When people talk about the experience of playing early first-person shooters on home computers in the 90s, The Fortress Of Dr. Radiaki hardly comes up in conversation — and for pretty good reason.
It's nowhere near the same quality as its genre-defining contemporaries like Doom or Wolfenstein 3D, instead being a fairly transparent attempt at riding on the coattails of other more successful games. Arguably, because of this, history has mostly forgotten the title, with only those who have had the misfortune to play it themselves or to experience it secondhand through Let's Play and other YouTube videos remembering its bizarre B-movie plot and frustrating enemies and controls.
Now, though, thanks to the digital distributor ZOOM, it seems that could all be about to change, as over the weekend, it announced that it had rereleased the infamous The Fortress of Dr. Radiaki on its storefront. Reactions to the news were exactly as you'd expect, with many asking "Why Radiaki of all things?" while expressing interest in how the company had managed to untangle the rights all these years later.
The Fortress of Dr. Radiaki came out in 1994 and was the product of a collaboration between two developers Future Visionary Inc. and Maelstrom Software, with another company called Merit Studios handling its publishing. As things stand, all three companies no longer exist, so we can imagine sifting through the rights to find out who still owns it wasn't exactly easy-going.
If you fancy giving the game a go yourself, here's the description of it from the store page:
"The Fortress of Dr. Radiaki is a thrilling first-person shooter adventure mixing carnage with a cutting edge sense of humor. You will confront scores of different adversaries, including sword wielding samurai, stealthy ninja warriors, robots with toasters for heads, mutated alligators and more. You must use all your wits to find your way through the cavernous fortress and defeat the Machiavellian designs of the horribly twisted Dr. Radiaki!"
You can buy it now for $5.99 on ZOOM for PC, though bear in mind, your mileage may vary depending on how much you enjoy playing flawed and frustrating games from the past.