Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, a lot of Finnish kids had game called Areena 4 on their PC. In Areena, you ran a gladiator team. You hired goblins and druids and elves and the occasional zombie, bought them swords and crossbows and armour, taught them spells, and watched their stats creep upward season after season. Once a month you fought another team, and if you hadn't scouted their strengths beforehand you deserved what happened next. Win enough and you climbed a division. Lose enough and you didn't.
I was one of those kids. Over twenty years ago I emailed the developer, Seppo Suorsa, and asked him how a person actually starts making games. He wrote back. Kindly, and at length explaining the process and giving me some pointers.
Then I spent the next two decades learning and writing software that had nothing to do with games. The seed sat there the whole time. Astro Protocol is what eventually grew out of it.
Runerock Arena is out now
Seppo has brought the series to Steam. Runerock Arena released on August 11th, and it's the real thing: hire gladiators, kit them out with weapons, armour and spells, scout the opposing team, then win or lose on the grid. Careers run their full arc — recruits become veterans, veterans become legends, and eventually they retire. You'd better have trained a successor.
If you played the classics, it feels like coming home. 36 character classes, the old attribute and skill depth, the same grinding monthly climb toward the Championship of Runerock. What's new is everything around it: a modern interface, quality-of-life that respects your time, and a handful of genuinely fresh ideas layered onto the formula. It's exactly what I needed to get back to the kind of game I loved as a kid.
Here's the part that makes me happy, though. For most of its life this series was a Finnish secret, passed on floppy disks between kids. Runerock Arena ships in eight languages: English, German, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Polish and Brazilian Portuguese. Thirty-five years after the first Areena ran on a Commodore 64, a teenager in São Paulo or Seoul can finally play the thing in their own language.
There's also a free demo if you want to try before buying.
There's a bundle
Seppo and I put together an official Astro Protocol & Runerock Arena bundle
It's a complete-the-set bundle, so if you already own Astro Protocol you don't pay for it twice. Steam works out what's missing from your library and applies the 10% to that. Same the other way around: if Runerock Arena is what brought you here and you don't have Astro Protocol yet, the bundle knocks 10% off picking it up.
Runerock Arena also has a 20% launch discount running until August 25, so if you're only after that one, buying it on its own is the cheaper route this fortnight. I'd rather tell you that than have you overpay for a bundle.
Go support Seppo. I owe him a career.
- Zeikko