Yesterday morning, Devolver Digital – them responsible for bankrolling the upcoming Shadow Warrior reboot – launched a promotion on Facebook. In return for a Like with a capital L, fans would receive a copy of the original 3D Realms shooter for free. 50,000 Steam keys were lined up for the occasion – until some wiley so-and-so broke through Devolver’s security and took all of them.
In response, the publisher has made the game free for everyone. Forever.
“The idea was to let fans of the original game and folks that had not tried it before have a chance to download it for free and get involved in the community for the reimagined Shadow Warrior that our friends at Flying Wild Hog are developing for release later this year,” said the publisher in a blog post.
“Now we just had a lot of disappointed fans that wanted to get the game but the promotional app was, for lack of a better term, empty and there were no more keys at the ready to reload it.
“And if we did, wouldn’t they just get zapped again? With some of the original keys, that were meant to be free, already being sold online we had to do something.”
Devolver had no plans to charge for the original game in any case, and so made the decision to make the game free indefinitely. Shadow Warrior Classic, the version first released as the follow-up to Duke Nukem 3D in 1997, is now ripe for penniless playing on Steam.
Isn’t that lovely?