Disk Cleanup
Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend column 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?”
Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood Interactive, first encountered PC gaming on a 386 in his dad’s office. “It had a game installed on it, and the game was just called ‘Hero’. I’ve never been able to find this game since,” he says. “You would go into taverns and talk to people, and then go out into the woods to try to fight goblins and stuff”.
Dave Oshry
Oshry co-led the 2013 remake of Apogee’s 1995 FPS Rise of the Triad, before founding New Blood the following year. New Blood would go on to publish the boomer-shooter’s own equivalent of Doom, 2018’s Dusk, as well as the brilliant Amid Evil and the phenomenally successful Ultrakill. At present, New Blood is currently working on updates for Gloomwood and Blood West, finishing off its Dungeon Crawler spinoff Dungeons of Dusk, and releasing a brand new episode for Fallen Aces, its 1930s gangster immersive sim.
“We’re doing lots of crazy stuff,” Oshry says of Fallen Aces’ upcoming episode. “You’re gonna be able to drive the car around Highway 17-style, controllable NPCs … and then obviously just tons more weapons to kill goons with. With all the money Ultrakill makes, we can just dump that money into Gloomwood and Fallen Aces … like any great studio, we’re going to go out of business by making immersive sims.”
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Oshry took a break from wrangling PC gaming’s most treacherous genre to show me around the twisting back-alleys of his PC, a journey that took us from Miami Beach to the depths of Hell.
What game are you currently playing?
Dave Oshry: Aether & Iron. I’m a sucker for art deco and retro futurism and RPGs with exposed dice rolls so—they got me good!
My favourite genre is CRPGs. I’m an RPG guy, you know, the Baldur’s Gates, the Torments, the Fallouts
Dave Oshry
It’s not quite a CRPG. It’s not quite what you would call a Disco-like these days. It’s somewhere in between. It’s light on gameplay, heavy on narrative. My wife calls it a Nancy Drew like, which I think is pretty apt. You move from scene to scene by just clicking, and then it’s just a lot of talking and dicerolls and skill checks. But there’s also turn-based car combat sections.
I think Steam just recommended it to me. I don’t think I saw it anywhere. The algorithm was just like ‘Hey, you might like this’. And I looked at it and I was like ‘Ooh, what’s this?’. And I played the demo and I was like ‘This is awesome’.
People always think that my number one genre is first-person shooters, because I’m the boomer shooter guy. I’m the FPS guy. But I’ve said this before in interviews: my favourite genre is CRPGs. I’m an RPG guy, you know, the Baldur’s Gates, the Torments, the Fallouts, that’s really what I liked the most growing up. Anything that was big in the ’90s, is my shit.
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
A modded version of Vice City that combines the best bits of the PC, PS2 and Xbox versions of the game into what I’d call a proper “Definitive Edition”. It’ll always be my favourite GTA by far. I’m always kinda, sorta playing it.
At New Blood, we’re big old-school Rockstar fans, and we keep our own library of Rockstar mods and stuff like that, builds that we put together for ourselves and share internally. So our Vice City build, I would say, is pretty definitive. Not like the actual Definitive Editions, which are not definitive at all. It combines the best stuff from the PC, PS2 and Xbox versions plus some mods like the silent patch and stuff like that. And really modern controls, which is very nice. It’s just plug and play. It just feels right.
Vice City felt focused on what it was. It’s not too big, it’s not too small. It’s not too long. It’s homing in on a very specific time. Miami,1980s, Scarface, cocaine. It’s a complete vibe.
I was born in the ’80s. I grew up in the ’80s. I saw that firsthand as a kid. I remember being in Miami when I was like six, seven years old, on Miami Beach. I’ve seen the hotel that Tommy comes in and out of. The Colony and stuff. They got it. They nailed it. I’ve been back there since and you cannot not associate that with Vice City.
What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?
Gotta be Wolf 3-D, right? Sometimes I boot it up just to hear the sounds, like the BJ picking-up-loot sound, Mein Leben! You know, it’s just so iconic. But Wolf 3-D was the first game I ever modded. But it wasn’t the PC version; it was the Mac version.
I was a Mac gamer in the ’90s. My parents were divorced, and at home in my mom’s house, I had a Mac, and in my dad’s house, I had a PC. So at mom’s house I would play Mac games, and then I would go to my dad’s, I’d play PC games like Doom and Duke Nukem and Quake.
I’d play what we had available for Mac, which was a whole slew of interesting, hard-to-find games now, but then also you get ports of PC games. Rebecca Heineman, famously, for Interplay and MacPlay did the Mac port of Wolf 3-D. Who, as you know, she recently passed. I actually got to tell her that I got my start modding on the Mac version of Wolf 3-D that she made.
That version was based on the Jaguar version. So the graphics were better. It was smoother. It had more weapons, but it also shipped with a level editor, and it lets you make your own levels … I would make levels for myself and my friends and try to sell them at school. And I made a—I’ve told this story before—I made a whole new episode of Wolf 3-D with the Mac editor and I called it Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I beat Activision to the punch by 10 years or something, when I was eight years old.
Most people probably only played the shareware episode. People think that MechaHitler is the final boss. He’s the boss of Episode Three. He’s the midway boss of the game. It’s like General [Fettgesicht] or whoever is the final boss of Wolf.
I feel like there’s a lot of cool enemy designs that are forgotten, like the mutants in episode two with the guns in their chests. They should make a comeback. I’m pretty sure MachineGames are working on Wolf 3. If they read this interview, bring back the mutants with the chainguns in their chests!
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
Not counting games I’ve worked on? *sigh* Fallout 76 comes in at 488.8 hours. And I haven’t played it since 2021! Not because I don’t want to but because I value my free time! Of which I have very little these days.
I think it’s the best map they’ve ever made. And I think anybody who’s actually played it will probably tell you the same thing. I tell people, they’re like: ‘Dave, how do you play Fallout 76 if you hate multiplayer?’ I play it as a single-player game. If you turn off as much of the multiplayer shit that you want, and just shut off all the noise and play like a single-player game, it’s an amazing game. You can spend so much time just exploring the map hunting cryptids. It’s the best cryptid hunting game.
There’s things they did in 76 that are so much better than Fallout 4. If they made an offline version of Fallout 76 and called it Fallout Appalachia or something, people would love it.
If we’re counting from before Steam started counting (and before Steam existed) then it’s most definitely Oblivion (which I used to make mods for). Followed by Skyrim… then New Vegas… then Fallout 4. I think you can see the trend here. Thanks, Todd.
What game will you never, ever uninstall?
DOOM, of course.
Imagine if somebody came to my house. Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood, the fucking boomer shooter guy, the retro shooter guy, the publisher of DUSK, Amid Evil, Ultrakill, and they were like ‘Hey, do you have Doom installed on your PC?’ And I said ‘No’. Are you out of your mind? John Romero would call me up and be like ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’
You can always play Doom. If you’re on a desert island, you know. And not only that, there’s always new wads coming out. The New Blood community members are always making cool Doom wads and stuff like that for us to play. There’s always some on GZDoom, like Scumheads’ games and stuff … Mohrta is really cool. Selaco, Hello?! Supplice, Hedon, Beyond Sunset, Age of Hell, Brutal Fate. It’s all Doom, and there’s tons of mods, an infinite amount of levels.
The search bar on Windows is useless
Dave Oshry
But much like Fallout 1, I’m a Doom 1 guy. I’ve never been a Doom 2 guy. That’s been a controversial opinion of mine. People are like ‘Oh, Doom 2 is better’. I’m like ‘How?’. It’s a lot like Fallout 2 where bigger doesn’t mean better. And honestly, I’m a super shotgun hater. I like the single shotgun way better … It’s just something about the pace of it. I can hear it in my head, the ‘Boom, click-clack.’
We based the super shotgun in Dusk on the super shotgun in Doom 2 and I don’t like that either. Andrew [Hulshult] made me keep it. And I was like ‘Whatever, you guys’. I’m not a super shotgun guy. I’m a single shotgun guy. I’m a Doom 1 guy. I think the first three episodes of Doom are as good as it gets.
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
Everything by Voidtools. It allows you to instantly search for anything on your entire PC.
It literally will search as you’re typing. It will search all your drives, instantly. Which, if you’re like me, we’re constantly making trailers and files and then naming them just, stupid bullshit. It’s completely instant and it’s free.
I don’t know how I could live without it, because the search bar on Windows is useless. It used to search. Now it’s like ‘Do you want to, fucking, Bing?’ Like, no, I want to [find] the files on my computer. It’s Windows. Like everything else, it sucks now.
Anybody, if you’re reading this. Please just Google ‘Everything’ by Voidtools. It’s a little orange magnifying glass, and you will not believe that you were able to live without it.
Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?
Very tidy! I’ve got a touch of the OCD but I’m also a very “out of sight, out of mind” person. So while my desktop is very clean it’s also arranged into folders called things like “New Blood Stuff, Family Stuff, Random Stuff”, etc.
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