When gaming companies are bought out or close, where does all the code for their games go? Much of the time it is lost to time until an archaeologist happens to find it.

Shadow Warrior (1997) is a first-person shooter video game developed by 3D Realms and published by GT Interactive Software. The shareware version was released for the PC on May 13, 1997, while the full version was released on August 31, 1997. Shadow Warrior was developed using Ken Silverman’s Build engine and improved on 3D Realms’ previous Build engine game, Duke Nukem 3D. Mark Adams ported Shadow Warrior to Mac OS in August 1997.

The game’s improvements included introduction of true room-over-room situations, the use of 3D voxels instead of 2D sprites for weapons and usable inventory items, transparent water, climbable ladders, and assorted vehicles to drive (some armed with weapons). Although violent, the game had its own sense of humor and contained some sexual themes.

Enter Yoav and the current release of the game versions 1.0-1.2.

The Shadow Warrior (1997) code is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL (General Public License) version 2 or later. See GPL-2.0.TXT for the details.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This release is dedicated to the memory of Terence Colligan. Further known as Terry, he was the founder of Tenberry Software (previously Rational Systems). A notable product of this company for the time was DOS/4G, a DOS extender used for a myriad of 32-bit DOS programs, and games in particular. These include games made with the Build engine, Shadow Warrior being no exception.

Many thanks go to 3D Realms for digging up old materials found in this archive, including the Shadow Warrior source codes, later to be sent to Richard Gobeille and Evan Ramos, who further inspected such materials.

Additional thanks go to Evan for getting the ball rolling, Devolver Digital for their permission to release the old Shadow Warrior materials, and Ken Silverman for his consent to release the older Build Engine sources.

Further thanks go to Ken Silverman for open-sourcing the Build Engine on 2000, and to anybody involved in open-sourcing Shadow Warrior on 2005. This includes Frank Maddin (one of the original Shadow Warrior programmers) for digging up the sources and assisting with their release, Jonathon Fowler (responsible for the JonoF ports of Build, Duke3D and SW) using his experience for technical assistance, Charlie Wiederhold for preparing the sources for release and 3D Realms for paving the way.

Finally, thanks to all fans of 3D Realms, Devolver Digital, General Arcade, Shadow Warrior and the Build engine!

The code and documentation is available on GitLab.

Do you like classic gaming or the ability to review classic game code? Let us know in the comments.