Before Doom, there was Dangerous Dave, and John Romero's 8-bit hero is getting a spiritual successor next week

Before Doom, there was Dangerous Dave, and John Romero’s 8-bit hero is getting a spiritual successor next week | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these RPG Cara Ellison, senior narrative designer on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 before Paradox switched developers, discusses her love of Troika’s original RPG: ‘Everyone on the team helped really make that maximum goth’ FPS Citing Halo, FEAR, and Half-Life 2 as inspirations, Sprawl: Zero waves goodbye to boomer shooters and heralds the arrival of the Millennial FPS RPG You’ve never heard of it, but a Russian studio made a fantasy take on original Fallout way back in 2001, and it honestly kind of rules RPG Why I love Diablo 2, Act 1 FPS A decade before Stalker, this obscure Ukrainian Quake clone was quietly breaking new ground for first-person shooters Games The best indie games on PC Action Desert Strike spiritual successor Cleared Hot’s next update brings better Steam Deck support and arcade missions, but I’m more excited about using my winch to slingshot missiles back at enemies: ‘I’ve been waiting months to work on this again’ FPS Doom: The Dark Ages director says the upcoming DLC is ‘basically like a sequel’: ‘It’s just ginormous’ Puzzle Devs behind GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and TimeSplitters are done with big shooters after getting burned by Embracer, so their next game is a Balatro-like twist on Scrabble—and you can try the demo now FPS If you love Marathon’s vectorheart style but not its PvP, get your aesthetic fix from the gorgeously overstimulating demo for this time trial FPS instead Action Just Cause dev co-founder says the studio got too big and ‘numbers focused,’ so he quit and made a $25 open world crime brawler FPS Occult deckbuilder The Killing Stone is introducing a ‘dynamic’ scare system originally considered for BioShock 2: ‘It’s very fun as a gamedev to be surprised by something in your own game’ RPG ‘We lost things such as physics in games:’ The dev behind my most anticipated RPG thinks players are craving more interactive games, not just ‘moving around in a static 3D environment’ FPS 10 years in the making, this total conversion based on Half-Life is every bit as ambitious as Black Mesa Adventure One of the strangest point ‘n’ click adventures of the ’90s is getting a modern ‘restoration’ for Steam, making it easily playable for the first time this century PopularNEW: PC Gamer Clips!MarathonArc RaidersBest PC gearQuizzes Games Action Before Doom, there was Dangerous Dave, and John Romero’s 8-bit hero is getting a spiritual successor next week News By Rick Lane published 8 March 2026 Haunted Lands is out March 10. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: alevgor) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter PC Gamer Get the PC Gamer Newsletter Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? Every Friday GamesRadar+ Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you’re going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them. 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From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter There is an almost fractal quality to the history of id Software, in that the closer you look at it, the more games seem to appear. The studio’s first official game is Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, but prior to that is a weird transition period where the creators of Doom were still partly tied to its previous employer, Softdisk.It was during this period that id Software’s four founders developed Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, a side-scrolling shooter released in late 1990. Sequel to 1988’s Dangerous Dave in the Deserted Pirate’s Hideout, which was created exclusively by John Romero, it’s generally regarded as the best in the series, notable for how it let you blast zombies into chunky gibs with your shotgun—a shocking display of violence that would soon be massively eclipsed by id Software’s first-person shooters.While Dave himself has long been consigned to the recycle bin of history, his spirit lives on. Haunted Lands is a spiritual successor to Dave’s 8-bit adventures, a passion project created by solo developer Alevgor. You may like id Software’s second FPS only brought in $5,000, and the studio might not have made Wolfenstein and Doom if the game hadn’t made a dev fall out of his chair: ‘That was just one of the craziest things in a videogame I’d ever seen’ Doom: The Dark Ages, the superior sequel in the rebooted FPS series (sorry, not sorry, Eternal), is now 67% off thanks to id Software’s 35th anniversary celebration Over 30 years since release, this classic PC platformer built with the tech that le