New Blood Interactive and its long-standing members occupy an almost elder statesman position in the boomer shooter scene – the indie FPS milieu that celebrates design and aesthetic trends of the '90s and early 2000s. However, this status hardly came about overnight.
“Ten years ago we were just a few friends in my apartment trying to figure out what we wanted to do,” founder Dave Oshry told me in an interview about the studio's tenth anniversary and the release of an SDK and visuals remaster for its 2018 FPS ,Dusk. “There was never any plan other than hanging out with friends and trying to make games, which was the same thing I tried to do ten years ago. It just turns out that’s actually the way to stay together.”
“Most of the stuff we did in the first two years was never published,” Oshry said. Dusk's initial release in 2016 was a major turning point for the studio, tapping into an underserved audience of FPS enthusiasts. While the new millennium saw sporadic setbacks like Painkiller and id's Doom reboot was a huge success in 2016, Dusk actually cemented the indie scene as the home of the boomer shooter heading into the 2020s .
Creator David Szymanski said: “When we first showed Dusk at QuakeCon, I saw a lot of people come in and be really shocked. They asked themselves, 'Is this an old game? It looks like Quake!'” and being really interested in it.”
“We definitely haven’t seen it explode into this whole subgenre,” Oshry said. It's now harder than ever to stand out as a boomer shooter – the genre now has its own name on Steam – but New Blood's team members seem more excited about that than anything else.
“For years as a gamer, I was frustrated by the lack of games like this, new games like Doom or Quake,” Szymanski said. “Now there are too many for me to play, I can’t play all of them that come out.”
“I think: the more the merrier. “It's great that there are a bajillion games like this, why not?” Oshry said. Even in the more crowded indie shooter scene, New Blood's work still stands out: Dusk, Ultra killAnd In the midst of evil are unique FPS, while I'm excited about the immersive sims in the works Darkwood And Fallen aces.
