Why were the Wolf3D weapons so pixelated?

Something that has been lurking in the back of my mind for many years yet I never summoned the curiosity to actually ask the question until now. The first person weapon sprites in Wolfenstein 3D look like they are low resolution and upscaled many times over. Why did they go that route instead of just drawing larger sprites in a native resolution? That's how it was in id's previous game Catacomb 3D.

So that they were at their native resolution at the smallest window size?

For some reason they seem to have been using Ascii art for the weapons. The difference can have something to do with Wolf 3d being 256 colors while Catacomb 3d were only 16. But I'm just guessing there.

Maes said:

So that they were at their native resolution at the smallest window size?

That does seem to be the answer though it's never made any sense to me at all.

The sprites and walls in Wolfenstein 3D are all 64x64 in size. Just like in Doom, the Wolf3D weapon and certain overlay graphics (but not the status bar) are sprites, so they're also 64x64. They have to be drawn both at the bottom of the screen (the weapons) and the top (the floating "Demo" or "Death Cam" text) at a fixed position. In order to fit all the vertical space, they had to be stretched 2x.

The game was very much ahead of its time in that it was the first 3D game to implement depth-of-field, although crudely. The weapon was simply out of focus.