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Let’s not beat around the bush: Will Rock is basically Serious Sam.

That’s the first comparison anyone makes. And they’re not wrong. It plays almost exactly like Croteam’s arena shooter—fast, chaotic, and ridiculous. But calling it a copy misses something important. Because Will Rock isn’t just a clone. It’s a four-month miracle, a budget game from a brand-new studio, and a strange, beautiful mess stuffed with quirks that make it unforgettable. That is, if you were lucky enough to stumble into it.

Saber Interactive was brand new in 2003. Will Rock was their very first game. They built it in just over four months. Four months to create an entire FPS from scratch on a brand-new engine. An engine that didn’t even have a name yet—it would later become Saber3D. At the time, Will Rock was basically a tech demo wearing an Ancient Greece skin.

The game came out in June 2003 under Ubisoft. But the marketing wasn’t exactly explosive. The most famous thing about it wasn’t a trailer. It was the soundtrack. Specifically: Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock.” It’s definitely in the trailer. It’s apparently in the main menu. YouTube uploads show it.

And yet… after replaying the game, I never heard it once. That’s not a song you just miss. So maybe it’s a ghost track. Maybe it’s a Mandela Effect. Either way, it’s the most famous song that may or may not actually be in the game.

Distribution was weird, too. Ubisoft sold it in stores. But it also came bundled with Gigabyte PC-CDROM drives. A lot of players didn’t buy it—they just found it on their new hardware. That’s how many people first played Will Rock: by accident. Which might explain why it feels like a half-remembered fever dream now.

The story is early-2000s action nonsense. Willford Rockwell, archaeologist, gets possessed by Prometheus. Prometheus gives him powers. He goes to war with Zeus to save his girlfriend. That’s it. But the Greek mythology setting works. Where Serious Sam had Egypt and aliens, Will Rock has Minotaurs, Harpies, Centaurs, Cyclops, skeleton warriors, and massive Atlas statues that rip themselves free from pedestals and come for you.

And this is where the boom begins.

Minotaurs don’t just die—they split into more Minotaurs when you kill them. Atlas statues don’t just stand there—they crash forward like a granite linebacker. Harpies dive-bomb screaming. Rat-bombs explode. Enemies accidentally damage each other in the chaos. The screen becomes a mess of smoke, blood, and flying marble.

The weapons make it louder. You’ve got the standard pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and minigun. But then it gets weird. The shotgun looks like a lever-action rifle and uses rifle ammo. The Medusa Gun turns enemies to stone so you can smash them into gravel. The Acid Gun inflates enemies until they burst with a wet rubber squeal. The Atomic Gun fires a miniature nuke. And the shovel—the humble melee weapon—is absurdly effective, especially against archers. Every weapon feels tuned for chaos.

Then there are the Titan powers. You collect gold to buy them at altars. Immortality makes sense. Titan Damage makes sense. Titan Motion? It slows down time—and slows you down too. It’s basically useless. A broken power-up in a game already running at maximum speed. But that’s Will Rock. Half the fun is in its glorious mistakes.

The level design swings wildly. Sometimes you’re in wide-open killboxes built for maximum slaughter. Sometimes you’re in cramped switch-hunts that feel like filler. You’ll bounce on trampolines, fire yourself from catapults, sneak through a Trojan horse, pull endless levers. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s busywork. But it’s never quiet.

Reviews at the time were mixed. Metacritic score: 63. GameSpot called it a “mindless knockoff.” IGN called it “hard.” Other critics called it too easy because enemies dropped in three hits and health pickups were everywhere. Even the difficulty became a quirk—easy for some, brutal for others.

For most players, Will Rock disappeared quickly. It was overshadowed by Serious Sam and never got a sequel. But for the people who remember it? It’s the quirks that stand out. The regenerating Minotaurs. The statues that wake up. The useless Titan Motion. The shotgun that’s somehow a rifle. The shovel that’s better than half the guns. The ghost of Twisted Sister haunting the main menu.

For everyone else, Will Rock is just another budget shooter from 2003. But for those who stumbled into it—maybe from a Gigabyte CD-ROM—it’s something stranger. A flawed, loud, chaotic snapshot of early-2000s FPS excess. A game that didn’t just copy Serious Sam. It kept the boom going.

Light of Motiram is TBA on Steam

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Turns out Tetris Elements is my favourite Tetris.

And I’ve played a lot of Tetris. Atari Tetris, Nintendo Tetris, SEGA Tetris, Capcom Tetris, EA Tetris… I’ve even played multiple board game versions—and yes, there are more than you’d think.

But nothing fills me with joy like Tetris Elements, the 2004 THQ release that stayed stuck on Windows and Mac. Never consoles. Never handhelds. Just a weird budget disc for early-2000s computers.

It was meant to follow Tetris Worlds. ImaginEngine built it under THQ’s ValuSoft label. Mostly an educational-games studio, with a little help from a programming shop in India. Small budget, short schedule. The kind of game you’d expect to look rushed.

And it does. But it also tries things other official Tetris games never touched again.

On the surface, it’s simple: Classic mode plus five elemental modes. Earthquake, Fire, Ice, Stratosphere, Tempest. But these aren’t harmless gimmicks. They mess with the core game. Earthquake shakes the board and warps your stack. Tempest forces you to manage two rotating wells. Stratosphere drops meteors that can open perfect holes—or land garbage in the exact spot you needed clear.

Even the safe-looking modes have teeth. Ice will slam a piece straight to the bottom if an icicle hits it. Fire can chain explosions if you heat-drop pieces in sequence. These weren’t casual distractions. They were strange, playable twists on Tetris that you couldn’t get anywhere else.

And then there are the quirks.

The game says it uses the modern SRS rotation system. But pieces spawn in odd orientations, like the letters they’re named after. Wall kicks are inconsistent. The configuration files literally include a “–99, –99” coordinate—developer shorthand for “don’t use this”—as an actual kick entry. It shipped like that.

Hard drops don’t even behave consistently. Sometimes the next piece spawns instantly. Sometimes there’s a pause just long enough to throw off your rhythm. It feels half-finished.

Look in the game’s files and it gets stranger. All the rotation data, piece definitions, and rules are in plain-text .INI files. No encryption, no compression. It’s like the studio assumed no one would bother to check. That’s how players found five unused pieces just sitting there. Pentominoes, oversized blocks, even odd trimino shapes. All fully defined. None ever used.

The audio hides unused tracks too. Better quality than what shipped. There are unused menu graphics, leftover text strings. “Name Exists” sits quietly in the files. There’s even an unused “You Lose” screen. It’s a Tetris game with the workshop still attached.

Even the presentation feels slightly off. Clearing a Tetris flashes the screen white, like the game’s trying to burn your retinas as a reward. The music is fine—light techno, some nods to the classics—but the big feature was loading your own MP3s. And then the game speeds them up in pitch as your stack rises. A nice idea if you like drum ’n’ bass. Less nice if you don’t want your playlist chipmunked mid-match.

Reception at the time was muted. Two critics reviewed it. Scored in the 70s. People moved on. Hardcore players dismissed it. Casual players bought it in a bargain bin, played Fire mode once, and forgot it.

But the quirks gave it a second life.

The .INI structure made it one of the easiest official Tetris games to modify. Fans enabled the unused pieces. They rewrote gravity. They fixed rotation bugs themselves. It became a little laboratory for people who liked taking Tetris apart.

On Mac, it stuck around longer than expected. The disc ran on both OS 9 and OS X. PowerPC Macs could run it cleanly. Classic mode on OS X 10.4 ran even better. Intel Macs killed it, but by then it was already out of print.

On PC, it lived as long as people kept CD drives. No keys, just disc-based protection. When drives vanished, so did the game—until no-CD patches and Archive.org brought it back. Today it runs on Windows 10 with glitches. Windows 11 is hit or miss.

Its reputation now? Not a classic. Not even a cult favourite. Just an oddball entry people dig up because it’s strange, moddable, and unlike anything else in the series.

It’s not polished. It’s not balanced. But it’s an official Tetris that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere in the series history. And somehow, that makes it fit perfectly.

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