6 games that had a huge impact on PC gaming, but are rarely celebrated today

For every entry on PC Gamer’s list of the 50 most important PC games, there are a dozen other less-celebrated trailblazers that don’t get as much love as The Secret of Monkey Island or Doom or Deus Ex. The genealogy of games has always fascinated me: Tracing back whole genres to their evolutionary roots, discovering where ideas become accepted, fell out of vogue or just forgotten. Why are survival games massively popular in the 2020s, when the survival games of the ’90s have completely faded from memory? Why did it take so long for deckbuilders to become a hit genre, when Magic: the Gathering was doing it on PC 25 years ago?

Here’s a handful of games that—while seldom thought about nowadays—were hugely influential on PC gaming as we know it today. 

Star Control 2

Released: November 1992
Developer: Toys For Bob
What it achieved: Charted the course for space adventures, but got lost in a legal neutral zone

The captain of an extraordinary starship assembles a crew of weird alien misfits on a quest to save the galaxy from an omnicidal precursor race. There’s planetside exploration, mining worlds for resources in a slightly-too-fiddly minigame, fully voiced multiple-choice dialogues with a reputation system, and even sexy blue alien ladies to romance. Sounds more than a bit like Mass Effect, doesn’t it? While the original Star Control got the ball rolling, the sequel gave us a template for space exploration and adventuring that hasn’t changed much in 30 years.

As for why it’s seldom mentioned nowadays, there’s a few reasons. Firstly, Star Control 3 (by a different studio) was a bit rubbish. Secondly, Stardock’s attempts to revive the series after acquiring the name were also underwhelming and legally disputed. Third, the version of the game available on Steam or GOG is the clunky DOS original. Thankfully better options exist in the form of an unofficial remaster (integrating the best bits from all versions) and its enhanced HD version, but they exist in vague legal limbo. It’s a space adventure worth going on, but it’ll take consulting some dusty old star-charts to get there. 

Magic: The Gathering

Released: March 1997
Developer: MicroProse Software
What it achieved: It ran before deckbuilders learned to even crawl

Deckbuilding games are truly inescapable these days. There’s dozens of them due out this year alone, but back in 1997, the options were a bit more limited. Without so much as a subtitle, the 1997 PC adaptation of Magic: The Gathering was a revelation. Not only was it an excellent adaptation of the ascendant CCG, but it had a mind-bendingly expansive campaign mode named Shandalar, unprecedented for its time. Part open world RPG, part Heroes Of Might & Magic, all card battling. As a roaming sorcerer, you traveled around a huge map, fighting monsters in dungeons, challenging rival sorcerer-lords and buying and selling cards in towns.

The reason it’s obscure now is largely because there’s no legal way to get hold of it beyond trawling Ebay for second-hand copies, and playing it on modern machines is a bit of a struggle. There are some fan-made efforts to create an unofficial successor to the Shandalar campaign, but nothing has fully borne fruit yet. Given that the fans are operating unlicensed and under the baleful eye of Sauron Hasbro, it’s probably best that I not link to anything until everything is done, dusted and released to the public. 

Kill.switch

Released: October 2003
Developer: Bohemia Interactive
What it achieved: It gave us the cover-shooter genre, then kept its head down

While the cover shooter has fallen out of vogue recently (I’m still waiting for the official announcement of Gears 6), it was one of the dominant forces in videogames for a good long while. Gears of War was the first major hit in the genre, but Namco’s Kill.switch predated it and was the first to really clarify that bombastic military action style. It introduced blind-firing (not so useful in real life, much more effective with a third-person camera) to the mix, completing the formula as we know it now. While a little raw and unrefined nowadays, it’s not hard to see Kill.switch’s influence.

This one faded from memory pretty quickly, largely in part because the game was, well, kinda mid. Without the visual hooks of Gears of War’s gigantic sassy muscle men and subterranean monsters, it was mostly just grey-brown military generica, and a very short and easy game to boot. It also came to the PC late, although interestingly was ported to Windows by The Bitmap Brothers, another influential studio largely forgotten these days. 

Painkiller

Released: April 2004
Developer: People Can Fly
What it achieved: It carved out a hell-grinding FPS niche that has only grown

Circa 2004, the prevailing wisdom in gaming was that gritty and grounded was the way forward—see Kill.switch above. Even Doom had reinvented itself as a slower, more cinematic horror-adjacent experience. Painkiller felt like a rebuttal to this new trend—a loud, fast Gun Dude Versus Hell arcade shooter inspired by the classics of the ’90s but not entirely beholden to them. It’s what the kids these days would call a ‘boomer shooter’, but before we had such (inaccurate) terminology, it was just plain old school, moreso even than the Serious Sam series.

Painkiller didn’t remain the uncontested ruler of its particular niche for long. Other rivals came and went, and attempts to recapture its relevance fell flat. Two sequels, Painkiller: Overdose and Painkiller: Resurrection just didn’t live up to the original, and were widely panned by critics. 2013’s Hell & Damnation (HD, get it?) was a decent remake of the original’s best levels, but bafflingly relegating many of its best levels to DLC made it a hard sell at the time. By then the retro FPS revival was in full swing, and there wasn’t much reason to return to Painkiller. The Doom mod scene has even stripped it for parts in the form of the (excellent) gameplay mod Painslayer. 

Wing Commander Privateer

Released: September 1993
Developer: Origin Systems
What it achieved: Defining the space trading-and-shooting genre as we know it

If you grew up through the ’70s or ’80s, chances are you wanted to be Han Solo at some point. A roguish space captain, smuggler, hero and troublemaker. Hauling (sometimes illicit) goods and getting into dogfights with pirates on almost every trip. There’s a long history of games delivering on this dream (including the still-active Elite series), but it was Wing Commander: Privateer that defined the form, bringing that cinematic, Hollywood-esque vibe to an otherwise dry sim style. With face-to-face dialogues, sketchy characters to meet and combat lifted straight from the mainline Wing Commander games, Privateer was the template to follow.

Despite being easily accessible on GOG (opens in new tab), Privateer is less talked about now simply because it was so thoroughly supplanted by its successors. Egosoft’s X franchise, the Freelancer series, modern takes like Everspace 2, even its own direct successor, the absurdly-budgeted Star Citizen. Still, there are some that hold a torch for Privateer’s specific charms. The underrated Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is so visually and mechanically similar that it could pass for an unofficial reboot. It makes a lot of quality-of-life improvements while still retaining some of its interesting quirks, like its charmingly, intrusively bulky ship cockpits. 

Robinson’s Requiem

Released: 1994
Developer: Silmarils
What it achieved: It laid the ground for the grueling survival sandbox genre

Modern survival games are for weaklings. Managing hunger and hydration gauges? Easy. Back in my day, we had to decipher a bafflingly complex medical interface after every fight. First diagnosing what terrible injury we’d suffered, then cleaning, disinfecting and wrapping individual wounds or even performing gruesome field surgery. Robinson’s Requiem (and more polished sequel Deus) were some of the first big hits in the survival sandbox genre, and went harder and further than almost any of their modern contemporaries. French studio Silmarils never seemed content to do what other games were doing.

As for why Robinson’s Requiem and its sequel are so rarely mentioned these days, I feel they were just too far ahead of their time—and possibly a bit too extreme on the simulation front. As you can see in the video above, there are a comical number of ways to die. Clearly there was an audience for grueling survival sandbox games (if there wasn’t, Robinson’s Requiem wouldn’t have gotten a sequel), but the concept wasn’t quite ready to go mainstream yet. The world definitely couldn’t have handled SCUM in 1994. The Robinson games are very hard to approach now, thanks to their brutal learning curves and extremely clunky interfaces, and sadly they’re not popular enough to inspire fans to unofficially remaster or remake them. 


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We now know the massive changes coming to Destiny 2’s DPS meta in Lightfall

Linear fusion rifles have dominated Destiny 2’s DPS meta for over a year now. The quadrilogy of Cataclysmic, Taipan-4FR, Stormchaser and Reed’s Regret have been the default picks for raids, dungeons and Nightfalls throughout The Witch Queen era. So when Bungie first teased an overhaul of heavy weapons for next month’s Lightfall expansion, we all instinctively knew that a major nerf was on the cards.

And so it is. In yesterday’s Season 20 weapon tuning preview, Bungie revealed that all legendary linear fusion rifles are getting a 15% reduction to damage against Champions, minibosses, bosses and vehicles. Pack it in, they’re done.

OK, maybe not entirely done. Linears were king for more than just the damage output, although that certainly helped. They have the best ammo economy of any ranged DPS option, and, thanks to perks like Clown Cartridge, Fourth Times the Charm or Triple Tap, most can extend their magazine size well beyond its default limit. They’re perfect for sustained DPS, making them the best choice for raid and dungeon bosses that have long damage phases—ie, most raid and dungeon bosses. And while their damage completely falls off if you’re not hitting headshots, that can be easily mitigated by having a Divinity user on your team.

Even Divinity’s nerf last year didn’t do much to lessen the popularity of Linears. And honestly, in terms of their ease of use, I could see them still having a place in the game after Lightfall’s launch. Especially as exotic linears aren’t being touched. As you can see by this crunchy breakdown of the numbers, Sleeper Simulant will be a compelling pick.

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A modest buff to LMGs

If linears are the big losers of this upcoming update, we do also have some clear winners. Machine guns are getting approximately 10% extra damage, as well as an increase to reserve ammo.

Is it enough? Machine guns are in a weird place at the moment, largely because the community has decided that add clear weapons don’t have a place in the current sandbox. This is largely thanks to the Light 3.0 rework, and how strong it made abilities. If you can clear whole rooms with instantly recharging Vortex grenades, why equip a heavy weapon that’s built for that same purpose?

Despite this, I think they’re being slept on. There are plenty of non-boss encounters in raids—think Totems in King’s Fall or Exhibition in Vow of the Disciple—where machine guns are the perfect pick. And the more Bungie experiments with enforced power scaling—such as Heist Battlegrounds locking you below your current power level—the more I can see a place for their sustained, multi-target firepower. And, as the perennial Divinity user of my raid group, I’m rarely doing actual boss damage, so my trusty Commemoration has proved a solid choice for quickly clearing the field, particularly paired with Volatile Rounds.

Is Anarchy back?

Heavy grenade launchers, meanwhile, are getting a major buff—20% increased damage against Champions, minibosses, bosses, and vehicles. In addition, their projectiles are getting improved collision and increased blast radius, making it easier to land hits. “With this change, Heavy Grenade Launchers should be significantly more useful in PvE, and easier to use in both PvE and PvP,” writes Bungie.

It’s been years since heavy grenade launchers have had a place in the meta, with one main exception that, thanks to this update, could also be back on the table.

Anarchy is an exotic grenade launcher that fires sticky projectiles that do damage-over-time to enemies they hit. This means you can pop a couple of grenades on a boss, and swap to a high-damage secondary to bump up your damage. It was the top pick back in Season 14—largely thanks to the Breach and Clear artefact mod that caused enemies to take increased damage when hit by grenades. Then, in Season 15, it felt Bungie’s wrath—a 30% damage nerf to bosses, coupled with a significant reduction in total ammo.

Lightfall’s update won’t quite bring it back to its former glory, but it might once again become a solid choice for its specific fire-and-forget purpose. It’s a great weapon to pair with a good boss damage secondary—meaning sniper rifles might once again make an appearance—and the damage-over-time effect will make it a top option for Warlocks running Starfire Protocol builds. For raid DPS, though, probably not.

As for whether legendary heavy grenade launchers will finally be worth using, I could see it. RokDC’s tweet thread suggests a godroll Interference VI will for sure do the business. It’s probably worth hunting for a good Wendigo GL3 when it returns as the Nightfall weapon on February 21. If you nab one with Spike Grenades in the second column, Explosive Light in the fourth column, and either Auto-Loading Holster, Clown Cartridge or Field Prep in the third, you’ll be all set.

Exotic heavies are more fun now

(Image credit: Bungie)

One effect of the linear fusion meta is that exotic heavies don’t get as much use. Sleeper Simulant does a hell of a lot of damage, but its legendary counterparts benefit from having access to ammo perks. As a result, Bungie is reworking a whole bunch of exotic heavies—giving them access to some of Light 3.0’s effects, thus tying them more intrinsically into the game’s buildcrafting.

This has resulted in my favourite upcoming change: giving scorch stacks to One Thousand Voices.

1KV is Last Wish’s raid exotic—a (non-linear) heavy fusion rifle that fires a burst of plasma that explodes wherever it lands. It’s loud. It’s messy. You can easily kill yourself with it. It’s everything I want in an exotic weapon. It had its time to shine in Season 15, thanks to the Particle Deconstruction artifact mod, but hasn’t made an impact this year. “We wanted to lean even more into a chain of Solar explosions by adding scorch,” writes Bungie, “and with the global Heavy weapon changes it’s also a strong option. If you have Ember of Ashes equipped, landing a full burst on a single target will trigger an ignition immediately.” Perfect. No notes. I will be using this constantly.

The exotic heavy bow Leviathan’s breath is, similarly, getting a Light verb—it will apply volatile (big void explosion) on perfect draws, and is getting 30% increased damage to Champions. It’s already a great pick for Grandmaster Nightfalls thanks to its many previous buffs, and, with this change, will be an absolute no brainer. Who needs Arbalest?

Those are the two exotic changes that feel immediately like they could shake things up, but there’s plenty more intriguing changes planned too. The most interesting is the suggestion that Two-Tailed Fox—a rocket launcher that simultaneously fires a Solar and Void rocket—will be getting a third, Arc verb with its catalyst. With it also being updated so that each rocket applies an element-appropriate verb, it could finally see some use in the sandbox.

In addition to the above heavy changes, Bungie also announced some more crunchy changes to Kinetic slot weapon damage—giving pure Kinetic damage weapons more of a purpose over their slotmate Stasis (and, presumably, Strand) weapons. Feel free to crunch the numbers over at Bungie’s blogpost. Personally, I’m just going to be staring longingly at One Thousand Voices. Soon, my friend. Soon.



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LG’s latest tech could fix the biggest problem with gaming OLEDs

It’s been a long time coming but OLED panels are now beginning to roll out inside the latest gaming monitors. If you didn’t know already, LG is the manufacturer of pretty much every OLED panel out there today, from the Asus ROG Swift PG42UQ (opens in new tab) to the Corsair Xeneon Flex (opens in new tab). And LG has big plans for the next-gen: a new technology that will make OLED gaming monitors better and brighter.

According to a report from Korea IT News (opens in new tab) (via Computer Base (opens in new tab)), LG is planning to introduce its LG META Technology into gaming monitors, likely later this year.

Not to be confused with the company behind Facebook, META Technology is a combination of a new Micro Lens Array (MLA) and META Booster algorithm. According to LG, the result is an OLED screen capable of delivering 2,100 nits brightness, which is, yep, pretty darn high. Since this is an OLED panel and not a traditional panel, that’s not an entire panel blasting your eyeballs to bits at 2,100 nits, just 3% of it. Nevertheless, that’s extremely bright.

The array of tiny micro lenses essentially amplify light emission from the self-emitting panel for a brighter overall image. LG’s packing a lot of them onto each 3rd Gen OLED panel—a 77-inch 4K TV would have 5,117 lenses per pixel. Nevertheless, these aren’t expected to create any odd-looking visual artefacts. In fact, the other benefit of these micro-lenses is they’ll deliver a wider viewing angle than anything on the market: 160°.

LG OLED-powered gaming panels could do with a little zhuzh. Using cut-down TV panels looks lush but they risk running too hot and struggling with burn-in when used on a desktop, meaning they’re not often as bright as we’d like them to be. The colours, the contrast, they’re all great on an OLED, but actually excelling in brightness would make these panels real all-rounders. Micro lenses could be a great way to do just that, as they actually allow an OLED panel to run at a lower power, but still retain high peak brightness. It’d be great if this meant there wasn’t such a need for chunky heatsinks either, like those we’ve seen on the Asus ROG Swift PG42UQ.

Most of the messaging around LG’s META Technology is regarding its next generation of OLED TVs. That’s what makes the big bucks and where OLED technology has more of a foothold in the market. Yet LG does cite a 45-inch ultrawide (3,440 x 1,440) and a 27-inch (2,560 x 1,440) gaming monitor on its META Technology website (opens in new tab) as set to arrive with the tech at some point in the future. Both 240Hz monitors, according to the site.

Here’s hoping these arrive this side of the summer. Even the viewing angles LG is bragging need to be seen to be believed.


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That time Among Us accidentally violated the Geneva Conventions



Running one of the most popular games on Earth can have its downsides. Every minor flaw will get picked to death, people will hassle you endlessly about expansions and sequels, and that time you accidentally violated the actual Geneva Conventions suddenly becomes a matter of public scrutiny.

Apparently, that’s what happened to Among Us back in 2020. In a post to Twitter yesterday (opens in new tab) evening, the official Among Us account let slip a “fun fact” about the game’s development: “after the game got big in 2020 [Innersloth] had to change the colour of the MedBay cross,” because the game had unintentionally “violated the Geneva Conventions Act by making it red”. Thus the now-familiar blue crosses that adorn the game’s medical bay walls, in complete non-violation of myriad international peace treaties.



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Seriously, where did you lot get the money for all those RTX 4090s?

Where did you people get all this money from?! Somehow Nvidia’s RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) has appeared in the Steam Hardware Survey (opens in new tab) for the first time this January, and has popped in above any of AMD’s high-end graphics cards.

The AMD RX 6800 XT (opens in new tab) is one of the best GPUs the red team has ever released, and I get that the pandemic/chip shortage fun times kinda made it tough to buy, but it’s been out since late 2020 and still comes in behind Nvidia’s ~$2,000 graphics card.

And that’s even with the Radeon card steadily gaining popularity and market share in the Steam survey since at least September.

In fact, as pointed out in a recent reddit thread (opens in new tab), the RX 6800 XT is behind even the RX 6900 XT (opens in new tab), AMD’s $999 version of its RDNA 2 GPU architecture which launched later. I get that it had a pretty significant price drop late in life, but damn. 

Still, the RX 580 is AMD’s most popular discrete graphics card according to the collected Steam Hardware Survey data, and there are more of those than RTX 4090, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT combined. So, AMD’s got that, at least.

It does bear saying, however, that the Steam Hardware Survey is purely a representative sample of the tech used by gamers with Steam installed, and not a complete record of the split of GPUs out in the wild.

Though I expect every single one of the RTX 4090 owners who were offered the chance to submit their gaming PC’s specs to Steam when they logged in most definitely clicked ‘Accept.’ After all, when you’ve spent a couple of grand on a GPU you want as many people to know as possible.

I bet Gabe would be well impressed, too.

Still, it is representative to a point, and sometimes it’s easy to forget just how dominant Nvidia is in the GPU market, despite how good AMD’s RX 6000-series graphics cards have proved. I mean, we still can’t believe people are picking the RTX 3060 over the excellent RX 6700 XT (opens in new tab).

It’s cheaper, faster, and just plain better. And no, we won’t stop going on about it until you lot listen, Intel’s Arc cards get far more consistent, or we actually get some competitively priced RTX 40-series or RX 7000-series GPUs.

Maybe one day.


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The Apocalypse has never been more relaxing in tinyBuild’s new cozy base builder


Who says surviving the apocalypse can’t also be relaxing? While most post-apocalyptic survival games focus on defending against hordes of zombies or some other man-eating monsters, I Am Future from tinyBuild slows things down a bit to focus more on enjoying the peaceful serenity of a world without all those noisy humans, well except for yourself of course. 

Just look at the sing-along trailer to see the brave new world for yourself.  



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Fans huff the copium as Platinum Games teases MGR:Revengeance’s 10th anniversary



Platinum Games has teased a celebratory event for the 10th anniversary of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the excellent hack-and-slash adventure that has gone on to have a second life as the source of countless memes. The game had originally been in development at Konami’s Kojima Productions as Metal Gear Rising before being handed over to the action game specialists, who came up with the rather brilliant central mechanic of ripping out your enemies’ spines to heal oneself, and the rest is high-octane history.

The game did get some (very good) DLC but, despite the positive reception and decent sales, it’s been silence ever since. Given the subsequent Konami-Kojima fallout and the Metal Gear series being seemingly put on ice, a sequel has never felt less likely. And yet, now Platinum is announcing the game’s upcoming 10th anniversary, along with the reveal of some new celebratory artwork.

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An error in Samsung’s 980 Pro firmware is causing SSDs to die. I’d check your drive right now tbh

If you’re rocking a Samsung 980 Pro in your gaming PC, it’s time to update or it might die in front of your eyes. Even worse, if that’s your Windows boot drive, your entire system may just one day soon refuse to start.

The issue was discovered by system builder, Puget Systems (opens in new tab) (via NordicHardware (opens in new tab)), which has stated that, “despite historically being some of our most reliable parts, we have received a surprising number of reports of failing Samsung drives, specifically with the 2TB version of the 980 Pro.”

It goes on to say that, working with Samsung itself, it has been confirmed that the firmware the 980 Pro SSDs were shipping with were responsible for these failures and that they need to be updated as soon as possible.

The drives were failing by suddenly becoming locked into read-only mode which effectively makes the SSD completely unusable as it can no longer be written to. As your OS is constantly making read/write actions as part of its general process, that means your system just will not start.

Puget Systems says that the issue has happened specifically with the 2TB version of the drive, but does say that Samsung “recommends users update the firmware on all 980 Pro drives to the latest version (5B2QGXA7) to prevent the issue from occurring.”

It says that the firmware update should just be an in-place upgrade and should preserve all current data, but just in case it would be wise to back up if possible.

The affected version of the firmware is 3B2QGXA7, though Puget Systems claims that drives running the 4B2QGXA7 firmware should be fine, even if Samsung is recommended the more recent update.

There’s currently nothing listed on the Samsung newsroom itself, so we don’t know if it is communicating with its customers directly, but Puget Systems is reportedly in touch with all its potentially affected customers by email today.

The fix is simple, simply download the Samsung SSD Magician software from the SSD support site (opens in new tab), and once installed open the application and navigate to the update tab and update the firmware from there. Easy. No dead SSD.

Samsung’s not having a great time with its SSDs right now. Not only is the 980 Pro at risk of imminent death if it’s not updated, there are numerous reports of the newer 990 Pro drives suffering from declining health (opens in new tab). In the same SSD Magician software that can come to the rescue of the 980 Pro, users are reporting (opens in new tab) issues with the drive health of their new SSDs rapidly dropping.

On this issue, however, Samsung is seemingly refusing to accept responsibility and drives sent back to the manufacturer are being returned with claims that no defect has been found. Basically, you’re sh!t out of luck, son.

After the initial reports had been picked up in various forums and publications, Samsung’s RMA division has been in touch with the original Neowin poster to replace the drive and try to replicate the issue.

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But, given the response across the different forums and social networks, this doesn’t look like an isolated incident and I’d probably expect another firmware update warning to be issues soon for the 990 Pro, too.



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Meta lost more than 4 billion dollars on the metaverse in the last financial quarter



Meta, the social network formerly known as Facebook that is definitely going to rename itself Facebook in a few years, has announced that its metaverse division has made a huge loss, again, despite last year’s stunning addition of legs to avatars. The VR and metaverse division, Meta Reality Labs, lost $4.279 billion in the fourth quarter (compared to a mere $3.304 billion in the same quarter last year), with revenue of $727 million ($877 million a year ago).

The Reality Labs division used to be known as the Oculus division, before Meta decided it didn’t like that name, and is now the umbrella under which both VR and the wider metaverse project is accounted for. This was the quarter that saw Meta increase the price of the Quest 2 headsets by $100, and launched the ludicrously priced Meta Quest Pro headset ($1500), which explains some of the revenue dip. But the real headline is that Meta doesn’t care about these losses, seeing the metaverse project as its long-term future rather than the current money pit it is.



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Dwarf Fortress releases sales figures since Steam release showing 46,000% increase in earnings

Dwarf Fortress just can’t stop winning. After blasting through its two-month sales estimate and hitting almost half a million copies sold (opens in new tab) in under a month, co-creator Tarn Adams came out yesterday and told players (opens in new tab) precisely how much money the game has earned since its December Steam release: $7,230,123, and 58 cents.

That’s around £5.9 million or €6.6 million, and it’s just slightly more than the $15,635 (£12.7k/€14.2k) that Dwarf Fortress earned in the month prior to its release on Steam. That’s more than a 46,000% increase, by my reckoning (and by my reckoning I mean the reckoning of this online calculator (opens in new tab) I used to do the sum, so I’m blaming that if my figures are wrong). That’s a life-changing shift, and not just because it’s allowed Adams and his brother Zach to hire an unprecedented second programmer (opens in new tab). 

“The appreciation you give us is part of our being now,” wrote Adams, “It carries us in the cars we drive. It sustains us as the food that we eat. There is now no longer any existence except the one that you have provided”.

It won’t all go to the creators, of course. Adams says that a “little less than half will go to taxes,” as well as “continuing to pay people and new business expenses and such”. He said that “it’s not all personal money, but a lot of it is,” enough that the brothers have “solved the main issues of health/retirement that are troubling for independent people”. They also feel the money has “safeguarded the future of the game” enough that they feel comfortable bringing on a new developer—called Putnam—to work on Dwarf Fortress’ code.

And then, as though he hadn’t just announced he’s a millionaire, Adams proceeded with business as usual. “Going to start off with an arena patch soon,” he wrote, “then on to the quality of life improvements”. Quality of life goes on, I suppose.

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of writing articles about Dwarf Fortress knocking it out of the park, because I can’t think of many games that deserve success more than the Adams brothers’ weird and sprawling magnum opus. It’s inspired plenty of other devs since its 2006 release, but Dwarf Fortress remains its own inimitably strange thing.


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