A Slash From The Past: Shadow Warrior Free On Steam

Everyone, Flying Wild Hog is remaking Shadow Warrior! Upon hearing that, a decent number of you probably tilted your heads so hard that confused dogs could hear and replied, "What's a Shadow Warrior?" That's understandable. The '90s were 7,000 years ago, after all. But maybe you saw the reboot's teaser trailer and went on a needlessly gruesome excitement rampage, or perhaps Hard Reset's uniquely incoherent brand of robo-shootyblasting won you over. Either way, background is always nice, even when it's kinda littered with festering piles of racism and misogyny. That's why Devolver Digital saw fit to dust off the original Shadow Warrior and slice its price tag to confetti. Oh, and thanks to a fairly gigantic promotional slip-up, they've just decided to make it free "forever".

For the uninitiated, the first Shadow Warrior was a first-person shooter/slasher from 3D Realms. Basically, think Duke Nukem with less class and more katanas, and you'll be on the right track. As you may have surmised from me saying it three sentences ago, it's now totally, 100 percent free. Here's why:

"This morning we launched a promotion on Facebook where fans of Shadow Warrior could like the new Facebook page and receive a Steam key for Shadow Warrior Classic, the original version of the game, for free. As luck would have it some folks were able to sidestep some of the security and download the Steam keys we had set aside for this promotion - all 50,000 of them. Whoops."

Fans, meanwhile, weren't terribly pleased, and "free" keys had their price tags surgically reattached in the Internet's seedier back alleys. Devolver, then, saw only one way to circumvent certain catastrophe: make Shadow Warrior free until the ocean swallows the Earth and a black hole sucks up the galaxy like screaming spaghetti. Or, you know, until they don't have the license anymore.

So yes, it's now free for anyone on Steam. Pretty neat, huh? Go, play, separate heads from their beloved bodies - do whatever you want. Just don't pay for it. Otherwise, there will be consequences.