Cult (PC) - 1997 Argonaut - Games That Weren't

1997 Argonaut

Platform: PC (the possibly others at a later date)

Not long after working on an unreleased Saturn version of Alien Odyssey (a story for another day), Argonaut’s Martin Piper was assigned to another project which was to showcase the new 3DFX Voodoo 1 graphics card (the first real mainstream graphics accelerator for the PC) and Argonaut’s BRender engine.

Cult was going to be an open world third person arcade shooter, with even talk of Virtual Reality integration at one point. There wasn’t really a story at this point, it was far too early – though Martin recalls a zombie twist of some kind.

Working with Martin on the game were artists Vanessa Pouillard and Owen Jenkins, who put together a few scenes, including an outside world area in a desert and a Diner with some underground parts as a proof of concept over a few months or so. Martin suggests that someone called Emerson was behind the design/concept.

Unfortunately, the game only ever got to the stage of some level graphics and character animations, with a controllable main character called Nathan that could run around some of the early maps and fire weapons. It was cancelled early on at a playable tech demo stage in mid-1997 for reasons that cannot yet be recalled.

Martin had mostly forgotten about the game, but came across an old archive with some source code and assets in late 2024 and kindly passed these over to Games That Weren’t to investigate and explore. After a month or so of playing around, we finally managed to get something up and running from the executable builds that Martin had provided.

This required a lot of trial and error with setting up folders with the correct version BRender files and finding the right Glide DLLs that Martin would have roughly used (examining games like FXFighter which was released around the same time). By chance and via BRender demos, we found a way to force the executables to use 3DFX mode (as they were trying and failing to use DirectX). All of this on a Windows 95 build via PCEM.

That wasn’t all – when the executables finally ran, we found that many files being referenced to were missing or on network paths that no longer existed. Carefully, we fixed paths to a single drive in the executables and added temporary placeholder files to replace those that were missing (using copies of other files that were in the archive).

Sadly far too much is missing to be able to properly play the prototype, but it runs and you can move, fire some shots and spawn some spiders. The main protagonist isn’t visible at all for some reason, even though the assets seem to be present.

We’re just pleased that we were able to get something going for the time being and as a starting point. Perhaps someone can work out how to get Nathan showing properly and some of the assets rendering? Maybe we are missing something still in the setup?

The download can be found below, and we recommend using the CultWorksFix3DFX.bat file to run. You will need to use a working Windows 95 setup with a Voodoo 1 card. We highly recommend checking out this tutorial on how to setup PCEM, which is how we managed to get it going in the end.

We hope that someday the missing assets will come to light, and the prototype can be fully re-constructed. Martin has allowed us to add the entire archive to the site, which includes the source code for the development. I believe the source code is complete, though it is just the graphical assets that seem to be incomplete.

If you discover anything new, please do get in touch with us and we’ll update this page over time. We have reached out to the artists to hopefully see if they have any of the missing assets.

Thankfully you can still see just how the game was looking, as Martin had made some screengrabs at the time. Here you can see how the Diner was shaping up for instance. We’ve also created some video showcasing the early maps created, and also reconstructed the main protagonist, Nathan – which you can find in the download in a .glb format in the assets download.

It is a great early glimpse at a title that could have had a lot of promise, but was cancelled far too early to really ever know for sure. Did we indeed miss out on something very special?

With a huge thank you to Martin Piper for sharing the archive and his recollections to help piece things together and The Oligopolist’s Tutorials for the great post on getting a Windows 95 Voodoo 1 rig up and running.