If there’s anything wrong with PC gaming these days, it’s that it’s way too easy. Steam Collections? Automated driver updates? Graphical user interfaces? Pah! Honestly, if a PC game doesn’t require a Sound Blaster 16 card and arrives on 25 floppy disks, I don’t want to know. Fortunately, there is one developer who gets it. Vblank Entertainment brings Retro city disaster—its homage to 8-bit games and Grand Theft Auto-over to the best gaming operating system of all time: MS-DOS.
Yes, the operating system that was released all the way back in 1981 is getting a brand new(ish) game. Retro City Rampage 486 is a port of Retro City Rampage DX, an enhanced version of the game featuring a story mode, arcade challenges, and free roaming. But before you get too excited, it’s best to check those system requirements. You need an Intel 486, a whopping 3.7 MB hard drive space and 4 MB RAM to get started.
Pretty steep, I know, but on the bright side if you already own a copy of the Windows or Mac version of Retro city disasteryou can pick up the new gate for free.
Interestingly, MS-DOS isn’t the only older platform Vblank has ported Retro city disaster until. In 2013, the developer brought a prototype version of the game to the NES, which was promised to be “100% hardware accurate” to the specifications of Nintendo’s first home console. That proved to be quite a challenge, as the NES only had 10 KB of RAM, 32 KB of program ROM, 256 KB of background graphics ROM, and 4 KB of sprite graphics ROM.
While the MS-DOS version isn’t nearly as limited in terms of resources, it remains to be seen what corners have been cut to get the game up and running. Unfortunately, Retro City Rampage 486 hasn’t been given a release date, but that should buy us some time to dig out an old 486 (or boot up DOSBox) and refresh those command-line installs.