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Yesterday was an exciting day @E3 due to many big titles being announced, and it was surely exciting for us at Croteam! We revealed our VR title – Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope – during the Youtube Gaming Live Show (hosted by Geoff Keighley) as well as at PC Gaming Event (sponsored by AMD) that happened later on, where you could see our beautiful devs Ante and Nika explaining what SSVR is all about.

We are also aware that many of you expected to learn more about Serious Sam 4, and after the reveal of SSVR, you wondered what happened to it… Rest assured, we are still working very hard on it and it’s still our prime goal, just like we said it on Twitter.

Just to be clear, Serious Sam VR is a fun separate side project, we are still working hard on Serious Sam 4 as our prime goal. Be patient!

— Croteam (@Croteam) June 13, 2016

And while we are here, let’s do short AMA (with ourselves, if that counts as AMA?) on this latest installment of your favorite hero saga:

WHY SERIOUS SAM VR?
Virtual reality technology has been made available to devs for quite some time now (and recently to the general public as well), and we are very excited about it. We know these are still the early days, but the potential is there, and unlike some other hardware gimmicks that came out in recent years, we are pretty sure this one will stick and make a tremendous impact on the gaming world. And our serious game seemed like a perfect for VR, but more on that below!

HOW BIG IS THIS GAME GOING TO BE?
It will be a few levels, and it likely won’t have the whole progression functionality in it’s Early Access form. We’ll add more levels and features as we wrap them up, until we have a number we’re happy with. There is no precise number of levels once we say it’s ‘complete’, but it will almost certainly be more than double the starting number of levels.

CAN I MOVE IN THIS GAME?
The game will be room scale in the sense that you can walk all over your entire playspace, which will allow you to dodge projectiles or change your position in relation to enemies a bit. Moving around a lot won’t be that important for the core gameplay experience, otherwise the game wouldn’t work well with small playspaces, so it will more often than not be easier or faster to just shoot the incoming projectiles.

WHY ANOTHER WAVESHOOTER?
Because we tried them all, and not one stood up from the crowd. Trust us, this is probably the best thing regarding such games at this very moment, and we expect it to totally rock once it’s out on Steam Early Access this summer.

WHAT’S THE PRICE TAG?
We are still debating this, hard to say anything at this point. There is a REDDIT thread here discussing the value of VR games, so feel free to pitch in and add your 2C https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4nwfdm/z/d47q9s9

HTC VIVE? OCULUS? PLAYSTATION VR?
So far we have integrated support for HTC Vive and Oculus into an early build, and we have support from both companies. The game requires tracked controllers though, and it won’t be available to play without them, so keep that in mind. We are also seeing great support from great guys at Sony who are interested in bringing this title to PlayStation 4 as well, so things are looking bright!

Stay tuned for more news on Serious Sam VR as our boys and girls on the field are getting ready to answer some serious questions from the press, and enjoy these screenshots which honestly, still don’t do justice to experiencing it with a headset!

Yes, it’s finally official after being announced @E3- our latest baby that will have it’s debut on Steam Early Access this summer is a full-fledged VR title called Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope. You didn’t see that one coming, did you? 😉

So, all you boys and girls who have been filling Sam’s shoes for years will now get a chance to do it FOR REAL (or as real as it gets)! Sam returns in his first ever VR adventure to dual wield an overwhelming amount of explosive ordinance and battle Mental’s relentless hordes. The Earth Defense Force is crumbling under the crushing offensive of Mental and his legions of savage warriors and beasts. Now the galaxy’s last hope must battle from planet to planet – piling up and upgrading his arsenal along the way – and lay waste to massive alien swarms under Mental’s control… All in first-person, all in virtual reality!

We already know you are gonna love this one when it comes out, but in the meantime, here is a short teaser to make you drool 😉

Admit it, you always wanted to dress up like Serious Sam? Never had the guts? Or simply a proper t-shirt?

WELL NOW YOU CAN! We proudly present you – Croteam Merchandise Store – ta dam!

Navigate to merch.croteam.com and indulge yourself, you know you want it!   🙂

“For us? You really shouldn’t have… -I love you, guys! – The pleasure is mine. -No, it’s all mine. -No. Mine.”

“Amazing! Exquisite! Huge!” were some of the superlatives the organizer of the Reboot Develop 2016 used to describe his conference. And guess what? It was all of that – and more. Three sunny days in beautiful Split, more than 80 speakers, 800 attendees, and six awards:

• Visual Excellence – Shadows of War (TRI.G)
• Outstanding Gameplay – Qube 2 (Toxic Games)
• Special Selection – Morning Men (Pixel Federation)
• Game of the Year – Qube 2 (Toxic Games)
• Hero Award – Charles Cecil
• Street Hero Award – Croteam

We’d like to congratulate everybody that won, console everybody who was nominated but didn’t win, but most of all – we are going to brag about our award, the Street Hero!

The award was introduced just this year and came as quite a surprise (that’s why we are sporting our street smarts at the awards ceremony and not wearing tuxedos). Initially we thought it was for eating the most at the hotel bar or winning the Develop football cup (yup! It was Croteam), but we got separate awards for those achievements. An extra charge at the hotel bill for the first one, and a nice golden cup for the second one.

Apparently, Street Hero has something to do with being a cool regional developer and an all-around nice studio. And that’s us, in a nutshell. Tnx, Reboot! See you next year.

If you remember that legendary Old Man Murray interview Croteam did 16 years ago, you’ll be glad to hear crates finally made it in Serious Sam game! Even if only in 2D…

#BogusDetour
Showcasing some breakables for Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour
sometimes the crates contain ammo pic.twitter.com/9UwCasp3TZ

— Crackshell (@RealCrackshell) March 29, 2016

Thanks to our friend Icculus, Serious Engine 1 source code is now available for Linux and Mac OS X.

“Hey @Croteam, welcome Serious Engine 1 back to Linux and Mac OS X.”

Here is the first screenshot of Serious Engine on Linux.

*** Of course, this was an April Fools’ joke. Serious Sam 4 is still on it’s way and being worked on by our core team. Stay tuned for more info! ***

That’s it, boys and girls, it’s done. We cancelled production of Serious Sam 4. No more Sam 4. Nada. Niente. Instead, we decided to go straight to Serious Sam 5.

Reasons, you might ask?

Well, we were so much under the pressure from our publisher, fans, friends, dentists, lawyers, neighbours and people we occasionally meet in elevator to deliver best Serious Sam game EVER, that we simply realized we couldn’t fill shoes that big and if we want to make a really good game, we need to let it go, and start from a scratch. Too bad, because story that Jonas and Verena wrote was so awesome, it took Sam to two European famous countries where he’s never been before…)

We do have one screenshot from abandoned SS4, but it had to be blurred for security reasons.

Serious Sam 5 will continue where never-released-and-prematurely-ended Serious Sam 4 left off, and it will showcase the power of new and improved Serious Engine 5, which can now render billions of square feet of sand with no noticeable dropout in frames per second.

Here are first three screenshots from the newly-started production of Serious Sam 5. This is the setting we are most comfortable with, we know how to do this properly.

Back in the day, at the very beginning of the new millennium, Croteam was a bunch of young 20-something guys who all shared the same dream – to develop most intense, hectic and fun shooter ever. Nowadays most of us are in our late thirties or early forties, have families,  and admittedly, don’t play games as much as we’d want to. But one thing we still share – our desire and passion for making best and most fun games ever. And of course, that same dream is still here, as vivid and real as it gets.

But how did it begin?

Our first game was released on Commodore Amiga in 1994. Only two years later, and we could see the age of Amiga was over, and it’s time to move one cause the new king came to town – Windows PC. So we decided to switch to PC gaming. The game we all loved and adored at the time was DOOM. We wanted to make something even crazier, but a bit light-hearted. But 3D engines at the time were so expensive, that a group of students couldn’t afford one. So we came up with the plan to create our own 3D engine, which would power our own game and which we could license to other developers as well.

Fast-forward several years of hard work, and in summer of early 2000 we finally burned alpha copies of TFE on CD’s and mailed them (yes, mailed by POST, not emailed) with an extensive game design document, printed in full color on deluxe paper, towards addresses of 30 biggest publishers worldwide. We thought the game was great, we loved it, we were so confident it’s gonna be a huge hit, so all that was left was to wait for a reply from those guys, and then pick the best proposal.

Out of 30 submissions, two letters returned. One said “No, thank you”, the other “Thank you, but no”. So, with no certain future and weakened morale, we decided we’ll go our separate ways, but before we split, we agreed to put a demo on the internet, to showcase our engine and what we’ve worked so hard on for the past few years.

In May 2000, public test 1 was released. And it blew up the internet (sorry Kim, we were first). It quickly became the most downloaded demo of that summer and landed us the contract with Gathering of Developers, a Texas-based company led by Mike Wilson and Harry Miller, among others.

After receiving hundreds of emails per week from gamers all over the world who loved the demo, with our batteries fully replenished and secured funding from GoD, we went on to finish our first Serious Sam game. To be honest, The First Encounter was (and still is) one of our dearest games, in which we poured our hearts, soul, sweat, and tears. It took us years to develop it, but on 21st of March 2001, the wait was finally over, our baby was released in stores worldwide. It had a great reception, everyone loved the crazy over-the-top gameplay combined with beautiful visual and audio presentation, and we were really relieved once first (positive) comments started pouring in. And best of all, it won Gamespot’s prestigious Game of the Year award, as well as numerous other awards and praises from the gaming press and community.

Concept vs. final box art

15 years later, it’s great to see our first baby still has a very strong following, mostly thanks to 2009 Steam HD reissue, published by Mike and Harry again, this time at the helm of Devolver Digital, probably the best publisher in the world.

In light of this anniversary, we asked our veterans to say a word or two:

“When I joined Croteam, the name Serious Sam was already there. And when I first heard it, I thought – God, we need to change it ASAP! I mean, who would buy game with such a name?! They convinced me to give it a rest for few months, and it eventually sunk in. Later, I was told that once our CEO Roman came up with that name, nobody liked it at first or believed in it. But Roman was so confident that in the end we all accepted it. Thanks God!”

Damjan Mravunac, Music composer/SFX designer/lead beta-tester for SS:TFE

“Late in Serious Sam development, while we were rushing to meet self-imposed deadlines, I was banned from testing the game (actually from reporting bugs) as I found “to many critical bugs” for programmers to fix.  There are 2 funny moments I remember:

Me: Hm, you can kill Ugh-Zan with a single bullet from colt if you shoot him RIGHT after he appears!
Guys: grhmspp…. told you not to test the game!!

Me: guys! shouldn’t Bomberman explode when I kill him?
Guys: !@#$#%^%^%^%^@#!!@ you are banned from testing the game!”

Admir Elezovic, 3D/2D artist, beta-tester for SS:TFE

“I joined Croteam after they made game Football Glory and started working on 3D engine wanting to make Doom-alike first person shooter, then working title “In The Flesh”. They needed someone to make levels in their newly created Serious Editor. Having made some simple games on ZX Spectrum and having an interest in making them I was more than willing to fill that role. I experimented with different environments and made more than 60 levels of various themes and sizes (well, I had enough time, guys were working on the engine for about 5 years).
I remember one of those levels in, particular, It was called Karnak. It was too big for capabilities of computers in those times, we couldn’t fix performance on it so we cut two-fifths out of it and they become two of the biggest levels of the Serious Sam: First Encounter, Karnak and Luxor. Imagine how that original Karnak level was big in size! We always dreamed big and I think we still do. Some of those dreams coming true you will be able to see in Serious Sam 4!”

Davor Tomicic, Level/Gameplay designer for SS:TFE

And for all of you Serious Sam fans and aficionados that have been here with us from the start, here is a little thank you in a form of artwork (some previously unreleased) that we managed to dig out of our archives.

Hey! We are working so hard on Serious Sam 4, that we almost forgot it’s been 15 years since we first launched Serious Sam: The First Encounter! Can you believe it? Neither can we, but we are still here, Sam is still here, and most importantly, you are still here. So let’s celebrate this together: in light of this anniversary which is taking place on 21st of March, we prepared trading cards for both Serious Sam HD First and Second Encounter. Now all you boys and girls can go back playing these classic games and get your shiny cards, you know you deserve them!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/41000/

Certain titles from Serious Sam Series are on sale right now on Steam. For more info you can check out here.

Offer ends on March 19^th for Serious Sam 2 and on March 21^st for other Sam titles.

Following the recent release of source code for Serious Engine v.1.10, our good friend Ryan C. Gordon a.k.a. Icculus contacted us regarding his Linux work: “Just dropped Croteam an email to ask if my Linux work can be published too. I’ll report back.”

Back in 2002 he made ports for Serious Sam The First and The Second Encounter for Linux. Here’s what he said: http://www.tek.no/artikler/ryan_c_gordon_and_michael_simms/68450/2

We were thrilled with his idea, so we gave him a big thumbs up! Stay tuned!

Hey guys, today we have a surprise for you. We’re releasing the source code for Serious Engine v1.10! It’s the very same engine that we used for Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter and The Second Encounter.

This month we’ll be celebrating Serious Sam’s 15th anniversary and we’re all feeling very nostalgic. Croteam’s Vyacheslav Nikitenko, who worked on the source code and prepared Serious Engine v.1.10 for this release, had this to say:

“Historically, this version of Serious Engine is very important for Croteam and for me personally. I created several mods for Serious Sam back in the day, before even starting the work on the source code, and it was a great tool for learning.

And it’s even better today! Obviously, Serious Engine v1.10 won’t produce top-notch graphics, but the source code is very well commented, easy to modify, and there are lots of user generated mods out there. This version has everything you need to build your own game – or just experiment.

If you’re looking to get started, just download the files from GitHub and head over to SeriousZone, it has a great community and lots of tutorials.”

You can grab the files here:

https://github.com/Croteam-official/Serious-Engine