The new game from Finnish developer Jani Penttinen, where players murder digital Covid-19 particles, began as a passion project. He had started building games in the 1990s, working for game companies like Remedy and Housemarque in their early days. In 1992, he codeveloped the game Utopos (later renamed Guntech) for the Atari ST computer system.
Penttinen’s newest game, Guntech 2, launched on the Xbox last week. Like its 30-year-old predecessor, the game is a top-down space shooter, where the player controls a spaceship that flits through the cosmos, blasting all manner of alien uglies. Think Asteroids, but with more color.
The decades-old game got some obvious updates to its graphics and gameplay. But it was Penttinen’s wife, Wen Sun, who suggested that he add a more modern element to meet the moment.
“I’m not so into gaming,” she says. “Every time he shows me the game, I feel like there are a lot of similar space shooting games. How are you making people choose yours and not others?”
The answer was to fill a level with marauding spaceship-sized virus particles. They’re just referred to as viruses in the game, but visual references to Covid-19 are unmistakable. The virus particles appear as great bulbous spheres surrounded by red spike proteins. Each is a spitting image of the demonic Koosh ball we’ve all come to know and hate over the past 23 months.
