Meet the superfans who spent a decade bringing Daikatana back to life

Daikatana!

No, really I got an email today from Frank Sappone, that his passion project the fixing and overhaul of Daikatana was written up on PCGAMER.  Although my involvement may have gotten edited down, honestly all I did was give that little bit of a push and inspiration that it could be done by spending a good week on installing Solaris, and porting the dedicated server portion from SPARC Solaris, to x86 Solaris.  Once we had it running there, it was far easier to then get it running on Linux and OS X as a dedicated server.  Once we had that push Frank was able to use his great knowledge of Quake/QuakeWorld/Quake II and fix an incredible amount of bugs, and bring it into a fairly good state.

The real star here is of course the Johns, John Carmack for making the source code to Quake/QuakeWorld, Quake II, open so we could always refer back to this code, which Daikatana was based off an early beta of Quake II, and John Romero for giving us the needed source to make it all possible.

11.75 HKD is like $1.50 USD

It’s on sale right now at steam!

You can find Frank’s hard work here on bitbucket.org

For Windows users, you can simply download DK_EXE_030816_FULL.7Z, from his site (mirror).  And from the readme:

It’s a 7zip package. After you’ve downloaded the package you extract it to Daikatana’s folder. If you have Steam installed to it’s default path Daikatana’s folder is located in:

C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Daikatana\

(or if you’re running 64-bit Windows):
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Daikatana\

If it asks if you would like to overwrite any files, do so and overwrite the files. End result is that when Daikatana starts you can see in the right bottom corner of the red area in main menu “1.3” instead of “1.2”. You’re also able to access for example the HD resolutions from the Video menu.

If you start playing multiplayer with Daikatana community, you’re also going to need:

dkcustom.rar (Pak9)

You extract that package into:

C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Daikatana\data\

 

And to further celebrate this awesome press day, I’ve purchased a limited number of steam keys, reply with a comment (be sure to include a working email address!) and I’ll send you a key!  That’s right it’s the:

ON SALE DAIKATANA GIVEAWAY!

*Quantities limited.