Antkill

Antkill was released for DOS in 1992 by Neurosport, a small American shareware outfit. It is filed as an RPG, but what you actually get is a very plain first-person dungeon crawl running on the studio's in-house engine, which they called VirtualDungeon.

The strangest and most interesting thing about it is how it looks. The underground is drawn in hard wireframe 3D, so corridors and creatures alike come across as folded out of paper — abstract, angular, untextured. Above ground there is a desert dotted with anthill openings you descend through, and below waits a population of giant ants and other oversized arthropods. The title describes the content precisely: you walk, and you hit insects.

Underneath that technical shell there is remarkably little game. Antkill is essentially a reskin of an earlier title from the same studio in which the enemies were dragons and the setting a castle; the monsters and scenery were swapped, the systems left alone. Both were given away free as bait for a paid dungeon the authors sold by mail order, and it shows. There is no story, no dialogue, no quests and no economy — just movement through corridors and hack-and-slash that repeats itself quickly.

One period curiosity deserves a mention: the game shipped with a library capable of playing recorded human speech through the PC speaker, so Antkill occasionally talks to you. In 1992 that was a party trick; today it is mostly endearing.

As an RPG it cannot be recommended, being far too thin and far too short. Its value is as a demonstration of what one person could do with a homemade 3D engine in the years before Wolfenstein, and as evidence of how shareware worked as advertising. On oldgame.cz it starts straight in the browser, so the curiosity takes about a minute to satisfy.