Fate

Fate is an oddity: a first-person shooter from 1996 that was never officially released. It was built on the Build engine, the same technology that powered Duke Nukem 3D, and promised an unusual blend of science fiction and fantasy. Then its publisher went bankrupt that very year and dragged the unfinished project down with it. All that survives is a playable demo of four levels — and that is exactly what you can try here.

The story takes place on a distant planet where human colonists clash with aggressive natives who wield magic. That premise drives the game's main appeal: sorcery set against technology, futuristic settings mixed with fantasy imagery. In the mid-nineties, when the market was flooded with Doom-style shooters full of soldiers and demons, it was a refreshing direction — which makes the outcome all the more of a pity.

The Build engine was famous in its day for interactive, believably layered environments, and the four surviving levels hint at what the team wanted to do with it. It is just as obvious that nobody ever finished the job: the balance was never tuned, the content ends right as you settle in, and many ideas remain only sketched out.

Is it worth playing? As a full game, no — it is a fragment. As a piece of gaming archaeology, absolutely: you rarely get to walk through a game that vanished before it could exist and guess at what it might have become. Fans of the Build era of shooters will also enjoy the strange sensation of familiar technology dressed in unfamiliar scenery.

The Fate demo runs on oldgame.cz directly in your browser, nothing to install.