''Serious Sam'' is a

video game series This is a list of video game franchises, organized alphabetically. All entries include multiple video games, not counting ports or altered re-releases. 0–9 *''1080° Snowboarding'' *''1942'' *''3D Ultra Minigolf'' *'' 3-D Ultra Pinball'' *''7 ...

created and primarily developed by

Croteam Croteam is a Croatian video game developer based in Zagreb. The company was established by Davor Hunski, Damir Perović, Roman Ribarić and Dean Sekulić, four former classmates, in late August 1992. Croteam is best known for ''Serious Sam'', a ...

. It consists predominantly of

first-person shooter First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the pl ...

s. The series follows the advances of mercenary Sam "Serious" Stone against Mental, an extraterrestrial overlord who attempts to destroy humanity at various points in time. The first game, '' Serious Sam: The First Encounter'', was released for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

in March 2001. Several

spin-offs Spin-off may refer to: *Spin-off (media), a media work derived from an existing work *Corporate spin-off, a type of corporate action that forms a new company or entity * Government spin-off, civilian goods which are the result of military or gove ...

were developed by other developers, such as a

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provi ...

conversion of ''The First Encounter'' by InterActive Vision, '' Serious Sam: Next Encounter'' (on

GameCube The is a home video game console developed and released by Nintendo in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, and in PAL territories in 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 (1996), and predecessor of the Wii ...

and

PlayStation 2 The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October 2000, in Europe on 24 November 2000, and in Australia on 3 ...

) by

Climax Solent Climax Studios is a British video game developer based in Portsmouth that is best known for their work on the 2004 action role-playing game ''Sudeki'' and the 2007 and 2009 survival horror video games '' Silent Hill: Origins'' and '' Silent Hi ...

, and '' Serious Sam Advance'' (on

Game Boy Advance The (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld game console developed, manufactured and marketed by Nintendo as the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, in North America on June 11, 2001, in the PAL region on June 22, 2 ...

) by Climax London. All three were published by

Global Star Software Global Star Software was a Canadian video game publisher based in Mississauga. It was founded in 1995 by Craig McGauley and Damian Cristiani and operated alongside their Triad Distributors, which had been founded in 1993. Both companies were acqu ...

Development

Croteam created a proprietary engine for use in both '' Serious Sam: The First Encounter'' and '' Serious Sam: The Second Encounter''. At the time Croteam was making ''Serious Sam'', licensing other engines was costly (upwards of ), so they made their own from scratch, following the feature set of the first ''Doom'' engine, which simulated 3D spaces in 2D, and did not include up or down targeting. As they were creating their own, both ''

Duke Nukem 3D ''Duke Nukem 3D'' is a first-person shooter video game developed by 3D Realms. It is a sequel to the platform games ''Duke Nukem'' and ''Duke Nukem II'', published by 3D Realms. ''Duke Nukem 3D'' features the adventures of the titular Duke Nuke ...

'' (which added up-and-down freelook) and '' Quake'' (a fully 3D rendered environment) were released, requiring Croteam to incorporate these features into their engine for their game to be competitive. Development was further complicated when the first 3D accelerators were released, forcing Croteam to develop for hardware rendering over software. Recognizing they needed to bring something new to what other games were pushing at that time, Croteam decided that they would make their Serious Engine support extremely large environments, with virtual view distances of over a kilometre, physics support, and capable of rendering up to a hundred enemies on screen at a time, and do this on the processing power of what current low-end computers using the original

Pentium Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium processor from which the brand took its name was first released on March 22, 1993. After that, the Pentium II and Pe ...

CPUs could handle. The team devised ways of doing object path caching so that they only had to perform

collision detection Collision detection is the computational problem of detecting the intersection (Euclidean geometry), intersection of two or more objects. Collision detection is a classic issue of computational geometry and has applications in various computing ...

with environmental features every few seconds rather than every cycle. Collision detection was also sped up by approximating the environment with spheres rather than boxes. This also enabled them to have multidirection gravity which was used for some of the game's secret areas. Serious Engine 1 is available as open-source software. A more powerful iteration of the Serious Engine was developed for use in ''

Serious Sam 2 ''Serious Sam 2'' is a first-person shooter video game released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox and the sequel to the 2001 video game ''Serious Sam''. It was developed by Croteam and was released on 11 October 2005. The game was initially publish ...

'' and is known as Serious Engine 2. It supports many features of modern GPUs such as pixel and vertex shaders, HDR, bloom and parallax mapping. Serious Engine 3 was used in '' Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter'' and '' Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter''. It includes detailed shading, and enemies are re-modelled to look more realistic. This engine is also being developed to harness the full capacity of HDR and high definition mapping. An updated version, Serious Engine 3.5, is used in ''Serious Sam 3''. Serious Sam is voiced by John J. Dick. After the release of both HD remakes of the original ''Serious Sam'' episodes, Devolver Digital re-released both classic encounters in 2010 and ''

Development

Games

Main series

Spin-offs

Notes

References

External links