When you think of the most renowned FPS games on PC - Half-Life, Doom, Cyberpunk 2077 - they're all about power. It's big guns. It's loud music. It's lots and lots of kills. But the two Condemned games, from esteemed and sadly recently departed FEAR and No One Lives Forever icon Monolith, are different. Firstly, these are 'shooters' where actual shooters are rare - most of the combat is melee-based. Secondly, you never feel strong. Condemned and its sequel are terrifying, and you spend most of your time fighting for your life. Brilliant and bloody, Condemned deserves a revival. One former Monolith exec and a developer at System Shock, Turok, and Quake necromancer Nightdive seem to be thinking the same thing…
Condemned Criminal Origins arrived in 2005, hot on the heels of Monolith's greatest work, FEAR. A horror FPS game where you fight using lead pipes, wooden planks, and basically anything you can lay your hands on, it was followed three years later by Condemned 2: Bloodshot - especially in its early levels, Condemned 2 is tenser, more frightening, and more squalid than even its predecessor.
Somehow, though, Condemned 2 never made it to PC, and now that Monolith has been shuttered by Warner Bros., it seems possible that the shooter and horror game series is gone forever. Or maybe not. Enter Monolith co-founder and Twin Galaxies CEO Jace Hall. Over on Twitter / X, one Condemned fan… enthusiastically beseeches Hall to start work on a Condemned remake. "Don't kill off our favorite horror game for no reason," they write. "Let's get it going." Hall offers a potentially promising reply.
"I will see what may be possible," Hall writes. "Absolutely no promises. Please have zero expectations. This will take me some time." Now, for the Condemned devout, that might be enough of a sign that not all hope is lost. But there's more…
Samuel Villarreal is the lead engine developer at Nightdive and the overseer of the studio's alchemic Kex Engine - the tech that powers all of Nightdive's remasters. Replying to Hall directly, Villarreal says simply that "we love [sic] to do a re-release to modern platforms if the opportunity ever rises." Adding just a little more fuel to the speculation fire, Nightdive previously told PCGamesN that it considers No One Lives Forever, Monolith's beloved 2000 spy shooter, its "white whale," and has been trying to track down the rights holders.
Remasters of the Condemned games? A modernized restoration of NOLF? Some kind of Monolith tribute collection? Yep. I'd buy any of those. In the meantime, Nightdive is keeping busy with a slick overhaul to its own remaster of the Turok.
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