Realms Deep 2020 is THE Digital Event for Fans of Retro “Boomer” Shooters

Despite having not played most of the iconic shooters of the 90s anywhere near their launch, I am a huge fan of retro shooters. If the enemies are flat pixels and the guns shoot nails, I am surprisingly all about it. To me, the catalyst of this massive wave of games that hearken back to the glory days of DOOM or Duke Nukem is DUSK, an extremely popular Quake-style game created by David Szymanski and published by New Blood Interactive. DUSK is one of my favorite PC experiences and that game created an insatiable hunger for more like it. From there we saw games like Ion Fury which carries forward the classic Build Engine and soon there will be Wrath: Aeon of Ruin which uses a modified version of the Quake Engine. Aside from these more popular entries, there are countless others and it feels like the latest from many of these developers will usher in a new era of retro-inspired greatness. Riding the wave is Realms Deep 2020, a digital event hosted by 3D Realms, featuring an incredible guest list and 20 new games to be announced.

The digital event occurs over the weekend (September 5th and 6th) and the action can be found at the 3D Realms Twitch channel. The two live streams will be starting at 11:00 am PT and go until 4:00 pm PT, meaning there are about ten hours or more of retro-inspired glory just on the official channel. Those looking to jump into the action can find many games on sale (Sep 3-7th) on Steam which will likely include several Early Access titles and demos. For example, many of the New Blood Interactive offerings like ULTRAKILL and Gloomwood have demos already but we do know that ULTRAKILL has officially hit Early Access with a large chunk of content ready for players. 

Unfortunately, the moment to moment schedule has yet to be updated on the Realms Deep website, at least as of this writing. Based on the guestlist we can expect to see an announcement of whatever John Romero has been working on, especially after the community excitement around his return to DOOM level-crafting in SIGIL, which is a pretty awesome wad file. We can also expect to see New Blood’s Dave Oshry, who we had as a guest on The Forever Classic Podcast, popup and talk about their latest games. It’s also interesting to see Cliff Bleszinski on the list as it seemed like he has left game design after LawBreakers but maybe he has teamed up with a studio to bring his mechanical expertise to a secret project. Another company to watch out for this weekend is Nightdive Studios who are famously working on a remake to System Shock; they also did incredible work modernizing the first two Turok games. Could Nightdive also have a surprise up their sleeve? There will also be a charity drive at some point that will benefit Child’s Play.

Regardless, anyone who enjoys blasting away baddies, rocking out to industrial guitars, or sneaking through Victorian sewers with a shotgun that definitely was a thing that existed and not a fictional weapon will want to keep up the Realms Deep 2020 Twitch coverage open all weekend long. 

More information, as well as merch and an eventual schedule are available on their website.