Croteam created a proprietary engine for use in both
Serious Sam: The First Encounter and
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. At the time Croteam was making
Serious Sam, licensing other engines was costly (upwards of ), so they made their own from scratch, following the feature set of the
first Doom engine, which simulated 3D spaces in 2D, and did not include up or down targeting. As they were creating their own, both
Duke Nukem 3D (which added up-and-down freelook) and
Quake (a fully 3D rendered environment) were released, requiring Croteam to incorporate these features into their engine for their game to be competitive. Development was further complicated when the first
3D accelerators were released, prompting Croteam to develop for hardware rendering over software. Recognizing they needed to bring something new to what other games were pushing at that time, Croteam decided that they would make their Serious Engine support extremely large environments, with virtual view distances of over a kilometre, physics support, and capability of rendering up to a hundred enemies on screen at a time, and do this on the processing power of what current low-end computers using the original
Pentium CPUs could handle. A more powerful iteration of the Serious Engine was developed for use in
Serious Sam 2 and is known as Serious Engine 2. It supports many features of modern GPUs such as pixel and vertex shaders, HDR, bloom and parallax mapping. Serious Engine 3 was used in
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and
Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter. It includes detailed shading, and enemies are re-modelled to look more realistic. This engine is also being developed to harness the full capacity of HDR and high definition mapping. An updated version, Serious Engine 3.5, is used in
Serious Sam 3. Serious Sam is voiced by John Dick. After the release of both HD remakes of the original
Serious Sam episodes, Devolver Digital re-released both classic encounters in 2010 and
Serious Sam 2 in 2011. == Games ==