'The mid-2000s was the golden era of first-person shooters': David Syzmankski, creator of Dusk and Iron Lung, discusses the games on his PC

Disk Cleanup

Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"

David Szymanski, creator of Dusk and one of the chief architects of the retro FPS revival, grew up playing games like Lemmings and Oil's Well on the family PC. Among these family favourites was a formative first-person game. But it probably isn't the one you'd expect: "The most foundational one I can remember is playing Myst for the first time," says the New Blood designer. "That was the first game I remember really getting super into—being able to enter another world and explore it in first-person."

Initially a designer of short horror games, Szymanski's breakout came in 2018 with Dusk, an homage to classic '90s shooters like Doom and Quake. Following Dusk's success, Szymanski returned to developing shorter games, including the hit submarine horror game Iron Lung, which was adapted into a movie by YouTuber Markiplier earlier this year.

Szymanski's current project is different from everything else he's made, an isometric game called B.U.G.B.I.T.E which is still in its early stages and is yet to be formally announced: "The only consistency I have is that I keep changing what I'm doing", he says. "I haven't figured out a good, succinct way to pitch it to people because it's not a very complicated game, but it also kind of is at the same time."

Szymanski took a break from blasting bugs as we delved into the fathomless blood ocean of his Steam library, a journey that took us from the apex of survival games to the most obscure corners of the FPS.

What game are you currently playing?

I am playing an old FPS called Instinct from 2007. It's one of those slavjank games. I got it in the Ultimate Slavjank Collection Bundle on Steam, and I just happened to see a video about it the other day, and was like "Oh, that seems up my alley". It's [on] the same engine as You Are Empty.

It's a pretty simple, barebones FPS, very much like You Are Empty. I don't think it's the same developer, but it's the same engine, so it has the same very hard to explain feel. The way the weapons recoil, the way enemies ragdoll and everything … you don't even have a run button.

You just kind of walk through these very linear Russian science facility hallways. Is it Russian? I don't even know where it's set because half the cutscenes don't work for me. I only have the most tentative grasp on the story … but it's not a very complicated story. There's a facility. There's zombies. You go in and shoot the zombies, and there's also evil guys with guns who you also shoot.

There's something very approachable about it. We have a huge variety of different kinds of FPS right now, but it's a bit of a novelty to have a FPS that's simple and slow and not highly technical …. Although I'm very much a boomer-shooter fan, and of course am known for Dusk, I would say that the mid-2000s was the golden era of first-person shooters, just in terms of the sheer number and variety that we had. It was after all games were Doom clones, but it was before all games were Call of Duty 4 clones.

There wasn't really this codified—or COD-ified—design for what a shooter was supposed to look like … you had Serious Sam a few years earlier, Painkiller a few years earlier. You had Halo doing its own thing. You had Half-Life 2 doing its own thing. You had Doom 3 and Far Cry, just this huge variety of different things that had all sorts of different mechanics and ways of interacting with it.

I've always considered, like, the '90s, maybe you would call it the silver age. And then I think late '90s early to mid-2000s is your golden age of FPSs. And then we enter the brown age.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

The previous games that I was mainlining was The Forest, which I never played when it came out because I didn't consider myself a big survival crafting person. Now I'm wondering if maybe I do like survival crafting games when they have goals, because I loved Subnautica and I love The Forest.

However, I haven't finished either of them, not because either of them are bad, but because I have—how many hours do I have in the Forest? 20 exactly. That's about my cutoff point attention-wise. That's the time where I go "I'd really like to finish this, but boy am I feeling like I want to do something new and different." So, it's sitting there waiting for me to go back and finish it. I have failed to finish games that I would consider some of the best things I've ever played. It sucks because that keeps me from being able to enjoy most CRPGs, even though I always enjoy them.

What game did I finish last? Oh, Pragmata! Which I also loved. That one is still installed because haven't 100%-ed it yet. That was great. I think that's my game of the year so far. It's not a wildly revolutionary thing. It's just crazy to play a AAA game in 2026 that is a short, singleplayer, campaign-driven game with some innovation in the mechanics.

And wouldn't you look at my playtime? Almost exactly 20 hours.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It's got to be Doom. Technically what's installed is the most recent port, but it's still Doom.

I consider Doom to be nearly, objectively, the best FPS ever made. And that's from a combination of historical importance—obviously it's extremely important—and relevance today. You can still go back and play Doom and almost everyone is going to have a good time.

Even if you compare it to Wolfenstein 3D, which is fun in its own way, it has not aged as well as Doom has. And Quake has a lot of improvements, but in some ways does not have the same life to it that Doom does.

I think chaos in vision and game design can actually be a very good thing.

It's a little bit similar to why I think Resident Evil is such an enduring franchise … where it's goofy, it's horror, but it's also action, and it's all of these different things, and as a result you can't really ruin it. And I think it's similar with Doom. In the past, Doom 3 got flak, and Doom 64 got flak. But you can make Doom a little more horror and it still pretty much works. You can make Doom goofier and it still pretty much works. It's such a chaotic mixture of things that it's very hard to actually ruin it.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

My play time in games is low compared to most people. The most number of hours I have in anything on Steam is Counter-Strike 2, because it was formerly Global Offensive, for a whopping 324 hours. But we go down the list … number four is the first singleplayer one, and I wanted to bring this up because it's Elden Ring for 186 hours.

That is exponentially the most time I've ever spent playing through a game, and funnily enough, I love Elden Ring, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily on my top 10 list. It'd be on my top 20, but I would say Dark Souls I like more than that. But for whatever reason, that was just one of the most gripping things I've ever played.

It turns out I do really like soulslikes … and some of it might just be that Elden Ring is a greatest hits collection of the series of games it turns out I really like. It's sort of this massive buffet of new things I had an experience with that I was resonating with.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

The boring answer [is] Doom, Quake … the one I have that's a little more unique is Infra, because that is a game I have a looping playthrough going on at any time. I always have a playthrough going of Infra, and when I finish it, I just start back over because it's my comfort game.

It's a 30-hour game in a genre of two-hour games. It's so incredibly long. I remember my first time through, I thought I was approaching the end after maybe five hours, and I was maybe approaching the end of chapter 1. But that's part of what makes it so compelling, there's always something you don't remember about it, because it's a 30-hour game of tunnels. There's always some puzzle or some area where you're like 'Oh man, I forgot about this'.

It's one of the most detailed Source engine games and might be one of the most detailed first-person games ever made … there's a whole lot of hand-placed detail that stands out to me, that you don't necessarily see even in real big AAA games.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I was trying to think if there's anything I could come up with that didn't have to do with making games, and I couldn't really come up with anything. Let's say GIMP, because I've been using GIMP from even before I was a developer.

I've never used Photoshop, so I have no idea what—that's why I never recommend [GIMP] to people because I don’t actually know what the software is like if you're coming from Photoshop or something. I just know this is the one I've used and it's free, so I just kept using it.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It's pretty tidy right now, because of a recent Linux install. But it's slowly becoming less tidy. I started out saying that I wouldn't have any icons on it. And now I'm up to nine icons.

Usually what ends up happening is I have some sort of, not New Year's resolution, but random date resolution that I'm gonna keep my desktop completely clean, just have it be a wallpaper, all aesthetically pleasing. And then it turns into an absolute dumpster fire of text documents and who knows what.

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