversary Upgrade, which was released on October 5 of this year. As for Return to Castle Wolfenstein itself, you may expect Version 2.0 of The Dark Army: Uprising, which was announced within the latest teaser of its sequel, The Dark Army: Downfall, to be released very soon.