A fan-made revival of a long-dead action game gets the official green light from Paradox

pcgamer.com:

Four years after being delisted from Steam, multiplayer sidescrolling action game The Showdown Effect(opens in new tab) is back in a completely fan-made resurrection that's been given official approval by Paradox Interactive.

Paradox released The Showdown Effect in 2013 to decent reviews—we called it «a cheap and cheerful action game that won't win any awards but provides solid knockabout laughs» in our 70% assessment(opens in new tab)—but it didn't really go anywhere. Player counts tailed off quickly after launch, and in 2018 Paradox pulled the plug and removed it from Steam.

That was the end of it until a couple of years later, when GiuseppeIII (who asked that we not use his real name) got involved. He was a player from the early days, but ironically came into it almost entirely by accident: He ended up with a copy of The Showdown Effect by way of a Humble Bundle that came out a few months after the game did.

«A little while later when looking for stuff to play and scrolling through my Steam library I noticed the game, and remembering the trailer from when I got the Humble Bundle I decided to check it out,» GiuseppeIII told me in a recent chat. «At this time the game was already on the decline user-wise and the bump it had gotten from the Humble Bundle had mostly gone away.

»While a low-player count is usually a death knell to a multiplayer game, it is actually one of the things that attracted me to the game and kept me playing. The welcoming tight-knit community and seeing the same names week after week was something that kept me playing."

One of those community members, who goes by the name Deathaxe, reached out to GiuseppeIII in 2020 with the idea of getting the old gang back together. They set up a Discord(opens