Exactly 25 years ago today, the original Serious Sam was launched – a successful shooter by Zagreb’s Croteam.
Today, Serious Sam is a well-known series from the Croatian studio Croteam. But before we got serious Sam Stone on this day in 2001, Croteam was developing a dark shooter called In the Flesh. Over time, the idea behind that game turned into a less scary and much lighter Serious Sam.
One of the reasons behind that change was himself Serious Enginewhich the team developed independently as a cheaper solution than renting other people’s tools. Serious Engine was seriously advanced at the time, and among its main strengths was the possibility rendriranja large exteriors with loads of enemies.
It’s original Sam Stone looked like we know him – he was wearing a white T-shirt, jeans and red sneakers. But it’s interesting that he kept that design thanks to the audience who liked Sam’s look, so they did developers ultimately gave up on the idea of making it more realistic. It wasn’t until later that Sam’s sunglasses were removed to avoid similarities to Duke Nukem, but they returned in later installments when Duke fell into oblivion.
In Serious Sam: The First Encounter, we covered alien forces the hated enemy of Mental. The game was set in ancient Egypt and gave us a deadly arsenal, which included a minigun, a rocket launcher, a laser cannon, etc. Here, for the first time, we encountered iconic enemies such as headless kamikazes, which followed Sam in later games as well.
The game was set in ancient Egypt and gave us a deadly arsenal.
Serious Sam was originally launched for the PC platform. It received good reviews from reviewers and the audience and was the best-rated Croatian game on Metacritic for more than 14 years (average score 87). It was later surpassed by Croteam’s second title – The Talos Principle for PS4 with an average rating of 88. GameSpot declared Serious Sam the best PC game of 2001.
It was soon followed by a sequel, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, which is bundled with the first game also appeared on the Xbox consolewith significant changes in gameplayu. Since 2009, we also have HD remaster of the original game, which is available for all current platforms and has been updated with raytracing support, while the Classic version of the game is also available on Steam. Serious Sama can also be played in the VR edition on the PC platform.