Bethesda Prohibited Hitler from Going Full Commando in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
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Key points
- Bethesda Softworks prohibited MachineGames from showing Adolf Hitler’s penis in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
- Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, with 31,992 reviews.
- MachineGames may create a direct follow-up to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, continuing BJ Blazkowicz’s story despite previous spinoffs.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus could have shown even more of Adolf Hitler than his bad temper, but the title’s publisher, Bethesda Softworks, insisted that the game’s developer, MachineGames, cut off the Führer’s penis from the game.
A memorable scene in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, when Hitler casts a propaganda movie and urinates in a champagne ice bucket, could have contained a full view of Hitler’s genitalia, recalled MachineGames co-founder and creative director Jens Matthies during the second episode of Noclip’s documentary on the Swedish video game developer behind the Wolfenstein duology, its spin-off, 2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circleand its recently released DLC, The Order of Giants.
“We wanted to actually show Hitler’s penis as well, when he was peeing,” said MachineGames studio head Jerk Gustafsson.
“The concept around Hitler was that he was going to be extremely physical,” added Matthies. “Like, the opposite of spiritual, basically. If you have a Nazi enemy – or, in this case… the ultimate Nazi – how do you make something unique out of it? How do you make it interesting and something they haven’t seen before?”
Matthies also recalled that he asked Todd Vaughn, VP of Production at Bethesda at the time, about showing Hitler’s penis, and Vaughn answered that he wouldn’t advise doing that.
The plan to show the embodiment of the opposite of the spiritual resulted in one of the game’s darkest comic scenes, where Hitler gets increasingly irate, eats, vomits, and has to urinate.
As of the time of writing, the sequel to 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order and the seventh main entry in the Wolfenstein series, 2017’s Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, with 31,992 reviews. The game has won four awards in different categories across multiple industry award ceremonies.
As reported by Gaming.News earlier, MachineGames may create a direct follow-up to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, continuing BJ Blazkowicz’s story despite previous spinoffs.
