Notrium Special Surprise Edition

06.12.2015

Surprise! We've released Notrium on Steam! The Notrium Special Surprise Edition is a re-release of the 2005 Notrium, with many improvements including achievements, cloud saves, autosaves, combination hints for the easier difficulty levels, and to top it all, a surprise! I mean, there's another more secret surprise, not just this surprise. But I bet you were surprised anyway.

Some 12 years ago I released a game called Notrium. The design was simple: you've crash-landed, and you've got to fix up your escape pod with scavenged parts before you get killed by all the aliens. I think I recall feeling that getting the word out about a game was a lot of work back then, I actually mailed about a dozen sites about Notrium! And then I sat back, and waited to see if someone downloaded the game.

To me that was the defining point in my game development hobby, that's when I decided I'd want to make games for a living. Not only had there been a lot of downloads for Notrium (millions was a huge amount back then), there were an overwhelming number of positive reviews about it. Even when I met my wife Anne for the first time, it turned out she'd heard of Notrium. The poor girl must have thought I was some kind of a suspicious game developer rock star when she started seeing me.

After Notrium got modding support, I worked with the talented and inventive Quanrian (Michael Quigley), the first of Notrium's many modders, to provide more playable characters, endings and everything that makes Notrium the game it is today. I'm glad to see many Notrium modders working in software development today. Sam must be a grown man already. At least we'll always have HarmlessHermit's Notrium Saga. There were hundreds of people who supported and encouraged me with the development of Notrium, and I'm extremely grateful for every one! Without you Notrium, Driftmoon, or our upcoming game(s) would not have been possible.

I had a lot of fun replaying Notrium when making this special edition version, and I hope you'll have fun too. And yes, Anne did really try the game, and found it quite difficult. Though I think she was just trying to make me feel better about dying so often.

Ps. I wonder if you'll find the surprise in the game?