Serious Sam
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Serious Sam | |
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Genre(s) | First-person shooter |
Developer(s) | Croteam[a] |
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First release | Serious Sam: The First Encounter 21 March 2001 |
Latest release | Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope 20 September 2017 |
Serious Sam is a video game series created and developed by Croteam. The series started on Microsoft Windows and has been released on a number of different platforms, including the Xbox, Xbox 360, Palm OS, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, GameCube and Stadia.
Direct spin-offs of the first title in the Serious Sam series were created for PlayStation 2, GameCube and Game Boy Advance by Climax Solent and for Palm OS by InterActive Vision. All of these spin-offs were published by Global Star Software.
The series follows the adventures of protagonist Sam "Serious" Stone and his fight against the forces of the notorious extraterrestrial overlord Mental who seeks to destroy humanity.
Development
Croteam created a proprietary engine for use in both Serious Sam: The First Encounter and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. At the time Croteam was making Serious Sam, licensing other engines was costly (upwards of US$1 million), so they made their own from scratch, following the feature set of the first Doom engine, which simulated 3D spaces in 2D, and did not include up or down targeting. As they were creating their own, both Duke Nukem 3D (which added up-and-down freelook) and Quake (a fully 3D rendered environment) were released, requiring Croteam to incorporate these features into their engine for their game to be competitive. Development was further complicated when the first 3D accelerators were released, forcing Croteam to develop for hardware rendering over software.[1] Recognizing they needed to bring something new to what other games were pushing at that time, Croteam decided that they would make their Serious Engine support extremely large environments, with virtual view distances of over a kilometre, physics support, and capable of rendering up to a hundred enemies on screen at a time, and do this on the processing power of what current low-end computers using the original Pentium CPUs could handle.[1] The team devised ways of doing object path caching so that they only had to perform collision detection with environmental features every few seconds rather than every cycle. Collision detection was also sped up by approximating the environment with spheres rather than boxes. This also enabled them to have multidirection gravity which was used for some of the game's secret areas.[1]
Serious Engine 1 is available as open-source software.[2] A more powerful iteration of the Serious Engine was developed for use in Serious Sam 2 and is known as Serious Engine 2. It supports many features of modern GPUs such as pixel and vertex shaders, HDR, bloom and parallax mapping. Serious Engine 3 was used in Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter. It includes detailed shading, and enemies are re-modelled to look more realistic. This engine is also being developed to harness the full capacity of HDR and high definition mapping. An updated version, Serious Engine 3.5, is used in Serious Sam 3.
Serious Sam is voiced by John J. Dick.[3]
After the release of both HD remakes of the original Serious Sam episodes, Devolver Digital re-released both classic encounters in 2010 and Serious Sam 2 in 2011.
Games
Main series
Title | Details |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2001–2002 – Windows 2001 – Palm OS 2002 – Xbox |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2005 – Windows, Xbox |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2011 – Windows 2012 – Mac OS X, Xbox 360, Linux 2014 – PlayStation 3 |
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Proposed release date:
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Proposed system release: 2020 – Windows, Stadia |
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Spin-offs
Title | Details |
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Original release dates: |
Release years by system: 2004 – GameCube, PlayStation 2 |
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Original release dates: |
Release years by system: 2004 – Game Boy Advance |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2011 – Microsoft Windows 2013 – Xbox 360 (XXL) |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2011 – Android, iOS 2012 – Windows |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2011 – Windows |
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Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2012 – Windows |
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Serious Sam's Bogus Detour Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2017 – Windows, Linux |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2017 – Windows |
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Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2018 – Windows, Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One |
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Serious Sam: Tormental Original release date:
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Release years by system: 2019 – Windows |
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Notes
- ^ Non-mainline entires were developed by InterActive Vision, Climax Solent, Climax London, Mommy's Best Games, Be-Rad Entertainment, Vlambeer, Eric Ruth Games, Crackshell, Binx Interactive, and Gungrounds
References
- ^ a b c Mosettig, Nikola; Manansala, Lee (3 October 2018). "War Stories: Serious Sam almost didn't happen—until crates saved the day". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 3 October 2018. Retrieved 3 October 2018.
- ^ "Serious Sam's Serious Engine source code released". Croteam. 11 March 2016. Archived from the original on 12 March 2016. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
- ^ Martin, Joe (12 August 2009). "Serious Sam voice actor for hire to fans". Bit-Tech.
- ^ "Serious Sam: The First Encounter". GameSpot. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "15th anniversary of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter". Croteam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter". Steam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter". Steam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter". Steam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Serious Sam VR: The Second Encounter". Steam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Serious Sam Classics: Revolution". Steam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Serious Sam 2". Croteam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Serious Sam 3: BFE". Croteam. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ https://store.steampowered.com/app/272620/Serious_Sams_Bogus_Detour/