Ryan C. Gordon aka Icculus, well known for many good Linux-ports, announced on a Patreon-post that a modernized Linux-version of Descent 3 is now available on Steam!

I've not just re-ported the game, I've upgraded it in several ways. It's now 64-bit (the original was 32), built on SDL 2.0, and runs on modern Linux and macOS (the original needed glibc 2.0 on Linux and only ran on Mac OS Classic!). It can handle larger screen resolutions...the original would drop the screen's physical resolution back to 640x480 for cutscenes and movies. Now it renders to a framebuffer_object and scales up as appropriate.

Speaking of movies, I didn't have source code to the original movie codec, so those are now Ogg Theora videos, which makes a complete install of the game hundreds of megabytes smaller than the two CD-ROM beast it was at the turn of the century.

I'm thrilled to be bringing this game back to a modern Linux audience. It was the first big project at Loki that I was in charge of, and I'm super-thrilled to be in charge of it again today.

It's available on Steam now; if you already bought it for Windows on Steam, you already own it for Linux and macOS, otherwise, for $9.99 it can be yours right away. It comes with the Mercenary expansion pack included. The current build warns that it is still a beta release, so please be gentle while we get those initial bug reports in! Updates will follow.