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Aardwolf
Aardwolfsign

The Aardwolf sign refers to a special prop that appears in E2M8 of Wolfenstein 3D at the end of a pushwall maze. It takes on the form of a floating red triangular marquee with with yellow text saying "Call Apogee Say 'Aardwolf'". It was supposedly created for part of what would have been a contest to see who would find the secret first, but the contest was eventually scrapped out of fear that datamining software may give an edge to unscrupulous players.

The secret[]

631005106 preview Aardwolf map

Map of the secret as illustrated by Steam user "RazorShader"

The secret is in a pushwall maze which takes up half of E2M8. Contained within the maze are roughly 6 1-ups, various score items, the Aardwolf object itself, and a Hans Grosse intended as a trap for hapless explorers.

Apogee calls[]

Due to the cancellation of the contest, the Call Apogee Say Aardwolf prop is a vestigial inclusion of most versions of Wolfenstein 3D. However, there have been enough instances of players stumbling upon the message and calling Apogee that it has become an issue. For this reason, in the Steam release of Wolfenstein 3D the prop's graphic is replaced with a duplicate of the graphic for the Bones 3 prop.

According to an Apogee FAQ people would frequently send letters or leave messages with the question "Has anyone seen this yet?"

Don't call Apogee/3DRealms with this stupid shit.

Legacy[]

New Aardwolf

Aardwolf in Wolfstone 3D

Notably, in Wolfstone 3D, there is an Aardwolf message replacement in the secret maze. Instead of calling on the player to call Apogee, they are now urged to send a Tweet to the @wolfenstein account to say "Aardwolf".

The Aardwolf message has since become an injoke with the Wolfenstein 3D community. Due to its exploitable nature, many mods (especially earlier ones) would make their own edits of the Call Apogee Say Aardwolf prop's text, including such examples as "Call Apogee Say 'Bullshit'", "Call Apogee Say 'Fuck You'", "Call Donald Trump And Say 'Fuck You'", or other such derivatives.

The short-lived modding team Team Aardwolf was named after this prop.

In 2016, Apogee staffer Joe Siegler published an article with a detailed story on Aardwolf, including some detail on what the word was before Aardwolf was settled on.

ECWolf DECORATE definition[]

​​​​​ actor CallApogee 73
 {
     radius 32
     +SOLID
     states
     {
         Spawn:
             AARD A -1
             stop
     }
 }
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