This upcoming FPS has a website that’s a sick throwback to ’90s game ads

Fortune’s Run is shaping up to be something special: a retro FPS blending immersive sim depth with pure boomer shooter speed, some of the best swordplay I’ve seen in a game, and a gloriously grungy ’90s sci-fi setting. But those aren’t the only lost arts Team Fortune is reviving: the two-person team just unveiled an absolutely sick new website.

I know what you’re thinking: “Website? How cool could it be? Besides grandpa, everyone advertises their games in portrait mode on TikTok dueted with ASMR footage of someone slicing up a bar of soap.” It may not represent today’s best marketing practices, but I love the way this page harkens back to an era of absurdly wordy magazine ads, like this original Half-Life spread that appeared in PC Gamer in the ’90s.

Fortune’s Run’s site presents an interactable 3D magazine with a backdrop of the game’s demo level, Club V’heni. You can click or use a phone’s touchscreen to flip the pages, with your perspective of the mag adjusting with mouse movement or⁠—and this is particularly dope⁠—your phone’s gyroscope. Inside are classic gaming mag-style bullet point descriptions of Fortune’s Run, a wall of gameplay .gifs arranged like a print panel of screenshots, and on the back you’ll find a riff on the infamous John Romero Daikatana ad. No sir, I believe I will not “suck it down.”

Remember when websites were fun, and all looked different from one another? When the internet was a vast, exciting place with all sorts of nooks and crannies to get lost in? Fortune’s Run’s new site also brings back memories of the Halo 3 “Believe” ad campaign, a series of shorts and promos centering on a fictional museum of the Human-Covenant War, decades after the events of the games.

I remember begging my dad to install a special version of Microsoft’s Silverlight media player so we could click through the Believe website’s explorable diorama of a human-Covenant battle. Now that was an ad campaign, dopey schlock and all.

I’m excited about Fortune’s Run—you should check out its demo and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t⁠—and this site really gels with that experience. Like the game itself, the site’s a throwback, but a creative, surprising one, reshaping your memories and nostalgia into something that feels entirely new. You can also check out my write-up of Fortune’s Run’s free demo level, Trouble at Club V’heni, from last year’s Realms Deep digital event.

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