I still remember buying the original Serious Sam box in some computer store back in the day when it was new (RIP Futureshop). The original Serious Sam: The First Encounter was sold as a 'budget ware' title back then at a price tag of like $25.00 brand new. It was never intended to be a full priced game, which was honestly pretty cool.
Yeah, The First Encounter borrowed elements from Duke Nukem (obviously), Doom and other classic FPS games like Rise of the Triad and such. But at the same time, it was also the game that created the whole arena styled 'wave shooter', or 'horde shooter' FPS sub-genre. The game was released at a time when FPS's were moving away from hordes of enemies that would lunge at the player in large numbers to much smaller numbers of enemies on screen (mostly due to higher polygon counts). The First Encounter was the 'bullet hell' rebirth in the FPS space.
It even inspired later games like Pain Killer, Dusk, Killing Floor, COD Zombies, L4D, (I am missing a lot) even the later Doom 2016 and more directly Doom Eternal shifted more towards the horde shooter style of gameplay. I have yet to play The Dark Ages. Serious Sam became the template for this style of game. The original First Encounter supported up to 8- 16 players for online co-op and even 4-player split screen local co-op. It was pretty nuts.
The first time I played it was on a Pentium Celeron running at 533MHz, with 128MB RAM and a Geforce 256 card with 32MB VRAM. For a budgetware game, it honestly looked really good. The engine is completely in-house by Croteam. It ran fast on my machine at like 1024*768 resolution. To be honest the last one that I sunk any time in was Serious Sam 4, which I guess is still the most recent one. Awesome to see that the series is still going strong. While the game it was inspired from: Duke Nukem hasn't seen a proper resurgence (thanks Randy).
