Don't bother with the rose-colored glasses. This is 2011, note for note.
Captain Blood‘s trailer looks like it should be buffering in 240p on Mediafire with a Ventrilo window next to it. Captain Blood itself looks like it should live in a generic Blockbuster case on a DVD so abused it makes my Xbox 360 disc drive howl in agony. Among the detritus of Steam’s New & Noteworthy page, this game is the equivalent of a perfectly preserved T. Rex mandible—if dinosaurs were contemporary to Halo 3, anyway.
Despite being released this week, Captain Blood looks every bit the relic of 2000s development hell it is. This isn’t lost on anyone behind the game, which began development in 2003 and almost released (but didn’t) on the seventh generation of consoles. Unlike most retro revivals, this isn’t a detailed touch-up or reimagining of a storied classic; it’s a canned game taken to the finish line exactly as it might have released in 2011 or so.
Oleg Klapovskiy, co-founder of the game’s publisher, SNEG, says the release is an act of preservation above all else. It got some tweaks and bug fixes to ensure its playability, but in all other respects, it’s a relic.
Blood will out
You know that kind of Xbox 360-era experience… It’s exactly a weekend long, it gives you a certain level of joy and you move on
Publisher Artem Shchuiko
“We’re having fun looking at how people assess it,” Klapovskiy said. “Our goal was to bring it as close to the original as possible. We are not game designers; it’s not our game, we were not working on it from the very beginning. There was a team of creative minds that had the vision for it.”
“If you assess the game by modern standards, I think I would put it at a very low score. I would say, three? Four? But again, that’s not a game from 2025 … Obviously, it has all its charm, all its flaws, and all the vibes are from that era. If you assess it as a game from that time, I would assess it as a 7.5/10 game. It’s all a matter of taste, how [you] approach it.”
That’s not to say the game has no niche. Its most obvious inspiration is the original God of War, which released a year before Captain Blood restarted development (for the second time) in 2006. But these days, it’s probably closer to the horde of games God of War inspired: clunky cult hits like Darksiders and Dante’s Inferno.
Artem Shchuiko, who co-founded SNEG with Klapovskiy after the two worked together at GOG for several years and shared a passion for games preservation, said Blood’s faults should evoke a certain fondness, warts and all.
“You know that kind of Xbox 360-, PS3-era experience. You get the overhyped game, you know based on the trailers that it’s not gonna be amazing, but then you play it and it’s exactly a weekend long … it gives you a certain level of joy and you move on. That’s kind of the nostalgic part of this game,” Shchuiko said. “The goal was not to make a 10/10. The goal was to get it shipped and release it.”
Shchuiko added that while some recent games like Evil West have been compared favorably to the janky action games of those days, “it’s one thing to pretend to be from the 360 era, to be inspired … it’s another thing to be exactly a game of that era.”
While plenty of games go for a nostalgia hit, Shchuiko said most publishers would balk at the idea of bringing back a bygone era’s low points as well as its high points.
“This game would cost a crazy amount of money today to be made, and it will not find its market, most likely. It’s the kind of game which cannot be made today. That makes it even more interesting. You’re getting something which you’re kind of not supposed to be getting based on the modern realities of the market.”
Setting sail
The easy part of resurrecting a canned game like Captain Blood turned out to be obtaining the rights. While it wasn’t trivial, Klapovskiy said it was “one of the easiest” experiences SNEG has had so far securing rights to release an old game. A nearly complete build had already leaked online, so getting the old codebase together wasn’t a struggle either. The entire original development team from Akella, now going by Seawolf Studio, was on board too—though the choice not to modernize or add features to the game, to fulfill the vision they couldn’t 15 years ago, saw some dissent.
“Even today I got a message from one of the guys from the original team … he’s like, ‘Hey, what if we give you money to make a sequel?’ I’m like, ‘Guys, you don’t even know if there’s any interest in this game but you’re proposing money?’ Like what the hell is this,” Klapovskiy said. “There were quite a few people coming to us and [offering investment money]. We were like, ‘Guys, we’re not about investors’ money, it’s a passion project. It’s fun and passion.'”
That’s not to say the team wasn’t excited to finally see the game release. Many of those developers had jobs at other game studios now, some working on huge games like Roblox, and worked on Captain Blood as they were available.
Shchuiko said that any passion for games preservation is felt twofold by developers with a game under their belt which never saw the light of day. Once it became evident they had the opportunity to provide some closure, he said it felt like a responsibility.
“One thing you can universally notice is some deeply hidden burden of something that never got shipped or released; I think they carried it with them to a certain extent,” he said. “I think it was very quickly and evidently an important thing to ship it and we got nothing but support in this regard.”
The SNEG co-founders said they aren’t certain what the future will look like for Seawolf or Captain Blood, but Shchuiko pointed out that a lot of treasured games from the past started as messy tributes and rough proofs of concept; and though Captain Blood might not not blow players away, the heart and labor put into it is why it’s worth preserving.
“Think about the franchises which we all know now, they’re all making gazillions of dollars. When they were making the first game, it was at first a clunky iteration. Think about Assassin’s Creed, you name it, and [Captain Blood] has this feeling. They clearly were inspired by God of War, they clearly were playing modern stuff back then and they just wanted to make their own … but they didn’t have enough experience, so they got this. All good stories usually start with developers having this first clunky, but promising, game.”
Klapovskiy added that if it’s a good time, that’s all that matters.
“I think that if you watch the trailers, you can see that we’re trying to make fun even out of ourselves here. We’ll be super proud if people who play it, stream it, write about it, have a smile while playing it … that’s what our industry’s about. It’s about entertaining.”
You can find Captain Blood on Steam, where it currently enjoying a small but “very positive” reception.
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