INFINITE AMMO

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.