WHEN WE MADE…


Toby Draper, producer on Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, tells Space Marine Vince Pavey about Auroch Digital’s intense retro shooter before the pair go on another perilous mission across the galaxy


F 50 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2023


or just about as long as we’ve had video games, people have wanted to go on the power-trip of shooting at bad guys, and


as technology has gotten better, the first-person genre has only grown and mutated along with the appetites of those playing as designers experiment and iterate. While John Carmack, John Romero, and Tom Hall popularised the 3D Shooter with the fantastic Wolfenstein 3D and it’s even more superb follow up Doom, it’s through this process of evolution (for lack of a better term) that despite still being loads of fun, the best-selling shooters at the moment can often feel like they have very little in common with their own predecessors.


Over here at MCV/DEVELOP, we’re


thankful that much like the return of vinyl record collections and (ahem) niche video game magazines, there has in recent years been somewhat of a nostalgic resurgence of what is now often called the ‘boomer’ flavour of first-person shooter, in an attempt to scratch that specific sort of itch. Boltgun is one of those games, with labyrinthian levels, keys and secrets to collect, more guns than a person could feasibly carry at once, and hordes of foes to blast them with on your path to glory. What makes it stand apart from the rest of the revival shooter crowd, however, is that it’s also a licensed game.


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