The man who made Wolfenstein
Until recently, Kari Ann Owen ran a therapeutic horse ranch in Montana. Now focused on writing and political activism, she isn’t much interested in video games. But she takes her late husband’s legacy very seriously. “He was a genius,” she says of Silas Warner. “And he’s never received the credit or the rewards he was due.”
Silas Warner’s most notable contribution to gaming was to create Castle Wolfenstein in 1981, which was the first game to include digitized speech and an early example both of stealth gaming and of the World War II shooter. Three years later, he released a follow-up, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.
Warner died in 2004, at age 54. He’d been suffering from ill health for more than a decade.
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Warner was one of the early game design pioneers. But unlike those who found fame and fortune from their work, he remains a somewhat obscure figure.
Partly, he preferred it that way. Warner was trading as Muse Software during the time of his greatest successes. He wasn’t much of a businessman, and the company went broke in 1987. Its assets, including the Wolfenstein name, were picked up by a broker.
In 1992, id Software bought the Wolfenstein name from the broker for $5,000. Two of the company’s co-founders, John Carmack and John Romero, had both been fans of the original games, and wanted the name for their new World War II shooter, Wolfenstein 3D.
That game was a prime mover in the developing popularity of first-person shooters, which continues to this day. Carmack and Romero went on to create Doom, and to make a fortune.
Bethesda Softworks bought id Software in 2009, and so acquired the rights to Wolfenstein. Since 2014, the company has released four Wolfenstein games, including this year’s Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Warner’s creation is now one of the most recognizable names in gaming.
After Muse collapsed, Warner went on to work at games various companies, including MicroProse and Virgin Interactive. Those who recall working with Warner, including Firaxis founder Sid Meier and famed gaming musician Tommy Tallarico, say he was sometimes treated as a minor celebrity by co-workers who admired his games. Being 6-foot-9 and more than 300 pounds added to a sense that he was a towering figure. But many who knew him say he was socially awkward, and would often react to praise of his games with bemusement.
He had no interest in celebrity, only in computers. His roles at those companies were mostly as a coder and technology problem-solver, not as a game designer.
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Eventually, Warner drifted out of gaming, using his talents with computers in a variety of jobs. He spoke fluent German, enjoyed composing sacred music, and was a tireless campaigner for public transportation. But his life wasn’t easy. At one point, he was on the brink of homelessness, living in cheap motel rooms. He married late in life — a happy partnership — but spent his last years in ill health.
“He had insulin-dependent diabetes combined with kidney disease, plus arthritis and high blood pressure,” says Owen. “That’s quite a combination. Silas had to devote himself to staying alive and to his medical needs. It was just genetics and bad luck. But Silas and I were very determined people.”
‘A towering intellect’
Speaking on the telephone from her ranch, Owen spares no praise for Warner as she tells his life story. “He had beauty, sensitivity, morality, and a towering intellect,” she says. “Silas’ magnificent character was formed by his mother, who almost gave her life for him.”
Warner spent his first seven years in Chicago. Owen says that Warner’s father, a wealthy industrialist, was violent and abusive toward his young son and toward the boy’s mother. “He threw Silas against a wall,” she says. “Later, Silas’ mother, Ann, was driving with her son on a Chicago freeway. She pulled over to find the brake linings had been cut.”
Ann and Silas escaped and went to live in Indiana. She struggled to raise the boy on her own, but found the time to get certified to work as a teacher. “She was devoted to him,” says Owen. “She supported him in every way, but allowed him his independence. He spent a lot of time alone while she worked. He used that time reading and learning about the things that interested him, especially science and history.”
Warner attended a laboratory school, where his intellectual prowess was recognized and fostered. “They were oriented toward gifted and talented children,” says Owen. “A teacher there worked very closely with Silas, who was way ahead academically. Unfortunately, his social skills were not way ahead. So he needed help in a lot of areas. But he had a wonderful teacher who helped him and prepared him for his career.”
At school, Warner’s unusually large physical size and quirky personality made him a mark for bullies. At some point, says Owen, “Silas had had enough” and “took care” of a bully, knocking him out.
On a memorial page for Warner, an old friend from those days remembers Ann and her son. “I can’t verify it, but Ann said he received a perfect score on his SATs. She was a bit disappointed that Silas, being incredibly gifted as he was, was wasting his life away as a games programmer. It seemed all a bit superficial to her, a quiet and humble lady who was raised a Quaker. She would have liked to have seen him go on to an academic career.”
Warner went on to attend Indiana University, where he discovered an extreme intolerance for alcohol. “It was absolute disintegrator for him,” says Owen. “He never took another drink again.”
Owen and Warner would not meet for another 20 years. But at the time — this was the late 1960s — Owen was attending the University of California, Berkeley. She too turned away from alcohol after some bad experiences. “Both of us had undiagnosed blood sugar disorders which eventually were diagnosed,” she says. “When we married, our home was alcohol-free and our friends were very happy with the great parties we had, without alcohol being served.”
Fellow student Ron Fields, writing on the memorial page, recalls Warner. “Silas occupied the dormitory room next to mine. He was a unique and enigmatic individual. Silas was intellectually leaps and bounds beyond his peers. While most guys in the dorm were concerned with the pursuits of free love and our draft status, Silas would commonly tune out most worldly interference, walking campus in his long black trench coat reading advanced chemistry and physics textbooks.”
Warner earned a degree in physics; computer science was not then taught at Indiana University. But he knew he was going to work with computers.
Computer pioneer
Warner split his time at Indiana University between his studies, reporting stories for the school’s radio station, and working part-time as a computer programmer.
According to computer historian Jimmy Maher at The Digital Antiquarian, Warner worked developing accident analysis software on an IBM mainframe. After completing his degree, he found work at the university, installing a new system called PLATO. This was an early educational computing system that guided students toward computer programming.
Warner created a PLATO user manual and got involved in making and playing rudimentary games. He helped create Empire, which is sometimes credited as being the first multiplayer shooting game. Players controlled Star Trek-style spaceships and typed in commands for changing directions and shooting. Warner then made his own shooter called Conquest and a multiplayer flight sim called Air Race.
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Speaking at KansasFest in 1992, Warner recalled working on PLATO. “It was a gigantic mainframe computer connected to a thousand terminals around the country,” he said. “The great advantage to these terminals was that they all had identical screen formats and identical commands. They were all graphics terminals, so as a result, you could write some really neat games on this thing.”
In 1976, Warner was hired by a large insurance company in Baltimore named Commercial Credit, where he created training-based computer games that the firm’s agents used to play out specific customer interactions. He wrote one called Sales Call Simulator.
In his spare time, he made a game called Robot Wars, and played the game with some new friends who also worked with computers. The players gave their robots orders at the start of each game, and then watched as the battles played out.
The rise and fall of Muse
Ed Zaron also worked at Commercial Credit, programming software that evaluated credit scores. He went on to co-found Muse with Warner. In a 1984 interview with Creative Computing, Zaron talked about how he and Warner became friends.
“He was just an acquaintance of mine, and I mentioned to him that I was going to buy an Apple computer that night and how excited I was about it,” Zaron said. “But I really didn’t know him that well. After work I went to the computer store. I brought the computer home, and I was taking it out of the box when the doorbell rang.
“It was Silas!” Zaron continued. “I barely even knew him, and he just walked right in to see my computer. Well, Silas is the kind of guy who can rub a manual across his chest and understand it completely. […] So he sat down in front of my computer and started to write programs. I just sat there and watched.”
When Zaron mentioned that he was leaving to attend a party, Warner carried on programming. “When I got home around 1:00 a.m. Silas was still there,” said Zaron. “He had a couple little games running on the computer. One of them he called The Apple Tree, and to play it you had to catch apples falling off a tree.”
Warner bought his own Apple II the next day. “It was No. 234,” recalled Warner in his KansasFest talk. “It was $1,399, but it was a really big machine. I got together with Ed Zaron and Jim Black, who was an accountant for the department that sent out the bills. These two people and myself got together at night and started producing cassettes.”
The three friends began making games and selling them at computer fairs up and down the East Coast.
“We recorded cassettes all night, after working all day,” recalled Warner. “We drove up [to computer fairs] in a truck with a box of tapes, and sold Tank Wars and maze games at an incredible rate. We began to realize that there really might be something to this software business.”
They decided to dedicate themselves to software development, full time, always drawing crowds of enthusiasts to their stalls. Muse created all kinds of Apple II software, such as audio tools and art programs. But it was the games that drew the most success.
Warner’s 3D Maze game, Escape, was a huge hit. It was so popular, the game was said to have impacted productivity at Apple because so many employees were playing it. Ultima creator Richard Garriott, who was also starting a game programming career, said that Escape was a major inspiration that “changed my life.”
Buoyed by the success of Escape and Ed Zaron’s Tank Wars, the Muse team expanded and moved into larger offices, and also opened an adjacent retail store where it sold computers and software. This helped the company buy new gear at trade prices, and see directly how its games were being received by customers.
“We were able to put our products in the Muse Computer Center and see how they were, see how they would play,” said Warner. “We also ordered our competitors’ software; not just stocking the store but to see what they were doing. So we had a good handle on the competition.”
As the burgeoning home computer market expanded, Muse was always ready to take advantage. When the Apple II disk drive came out, the company created its own assembler, easing the production line. Muse also started developing games for the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64. The company churned out software. By 1983, it was turning over more than $6 million a year (about $16 million in 2019 dollars).
One night, Warner visited a 7-11 and played the arcade hit Robotron 2084, which had been written by Eugene Jarvis. “It was such a cliche ... robots and science fiction gadgetry and all the trappings of that era,” said Warner, with characteristic bluntness.
“I wondered, what else could you do with it? And then I saw [1961 World War II film] The Guns of Navarone and realized what I could do with it. So Castle Wolfenstein came out about six months later.”
It was the company’s biggest project. “We put everything in there,” Warner said, referring to the Muse’s store of programming knowledge and its suite of software tools. “We were working with a professional recording studio. We went down there one fine day and I spent several hours on the microphone saying, ‘Achtung!’”
Those with memories of Castle Wolfenstein often recall the scary, angry voice coming out of the game as they tried to defeat Nazi enemies.
“I really played and played and played that game a ton,” recalls Seth Mendelsohn, who later worked with Warner at Virgin Interactive. “It really stands the test of time as the predecessor to Doom and Quake. I remember the digitized voice acting. It was way ahead of its time. It made the game more exciting. It was an amazing game.”
Sid Meier also remembers playing Castle Wolfenstein. “It wasn’t like the kinds of [military simulation] games we were making [at MicroProse], but we understood its value as a piece of technology. When we looked at Wolfenstein, we saw a game with a smooth frame rate and a clever pseudo 3D design. It has an intense gameplay,” he says.
“It was exploring an interesting new direction that led to all the shooters today,” Meier adds. “At the time, it felt like a window into the future, like SimCity a few years later. It was something that was new, and that a lot of people liked to play.”
Speaking in 1992, after the launch of id’s Wolfenstein 3D, Warner said: “That game supported our company right up until the time it collapsed. Now it’s supporting a new generation of folks.”
Wolfenstein’s later popularity
John Romero recalls in an email how id came to buy the Wolfenstein name.
“Around mid-April 1992, we decided that we could not come up with a better name than Wolfenstein,” he tells Polygon. “We decided to figure out how to get the rights to the name. Jay Wilbur was our biz guy at the time, and he tracked the remaining assets of MUSE Software. [...] It cost Jay $5,000 to buy the rights to the Wolfenstein name.”
Romero, Carmack, and other id Software folks went to see Warner give a speech at KansasFest (the same one quoted throughout this article).
“We drove from Dallas with our brand-new Toshiba color laptop in hand, with the newly-finished Wolfenstein 3D shareware on it,” recalls Romero. “We listened to Silas give a history talk about Muse and the great stuff he programmed.
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“After his talk we got to show him Wolfenstein 3D and he loved it. We had him sign a manual from the game which is displayed in id’s offices. We stayed up for hours at night, in the college dorm hallway, talking with him about Muse, the Apple II, and everything we could hope to hear him talk about. It was a great day.”
During the KansasFest speech, Warner acknowledged his young admirers. “I got a call from some producers who wanted to build a new version of Castle Wolfenstein in 3D, using modern technology,” he said. “Actually, I have seen their product and it’s very darn impressive on an IBM.”
Warner also spoke of Muse’s demise. “It was sudden and quite unexpected,” he said. “Our sales manager, who managed our growth, left us. The man we hired came from the consumer electronics business. He was every bit as smart and every bit as enthusiastic as our sales manager had been.”
The new sales manager fell ill, and died shortly afterward. In the fast-moving environment of the early games industry, this proved to be the end for Muse. “We had no sales. None at all. And developing a product is not very good when you have nothing to support it all,” said Warner. The company filed for bankruptcy: “Close the doors, lock it up, party’s over.”
Kari Ann Owen has a slightly different recollection. “He was not financially educated,” she says. “If Silas had been as good a businessperson as he was a computer scientist, life might have been very different for us.”
MicroProse and Virgin
After Muse, Warner returned to life as an employee. He began work at MicroProse, where he met Sid Meier. “Sid was like a mentor to him,” says Owen.
“We knew of Silas because of Wolfenstein, and he was in Baltimore too, and the games business was a small world then,” recalls Meier. “He came to interview with [the company’s then-president] Bill Stealey. They had a conversation. I talked to Bill afterward and he said, ‘You know, I’m not sure whether he’s the right person.’ Silas came back a day or two later and he said, ‘OK, I’ve decided to take the job.’”
Warner worked on converting various games to the different platforms that were emerging at the time. “He’d pick up a new computer, like an Atari ST or a Commodore Amiga, and become the expert on them almost overnight,” says Meier.
“Like a lot of us computer guys at that time, he tended to work pretty much independently,” says Meier. “He wasn’t super outgoing. He was in the technology nerd camp: introverted, focused on his work and on his computers. But when I talked to him about something that interested him, usually technology, he was knowledgeable and interesting.
“If he did something cool, he’d very casually show you, and we’d all be impressed. And that made him happy because he loved what he did. He was a good guy. But I don’t think he cared much about being a games designer. I think he saw them mainly as technical challenges.”
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As the PC started to become dominant, the demand for Warner’s technical skills slowed. In the early 1990s, he joined Virgin Interactive, which needed someone to work on its CD-ROM tech and to figure out video compression and full-motion video.
Stephen Clarke-Wilson worked with Warner at Virgin, as executive producer of games like The Terminator, Cool Spot, and The 7th Guest. “As a programmer, Silas got the job done,” says Clarke-Wilson. “He could also speak the language of the designers, which was super important. At the time, the concept of a design department was a new thing.”
“The thing I remember most was that he worked using two monitors and two keyboards, one on top of the other,” says Mendelsohn, who worked in marketing for Virgin at the time. “He would be typing with one hand on one keyboard and one hand on the other. I was amazed and asked him about it. He just said it was the way he worked.”
Mendelsohn also asked Warner if he ever planned to make another Wolfenstein game. “He looked surprised. He didn’t think anyone cared about it anymore. He was very modest about it and didn’t talk much about the old days.”
Mendelsohn would sometimes come into the office on weekends. More often than not, he would find Warner at his computer. “He’d come in after hours to play [Sid Meier’s] Railroad Tycoon. He loved that game.”
Later years
In the mid-’90s, Warner suffered a minor stroke, and was diagnosed with blood sugar deficiency and various other ailments. He moved to San Francisco and took a variety of programming jobs. He also met Kari Ann Owen.
“We met in May 1995,” she says. “We were both born in 1949. We were approaching 46. I don’t think he ever expected to marry. He was obese and didn’t have much confidence in his looks, but I thought him beautiful. He asked me to marry him.”
Owen is a short woman, and was also obese at the time. The happy couple’s physical appearance meant they cut a striking figure. She recalls the cruelty of strangers. “Silas would support me in defending myself from insults, although with a sense of humor. We had what so many people lack: a spiritual, physical, and emotional home with love shared at its deepest and most comprehensive.”
Despite being on kidney dialysis, Warner continued to work until he was laid off in 2002. After that, his health failing and unable to work, he and Owen moved out of San Francisco. He spent his last years in Paradise and then Chico in California’s central valley.
“He fought so hard,” recalls Owen. “My one regret is that Silas didn’t have the financial acumen to see to it that he was well-paid for his work and for his intellectual property. Neither of us were especially good at that, which I regret, because it would have helped him at the end.” She says that they discussed trying to secure some claim on the Wolfenstein name, but were advised that the legal process would be too costly.
Owen says her time with Silas Warner were the best years of her life. He supported her as she strived to lose weight, and to become a horse-riding instructor. He helped her get her first horse and her therapeutic instructional certification.
“He was a brilliant and brave man,” she says. “I’m very proud of all his achievements, including helping to start the video game industry. I just wish he got the recognition he deserves.”
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