Serious Sam: The First Encounter

Serious Sam: The First Encounter's gameplay consists almost entirely of the player attempting to defeat dozens of enemies at a time in wide-open arena-like areas and thus is relatively simple. The game's story establishes the reasons and methods for how the player travels from chapter to chapter through the game's menu system called NETRISCA. Enemies spawn frequently and attack in large waves from across the game map, and the player is intended to dodge their projectiles and charges by jumping and strafing rather than by taking cover. Health and armor are non-regenerative on all difficulty levels except for the easiest and instead are replenished with the health and armor packs which are littered throughout the game. Available health is represented by a percentage number on the screen. The combat is high-paced and frenetic: The levels typically consist of a series of elaborate arenas, in which the player will defeat a set number of re-spawning enemies before proceeding to the next. Enemies consist of soldiers with rocket launchers, charging bulls, gigantic robots that fire lasers and rockets, and shrieking suicide bombers without heads.

The player can carry a number of weapons, including shotguns, a minigun, a rocket launcher, a quad laser gun, and a cannon. Ammunition is scattered across levels that the player must pick up, but players are also suggested to explore the level's environments to find secret items including more health, ammo, and weapons that are obtainable regularly in later levels. Unfortunately, some items are trapped and may trigger a spawn of more enemies.

The game features cooperative gameplay through a split-screen mode and via the internet.

In ancient times, Earth was involved in a massive conflict between Mental, an evil extraterrestrial being who wants to rule the universe, and the Sirians, a technologically advanced sentient alien race that left many of its artefacts to be discovered by humanity. In the 22nd century, Mental and his army of grotesquely twisted monsters return to Earth intending to destroy humanity. The humans are quickly overwhelmed and driven back to Earth. As a last resort, humanity uses the "Time-Lock". This mysterious Sirian artefact contains the power to transport a single person back to a chosen point in time. Because of his bravery in fighting these monsters, Sam "Serious" Stone is chosen to use the Time-Lock in hopes that he will defeat Mental and change the course of history. As the game opens, Sam appears in Egypt. He travels from one Egyptian monument to the next, fighting against the monsters Mental sent after him along the way. During Sam's journey, Sam is able to find and activate a hidden Sirian communicator in the shape of an obelisk located in Luxor, which summons a Sirian starship to Earth from deep space. Sam rushes to the Great Pyramids of Giza in order to rendezvous with the starship, only to be cornered by Mental's general, Ugh Zan III. After defeating the giant, Sam then teleports himself onto the starship. While Sam is aboard the "SSS Centerprice", he leaves a phone message to Mental telling him that "he has a special delivery package for him" and sets a course to Sirius, the Sirian homeworld. The story continues in The Second Encounter.

Croteam began developing the game in 1996 formally titled In the Flesh. It was coined to be a first-person shooter with a dark and horror setting. They've opted to develop their own engine for the game due to licensing costs for other engines at the time being too high. Over time, the tone of the game changed from its dark horror to a bright and colorful setting, and began developing Serious Sam. Croteam did not have a way to playtest the game on as many systems as possible to fully optimize the game, so they opted to release public demos in 2000 on Gamespy to have players try out builds to better improve the game.[9] Sam's voice actor John J. Dick was one of the players to try out the public demo, and after writing to Croteam expressing his interest to help voice the character for the English release of the game, he was officially hired to voice the titular character since then.[10]

Croteam created their own engine for use in both The First Encounter and The Second Encounter. Named the "Serious Engine", it is designed to cope with extremely large view distances and massive numbers of models by implementing level of detail rendering. Most contemporary FPS engines were developed for a limited draw distance and only a few animating models (i.e. enemies) on screen at a time. The Serious Engine is very efficient, capable of maintaining dozens of moving enemies (often stampedes) and enormous enemies, even on a modest system challenging the well known id Tech, Unreal Engine or Source engines. The "Serious Engine" can render through both Direct3D or OpenGL and, while it does not support pixel or vertex shaders, it is optimized for Direct3D 7's hardware transformation, clipping and lighting. The "Serious Engine" is available for licensing from Croteam.[11]

A more powerful iteration of the "Serious Engine" was developed for use in Serious Sam 2 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 completely remodeled 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: BFE.

The latest version is the Serious Engine 4, which Croteam used in their most recent game, The Talos Principle.

In March 2016, Croteam released Serious Engine v1.10 as free and open source software on GitHub under the GNU General Public License v2.[12][13]

On 12 November 2002, both The First Encounter and The Second Encounter were combined into one game and ported to the Xbox titled Serious Sam. The game had notable differences from the PC counterparts, including the model of Sam being changed from the model of The First Encounter to a more cartoon style Sam, removing the shades to make him look less like Duke Nukem and more like he does today.

The Xbox version includes all of the levels from both PC games, though some were modified due to the memory constraints of the Xbox console. As a result, the levels were made smaller by removing the areas outside of the playing area, and some larger levels were split into two smaller ones. Unlike the PC versions where the player can walk almost infinitely away from the playing area, the game restricts them from going too far.

The gameplay was given a more arcade touch. A life system was implemented into the single-player game making use of the score. The player is granted a new life for every 100,000 points, which allows respawning at the place of death rather than at a save point. Combo points were added for killing multiple enemies at the same time, which allows a faster increase in the player's score.

Further changes to the game include the addition of treasure, weapons that were added into The Second Encounter can now be found in some of The First Encounter levels, and a different save system. Due to the hardware limitations of the Xbox, instead of allowing the player to manually save at any point during a level in the PC versions, there are save points that are designated by red phone booths that can be found in each level. Auto-aiming was also added to the Xbox version to compensate for the degree of control usually offered by a keyboard and mouse setup.

The Xbox Serious Sam was nominated for GameSpot's 2002 "Best Shooter on Xbox" award, which went to MechAssault.[14]

Kevin Rice reviewed the PC version of the game for Next Generation, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "Hmmm, should you get Deer Hunter XXII Extreme Plus [...] or Serious Sam for the same price? This is a no-brainer purchase for any FPS gamer."[16]

In the United States, Serious Sam: The First Encounter sold 83,000 copies by October 2001.[17]

The First Encounter was the recipient of various editorial and consumer praise, with an overall review ratio of 87/100 on Metacritic.[15] It also received numerous awards, including multiple Game of the Year awards.

Serious Sam won The Electric Playground's "Best Independent PC Game" prize, and was a nominee in the show's "Best Shooter for PC", "Best Graphics in a PC Game" and "Best Action Game for PC" categories.[18]

• Game of the Year 2001 — GameSpot[19]
• Game of the Month April 2001 — PC Gamer UK
• Best Value Priced Game 2001 — GameSpy
• Best End Boss 2001 — GameSpy
• Premier Awards 2001 — Computer Gaming World
• Action Vault Award 2001 (Outstanding Achievement in Technology) — IGN
• Action Vault Award 2001 (Surprise of the Year) — IGN
• Platinum 2001 Award — Gamer's Pulse
• Editors' Choice Award 2001 — IGN
• #1 PC Games of 2001 — EB Games
• PC Action Cream of the Crop Award — GamePen
• Best First Person Shooter 2001 — Christian Computer Gaming Review

• Official website