We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Ion Maiden is coming out on floppy disk… sort of

ion_maiden_uzi

One of the neat side effects of the recent throwback shooter trend is that it’s sparked off an arms race in old school marketing. I’ve still got a pair of chintzy neon ‘90s sunglasses kicking around from the Strafe booth at PAX a couple years ago, and now 3D Realms has announced their retro FPS Ion Maiden is coming to floppy disk. Well, sort of.

There are some classics that originally came out of floppy disk that are still well worth your time. Here’s our list of great old PC games you can still play today.

A Friday tweet from 3D Realms included a short video of the Ion Storm diskette, and it certainly looks like the real deal. But if you look closely at the label, you can read “Disk 1/1,” and it would be impossible to store a whole FPS on a 1.44 megabyte disk nowadays – even a game made entirely in the Build Engine, which Ion Maiden is.

Once the diskette is out of the package, you can see the trick. Moving the floppy’s metal shutter to the side exposes the contacts of a USB flash drive, which will have plenty of space available for Ion Maiden.

Of course, all you’ll really need to get Ion Maiden running is a Steam key. The game is currently in early access, and PCGamesN’s Chris already likes it a lot.