Forsaken

About Forsaken

Forsaken (1998) is Probe Entertainment's Descent-style 3D tunnel shooter, set on a dead future Earth and famed for coloured lighting so impressive it became a graphics card benchmark.

Forsaken in Depth

In 2113 a shockwave from a scientific accident has wiped out all life on Earth. In the PC and PlayStation versions the player is a scavenger hunting the planet's lost treasure, while in the Nintendo 64 release the goal is to kill the looters seeking it. In the style of Descent, the player steers a vehicle with full 3D movement through tunnels, with similar weapons and power-ups and missiles and mines counted as secondary weapons, plus elements borrowed from Quake. Its 22 missions ask the player to destroy every enemy ship in a maze of tunnels or hit targets such as a time limit or a percentage of enemies killed, and, as in Star Fox 64, different paths open depending on which targets are met.

There are four difficulty settings, easy, normal, hard and total mayhem, each with tougher enemies and less ammunition; the challenge was so severe that Acclaim released a patch that cut the difficulty dramatically. Multiplayer offers Free for All, Team Game, Capture the Flag, Flag Chase, Bounty Hunt and Team Bounty Hunt, each with sub-options, for up to 16 players on PC, four on Nintendo 64, where up to three computer players can join, and two on PlayStation. The PC version can also record demos. Every version's real-time coloured lighting drew praise, N64 Magazine likening heated battles to a lava lamp.

Making Forsaken

Probe Entertainment developed it between 1996 and 1998 under Fergus McGovern, as Probe was merged into its parent Acclaim and Microsoft's DirectX was starting to dominate PC development; the project was heavily driven by technology from the start. Iguana UK ported it to the Nintendo 64 as Forsaken 64 the same year. Reviews were favourable on all platforms. AllGame gave the PC version four and a half stars, calling its gameplay uninventive but praising "utterly impressive technical savvy", its lighting, frame rates, explosions and missile smoke trails, though the difficulty was sometimes considered excessive. Staff at Acclaim Studios Teesside planned a sequel that was scrapped when the studio closed in 2002.