I hope this is not an out-of-season April Fool’s joke. In two days’ time, Hellgate: London will be relaunched in Steam. Or at least a form of its previous incarnations.

Hellgate: London was released back in October 2007, a game developed by the ex-Blizzard team including David Brevik. I had a lot of fond memories with the game even though it had a really rocky start.

I remember having bought the game on day one, eager to get into “London” and to witness hell breaking loose. The game was buggy back then. I have made some progress and within days (or hours?), they have to deploy a patch (was it 1.04?) that wiped off all the progress. I kept playing for quite a while. When was it? What was I doing back in October 2007?

To answer that question, I looked up World of Warcraft in Wikipedia.

The Burning Crusade was launched back in January 2007. I vividly remember introducing the game to my wife thanks to the beautiful blood elves being introduced in that expansion. That was after my wife has passed the Financial Risk Management examination. I was pretty much addicted to WoW and I would imagine playing Hellgate: London as a filler. Because by then, I might have well been leveling my “alts” in WoW. Or doing some mindless dailies.

What did I like about Hellgate: London?

In a strange way, the realism of venturing into a lifeless city (which is kind of the plot as the city was overrun by demons). There was danger everywhere (yup, lots of death). I got to control the left and right guns with the left and right mouse buttons. The big demons were scary. Their number could be overwhelming. And it was satisfying just to survive, perhaps with a few good loots as souvenirs.

They say third time is a charm. I sure hope so. The first time Hellgate: London was launched, it has failed. Then a Korean company bought that over and turned that into an MMO with microtransaction. That didn’t work well. Now, the same Korean company is reviving it into a single player game. I do not know how much of its former self still lives in this latest iteration. I will have to wait for two days and see if it is not an April Fool’s joke.

Back to the title of this entry. I am in the Discord channel of It Lurks Below, the latest game created by David Brevik. And I asked him how he feels of his game coming back to life through Steam.

And he responded as follows.

I’m pretty excited about it. I’m happy that people will be able to play it again and a new generation of gamers will get a chance to experience it, but I am not sure how it stacks up to what I made vs. the changes they made once it was made for Korea/Asia. I don’t know how grindy/mtx/etc it will be now. I’m still happy though!

Mr. Brevik has a point. Rest assured that I will report back in after I have experienced what at best would be a fragment of my fond past in two days’ time.