Kingpin Gets A Remastered Version After 21 Years – GKZ Hitech

The 1990s were an interesting time: there were grunge groups, video rental stores and video games that always sought to attract adult audiences. The linchpin of Interplay: Life of Crime debuted in 1999, and it was a grainy immersive simulation, loaded with exploits, built into the Quake II engine and seemingly designed to horrify parents. Twenty-one years later, a Kingpin remaster: Recharg.

3D Realms announced the remastering on Friday with a trailer showing the improved 4K visuals and the grimy atmosphere that players will encounter as a thug of the 1999 original. The Reloaded version of Kingpin will also support 60 fps and support for ultra large monitors, a new quest system and some welcome rebalancing and polishing.

While Kingpin was built in the Quake II engine and offers a ton of graphic violence and deliberately colored language, it's much more than a direct shooter. Although it is certainly not as complex as games like System Shock or Deus Ex, it certainly qualifies as an immersive sim with its NPCs, quests and progression systems.

Here is the teaser:

As an unnamed thug, you can choose to approach situations in a non-violent manner, fight your way through many encounters, and improve your reputation by striving to eliminate the crime who beat you and left for dead in an alley.

Of course, you can also choose to club everyone on your way, but be warned – on normal difficulty, the fight gets pretty hairy in Kingpin. It is good, then, that you can recruit your own goons to help you. They are amazingly capable both in firefighting and in navigation level geometry, which makes Kingpin a fairly impressive technological feat for its time.

We will have to wait and see how well its parameters and premises hold in 2020. Kingpin: Reloaded will be available later this year – 3D Realms has not yet set a specific release date.

In the meantime, check out our list of the best classic games you can still play on PC.