Serious Sam

About

Serious Sam is a first-person shooter video game series created and developed by Croteam for release on various platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360, Palm OS, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2 and GameCube. The story revolves around the protagonist Samuel "Serious Sam" Stone, who fights through hordes of monsters in order to stop the alien tyrant Mental from destroying Earth and taking over the Universe.

History

Serious Sam began development in 1996 as a game called In the Flesh. The idea was to combine modern graphics with Doom's frantic, enemy horde-themed gameplay. The development went on and off because the early Croteam consisted of university students and the occasional person drafted into the military.

In the Flesh became Serious Sam in 1998, when Roman Ribarić, Croteam's CEO “received a vision” that told them to rename In the Flesh into “Serious Sam”. Most of the developers quickly complied. Development continued as normal, despite the name change.

In March 2001, Serious Sam: The First Encounter was released to wide acclaim. The game became a huge success and received multiple awards, including one from IGN, partially because of its $20 USD price tag^[1].

The story of TFE takes place in Egypt, Serious Sam goes to the past using an alien artifact known as the "Time-Lock" that allows him to travel back in time so he could assassinate Mental in the past, not knowing that by traveling back, he would wake up the hibernating Mental of that time.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter was released nearly a year after the success of TFE, originally being the other half of the latter; the story takes place right after the end of TFE, Serious Sam is on his way to Mental's homeworld until he crashes with a crate-bus of Croteam Big Heads, causing him to crash land back into Earth, without any other option, Sam heads to find the backup ship of the Sirians in order for him to continue his quest to stop Mental.

Serious Sam 2 began development in 2003 after the release of the Xbox port of the first 2 games and was released on October of 2005, the story takes place right after the end of TSE, Serious Sam gets summoned by the Sirian High Council informing him that will need a medallion in order to stop Mental, the only problem is that the medallion was split into 5 parts which Sam needs to recover.

Serious Sam 3 had a vague development history, Croteam started working on the Serious Engine 3 in 2006, but they made no word about Serious Sam 3 until 2009, which had a budget of about $500,000. The story takes place before The First Encounter, Earth is losing the fight against Mental and their only hope is to send Sam to the past via the Time-Lock to assassinate Mental. Additionally, 7 other spin-offs have been made by various indie developers.

Serious Sam 4

On September 24th, 2020, Croteam released^[9] Serious Sam 4, the fourth major installment in the series (trailer shown below, left). The game serves as a prequel to Serious Sam 3 and is chronologically the earliest game in the series. The game follows the journey of Serious Sam as he and his allies seek to obtain the Holy Grail, a powerful alien artifact.

The game features a Legion System, a game engine feature that the player to face tens of thousands of enemy units.

The game received mixed to positive reviews, maintaining a 70 average critic score with 32 reviews on Metacritic^[10] on the day of the release.

Online Presence

In August 2009, the @SeriousSam^[4] Twitter feed was created. On October 4th, the Serious Sam Wiki launched on Wikia.^[2] On November 6th, the /r/SeriousSam^[5] subreddit was launched for discussions about the games. On May 31st, 2011, the Serious Sam Facebook^[3] page was created, which gained over 58,400 likes over the next six years. On October 24th, a TV Tropes^[7] page for the series was launched.

Reception

The series is well known for its adrenaline-inducing fast paced gameplay and humor, TFE and TSE receiving multiple awards after their releases, Serious Sam 2 & 3 receiving generally positive reviews.

Fandom

The recent games have an active modding community, adding maps, enemies and weapons to the games.

Related Memes

Beheaded Kamikaze

The Beheaded Kamikaze (Also known as Headless Kamikaze) is one, if not, the most iconic enemy in the series, many people recognizing it by the scream it does while charging towards the player doing a suicidal attack causing major damage.

Immortal Fast Scorpion DRM

The Immortal Fast Scorpion DRM is a feature only available in pirated/cracked versions of Serious Sam 3: BFE as method of copy protection, it spawns an miniature Adult Arachnoid that is invincible and moves fast in order to make the game harder, if not, impossible to beat. This feature can be enabled on purchased copies and it's commonly used by admins to troll players in online play.

Search Interest

External References