INFINITE AMMO

How ’90s shooters escaped their certain Doom with an indie retro revival.

- Alex Spencer

If you tuned into 3D Realms’ Twitch channel this September, you could be forgiven for thinking you were peering through a portal into 1997. The publisher held the inaugural Realms Deep event, two days of lightning-fast frags and chunky gibs, weapon sprites, and the kind of character models where you could count the polygons by eye, all with a soundtrack that can only be described as ‘pumping’.

Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood Interactive, describes it as “our own E3 for retro shooters”. It’s a party for developers who believe the first-person shooter was perfected by the turn of the millennium and, rejecting all those heretical texts which followed, have spent the past half-decade striving to resurrect the look and feel of the ’90s golden age. This might sound like a regressive way of making games – and it certainly can be – but this movement has produced some of the highest-rated games on Steam. And you can trace almost its entire history back to one unlikely game: Rise of the Triad.

It was the remake of a 1995 shooter that Frederik Schreiber, now VP of 3D Realms, admits was “an obscure, kind of unknown game to the masses”. And he should know – in 2013, along with Oshry, Schreiber was one of the game’s directors. The remake isn’t much better remembered, but it happened to mark the beginning of a broader revival, the names getting bigger with each release: Shadow Warrior, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Doom.

The release led – via a few cancelled projects and a lot of