![]() “Those childhood memories are important, and that’s what stuck with me.” (spare a thought for those of us who were only able to play Minesweeper and Spider Solitaire on our oppressively adminned school PCs.)Įach game has a distinctive look - Dusk is crude and low-poly, Project Warlock is sprite-based and flat, while Amid Evil evokes the vibrant vistas of 80s sci-fi art more than any 90s game. “We had this room where we could stay after school, and there we had a couple of PCs with Commander Keen, DOSMario and Wolfenstein 3D,” he tells me. Project Warlock has a striking visual style. So how did a game from 1992 become a design obsession for someone born in a different millennium? Cislo has fond memories of watching his father play Doom 3, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, but it was a series of clandestine primary school sessions that introduced him to Nazi hunter B.J. “They give you that cool feedback that models don’t - it just feels more crisp, and sometimes if the 3D models are not done correctly they just look janky.” "I desperately wanted to make something with this blocky, chunky look to it."Ĭlearly, one developer’s jank is another one’s treasure.Ĭislo was just 18 when he made Project Warlock. “Sprites are my favourite design choice ever,” he says. I desperately wanted to make something with this blocky, chunky look to it, and I can’t really explain why that is!”Ĭislo’s stance on the 90s shooter aesthetic couldn’t be more different, with Project Warlock’s sprite-based art style and cramped corridors channeling Wolfenstein 3D. “The game had its own really weird Doom Alpha sort of engine, but they also had this ability to render 3D models. “Playing a game called Chasm: The Rift was the first time I saw that look,” he says. While the famously grotty Quake seems like an obvious reference point, his true low-poly love from the era was something far more obscure. As Project Warlock creator Kuba Cislo puts it, “Everyone has to pick a timeline, and from that timeline pick the most important elements to them.” Dusk is a chunky boy.ĭusk developer David Szymanski, for instance, was always about embracing the ugly. With so many great blueprints to work from, it’s inevitable that everyone has their own ideas about what made this era special, with indie developers approaching it from many different angles. The problem with defining a ‘90s shooter’ is that this was a decade of seismic technical progress that created several significant design styles an era that began with the blue corridors of Wolfenstein 3D, progressed through Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and the Build games, the onset of 3D graphics with Quake, then concluded with technical tour-de-force Unreal and of course Half-life. Now, with all three developers working on their next projects, I figured it was a perfect time to catch up with them, reflecting on the making of their games, the zeitgeist they started, and where it’s all going to go from here. The developers behind each game interpreted 90s shooter design in their own unique ways, finding ways to reconfigure it for an audience that, in many cases, wasn’t even born in the 90s. This retro shooter renaissance took hold in 2018, led by Dusk, Amid Evil, and Project Warlock - among others. After all, you didn’t need high production values or big budgets to recreate the splattery sprites, crude polygons and cuboid giblets that typified 90s shooters. Its success stirred up indie developers, who saw that there may be merit in doubling down on that old-school spirit. When Doom tore its way onto our screens in 2016, it marked a revival of 90s shooter motifs like blistering pace, charge-forward combat and a rejection of narrative and cutscenes.
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