Virtual Boy Game of the Year 2026

**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:21)
Hey, what's happening, everybody? Welcome to the program. It's The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It's August 4th, 2026 Here we are. I think, do these count as the dog days of summer now that it's August? Is that like a real, is this like a real thing? It's hot. I don't know. We went swimming. It was fine. The world of video games is all around us. There, no matter how hard you try to escape it, it is all here. And why don't we talk about some of that? Why don't we just get right into it, huh? That's right. I'm talking about the video game, GunZZZZZ The Duel.
The only video game that matters is back. I don't know. I spent some time over the weekend playing GunZZZZZ The Duel. That's G-U-N-Capital-Z. It is coming to Steam. This game is... This is a third-person shooter, if you're not familiar with it, from like a very long time ago. 20... More than 20 years. How... Gosh, when did this game originally... Because I'm trying to think, like... I'm trying to remember the office I was in when I first played GunZZZZZ the Duel. 2006 Okay. So, yeah, 20 years old.
It's not a game that... I don't know. Like, it was not a game that necessarily got talked about a lot then, because that was a very early time for free-to-play games on the PC. And it was not really something that got talked about or covered widely in the press at the time. Because I think, you know, a lot of publications were really not great at... And GameSpot, I would certainly lump into this back then. We were really bad at approaching free-to-play as it became not just dogshit video games. Like the early days of free-to-play was just like a lot of ripoffs and this is before phones. But it was a lot of stuff that you just like, I don't know, these are just like flash games or whatever. And as that stuff started to grow into something that was a little bit more real, the first free-to-play game I remember playing on PC was like a three-on-three basketball game.
And you use your keyboard to play it. And it was like not bad as a like arcade style basketball game or whatever, but it was not a very good game. But GunZZZZ the Duel, it was not a shareware game, it was not something where you're buying a registered version. It was not an adver game. Yeah, someone brought up America's Army, but America's Army was not a microtransaction based, America's Army was them trying to get you to join the Army. That's an ad. The taxpayers developed that game for you. GunZZZZ the Duel is a third-person competitive shooter. It is swords and guns like they're trying to do a little bit of John Woo type of shit in that game, and it's back. It's coming to Steam. I don't know. The development or the ownership, whatever the deal is, I guess it is changed hands, and it is in the hands of a company that intends to bring it to Steam, and they're running like a play test. So if you go to the page on Steam, you can join the play test, and I think they're just letting people in. I don't know. This is a button you press, and either you get in or you don't. But they are running something now that you can play. Yes. Seba in the chat says, the Steam description is just alternative action, GunZZZZ the duel. It's a disgustingly technical game, I guess is what I would call it, for something that just looks like a shitty anime third-person shooter with some diving and some swordplay. It ended up having one of the most ridiculous APM situations of just like, you need to do all of this shit just right, and then you can bounce off the, you're doing sideways dives off this wall, and you're climbing up walls with wall jumps and doing like all of this kind of weird movement tech that would become very key to the game for the years that followed. And the sickos that stuck with it, that was the thing. People were, it was the sort of game where people were mapping their controls all weird in order to do the things they needed to do and make it all work. And I'm, you know, like I remember watching videos of this, not that long ago, watching videos of people doing some of the more extreme movement stuff in guns and just being like, I didn't even realize like at the time when the game came out in like 6 or, you know, like around that time, none of that was immediately apparent. You're just like, okay, I don't know, I'm running around and I'm shooting people and then I have a sword and then if I round a corner, I can hit people with a sword. Like you can't really, you know, it's not like a lightsaber. You're not blocking bullets with the sword per se, but I want to say there's a little bit of that in there, but you know, it just had a very distinctive weird vibe to it. And you know, it was an early free to play game. And so I think a lot of people back then, if you were kind of looking for that sort of thing or couldn't afford, you know, mainstream video games at full price, you know, it was one of those good early examples of like, some shit you found online. And you're like, oh my god, what is this? And then it's very easy to see how someone could like, sink hours and days and years of their life into playing something like that over time. And so it's coming back. I mean, you know, it's a very different context. You know, it's, I say coming back, but I think you can still get on a Chinese server for this, for the original game. I think there is still some shit up out there. GunBound, GunBound is another great early example of like, and maybe a little bit later if I'm remembering correctly, but GunBound is another kind of good early example of some free to play stuff. And again, I'm specifically talking about free to play and not shareware because that opens a whole different door, right? Same concept, right, of like, yo, I found this shit online. I mean, that was Wolfenstein. You know, for some people that was Doom. You know, I knew what Wolfenstein was, so I already kind of eagerly awaited the release of Doom when that game came out. That game finally came out. But, you know, Wolfenstein and some of the other stuff that was out around then, all that stuff from Apogee and Epic, back when Epic was making video games, you know?