The game was originally released in a three-episode trilogy, with the first episode (dealing with the escape from Castle Wolfenstein) as the widely-released shareware episode. The subsequent episodes in the trilogy deal with B.J.'s pursuit against Operation Eisenfaust (which turned out to be the creation of undead Nazi mutants) and B.J.'s infiltration into the bunker of Adolf Hitler. must traverse the depths of the fortified stronghold (known as Castle Wolfenstein) and find a way to escape.

After overpowering a guard and stealing his Luger P08, B.J. Set in World War II, players control Captain William 'B.J.' Blazkowicz, an Allied spy imprisoned by the Nazi regime while attempting to uncover the plans of the mysterious 'Operation Eisenfaust'. Loosely inspired by the Castle Wolfenstein series of stealth action games, the game is often cited as the progenitor of the modern first-person shooter genre. Wolfenstein 3D (often stylized as Wolfenstein 3-D) is a first-person shooter developed by id and released by Apogee (via shareware and mail order) on for the PC (running MS-DOS).