The 1994 robot fighting classic rebuilt in HD for Windows, macOS, Linux and the web
▶ The trailer
1994 on an old PC in the game's colors, then 32 years later in HD: the new robots and arenas, and a mod made from scratch in OMF Studio, cut to Hadal Static's Twenty Ninety-Seven (Remix). Sound on.
The trailer can't play here. Watch it on GitHub.
A fan trailer, with the game's own main menu theme and sound effects. Watch it on GitHub
The robot fighting classic, rebuilt
In One Must Fall 2097 (Diversions Entertainment, 1994), pilots climb into giant robots and fight their way up a corporate tournament. It was one of the great DOS fighting games, and it has been freeware since 1999.
This project brings it back: a faithful reimplementation of the game's engine that plays the original game files, as a free app for Windows, macOS and Linux or in a browser. Play it exactly as it looked in 1994, or remastered in HD with new effects, modes and tools.
Every robot, arena, mode and quirk of the original, following the reverse engineering of OpenOMF. The soundtrack plays through a port of the game's own music driver.
3,200+ images redrawn in HD, widescreen arenas with depth, dynamic light and particles, smooth motion, and sharp text at any resolution.
LAN games, fourteen languages, a training lab, replays and clips, new modes, a robot workshop, mods and OMF Studio, gamepads with rumble, touch controls. It even works offline.
01 Classic / Remastered
The pixel-exact 1994 picture, or HD at any resolution. Press F2 to switch between them at any moment, even mid-fight.
02 The whole 1994 game
Everything from the original is here, playing its own data files: every robot, move, special and throw, every pilot fighting their own way, every mode, the original music and sounds, and the secrets.
The 1994 roster · 11 robots
The robot most pilots learn on, and the one many never leave. Quick on its feet and quicker to punish: it leaps across the arena, fires a concussion cannon and throws opponents clean over its head.
A lean ninja of a machine that projects translucent copies of itself. Its shadows strike, slide and grab from where the robot is not. Opponents who watch the robot instead of its shadow do not watch for long.
Hunched and spindly, with long red spikes on its elbows and knees. Thorn lives on speed and surprise: kicks out of nowhere, attacks off the arena walls and a charge that leads with the spikes.
Legs of flared thrusters painted with gold flames, hands like heavy gold blocks. Pyros rides on jets of fire: a spinning ring of flame, a thrust that crosses the arena in an instant and swoops from the air.
A slender, spiky robot with a crystalline torso and lightning crackling in its hands. Electra keeps opponents at a distance with ball lightning, thunder rolling along the floor and a spray of electric shards.
A samurai among robots, with long red blades along its forearms. Anything that jumps at the Katana meets the rising blade; anything that stays down gets its head stomped.
Lean and agile, with clawed hands that can leave its arms and fly at the opponent. Head-butts and flip kicks make the Shredder one of the most aggressive robots in the arena.
Top-heavy and unorthodox: an armored head-body on a coiled spring, rolling on a spiked wheel and swinging chains with spiked balls. The Flail spins opponents into throws and charges in fists first.
A winged demon of steel, with mechanical bat wings, a horned head and red talons. The Gargoyle owns the air: diving claws, flying talons and a charge on its wings.
Sleek and tall, with round gold joints and a red triangle on its chest. Chronos bends the rules of space: it teleports across the arena, phases through solid matter and freezes enemies in stasis.
Major Kreissack's own super-robot: bulky angular armor, a gold horn crest and fists that launch grenades and missiles. Nova waits at the end of the road. It is not on the select screen, but pilots have been known to find it anyway.
Every robot's moves are in the manual and in the pause menu's move list.
A heavy ice juggernaut, slow, strong and hard to put down, crowned with red ice crystals. It throws spears of ice, charges shoulder first on a slide of ice and stomps frost spikes out of the floor.
Made for the remaster, in the spirit of the originals. Comes with the game as a mod, off until you turn on New robots and arenas in Extras › Mods.
Light and fast, a wind robot with swept fins streaming back from its head. Its jumps are high and floaty: it throws whirlwinds, rises in a spinning kick that hits again and again, and dives out of the sky.
Made for the remaster, in the spirit of the originals. Comes with the game as a mod, off until you turn on New robots and arenas in Extras › Mods.
An industrial driller with a spiral drill for one arm and a claw for the other. It charges drill first, drives up in a corkscrew uppercut and fires its drill head across the arena like a missile.
Made for the remaster, in the spirit of the originals. Comes with the game as a mod, off until you turn on New robots and arenas in Extras › Mods.
A phantom in a hood and a cloak of blades, with lasers built into its forearms. It fires bolts of light, fades out to reappear behind its opponent and dashes in on a kick that trails afterimages.
Made for the remaster, in the spirit of the originals. Comes with the game as a mod, off until you turn on New robots and arenas in Extras › Mods.
The W.A.R. circuit
Each brings a body and a mind to the neural link: their power, agility and endurance shape every robot they pilot, and the computer plays each with their own personality.
Forced to fend for herself after her parents' mysterious death, Crystal's determination has earned great respect.
Although he is the youngest competitor in tournament history, Steffan fights with skill beyond his years.
Recruited by Raven for his outstanding kickboxing skills, Milano's speed and dexterity are legendary.
Christian's aggressive style strikes fear in the minds of competitors and desire in the hearts of many young women.
Over his many years of competition, Shirro has developed unrivaled power, yet retains a youthful sense of humor.
His calculating and devious nature along with well-rounded abilities often intimidate Jean-Paul's opponents.
A retired triathlete, Ibrahim's patience and honesty have made him a valued mentor to many aspiring competitors.
Angel's past is shrouded in mystery. Aside from her reclusive disposition and strong will, little is known of her.
A veteran fighter, Cossette has become cautious, defensive, and bitter after being crippled in the arena.
As Major Kreissack's bodyguard and right-hand man, Raven has beaten and humiliated many inside, and outside, the arena.
The master of the W.A.R. tournament circuit, and its final opponent. Kreissack pilots Nova, and he has never been told no.
Five arenas, five hazards
Painted again in HD and opened up to widescreen: the Danger Room's spikes, the Power Plant's fences, the Fire Pit's fireballs and the Desert's strafing jets are all still here.
Where W.A.R.'s machines get their first public testing: a steel pit under floodlights, the crowd behind the cage net.
Spikes shoot out of the walls. Keep your opponent against them, and yourself away from them.
Wall spikes
Built inside a lightning-receptive power plant: the walls deliver electric shocks.
Electrified fences
Holographic spheres ignite fireballs under the fighters, over a grate of glowing lava.
Fireballs
Golden dunes at sunset, and fighter jets strafing anything that stands still.
Strafing jets
Something lives under the Fire Pit
The one-player game's two secret opponents, as the 1994 program hides them. On Champion or harder, a destruction in the Fire Pit, then your robot's Fire & Ice move, sends it through the floor to fight Fire, an enhanced Katana in the burning pit below. On Ultimate, the same against Fire leads on to Ice, a translucent Shadow in a frozen pit.
Every screen, every mode
One and two players, the demo, the full tournament career with the mech lab, upgrades, training and the newsroom, the scoreboard, the intro and every ending. The menus were tidied up without losing anything, and a few things the 1994 menus promised finally work.
03 Fight effects
Remastered fights get a layer of modern effects, driven by what happens in the fight.
Rising embers, torchlight on the robots, heat haze over the grate.
The sunset behind the robots, sun shafts, sand blowing over the dunes.
The electrified fences throw blue light across the arena.
A flash, a shockwave, sparks and a slow-motion zoom on the final blow.
The effects are only for the eyes. They never touch the game's state or its random numbers, so a fight plays out exactly the same with them on or off (a test checks it). Each group can be turned off in Options › Graphics › Effects.
04 New ways to play
All of this is new, and none of it changes how the original plays unless you use it.
A dummy that never goes down, and the tools of modern fighting games: frame data and pixel-exact hitboxes, record the dummy and play it back, answer with a reversal, and combo trials for every robot, found by searching the game itself.
Fourteen languages, the 1994 texts and everything new, drawn in the original pixel font where its letters reach.
Fight a friend on another computer of your home network, on any of the three systems. Both play the very same fight, tick for tick, and only tell each other what was pressed.
Online Coming soon
Every fight is saved. Watch at any speed, step frame by frame, and save a clip as an MP4 or a GIF.
Records and 20 achievements, with nothing locked behind them.
Build your own robot from the new robots' parts: one's frame, another's head, a third one's special moves,
a size, a weight and three colors. It becomes a full fighter on the spot, shared as a small .omfbot
file.
Scored to Twenty Ninety-Seven (Remix) by Hadal Static: each credit pilots a robot against something the remaster had to beat (tech debt, spaghetti code, pixel noise) and wins on the beat.
Fewer opponents, their robots as they were or the new ones, more or less prize money. They show up in
Tournament play, shared as .omftrn files.
Victor and Kristen call the rounds, the knockouts and the winners, and after a fight a newsreader reads the TV report aloud, names and all.
The winner, a line of theirs, and the fight in numbers. And a fight camera, if you want it.
05 New robots and arenas
Four robots and four arenas made for the remaster, in the spirit of the originals. The 1994 game stays as it was: they come with it as a mod, off until you turn on New robots and arenas in Extras › Mods.
They play like the originals: the full set of moves, a throw, a scrap and a destruction finisher, the player's three colors, and a computer that knows how to fight with them. Pick them from the robot select above, or see their moves in the manual. Their HD frames are rendered in Blender from the remaster's own 3D models.
A space station's hangar with the Earth in its window. Dust floats in the low gravity, and now and then a shuttle passes outside.
A frozen cavern under the aurora. Snow blows in, frost mist creeps over the ice, shooting stars fall over the mountains.
A skyscraper's roof in the rain above a neon city. Lightning flashes over the skyline as a hover-car cruises by.
A glass dome on the sea floor. Bubbles rise, light ripples over the floor, a submersible glides past.
06 Mods and OMF Studio
Mods add robots, arenas and pilots that play exactly like the game's own, in both looks, in every mode and in replays. OMF Studio makes them, in the game's own formats, pixel for pixel.
.omfmod to share
08 Play
Download the game, free. Nothing to install: each download is the whole game in one file, its HD artwork and its music included, ready to run from anywhere.
Windows 10 or 11
Also for Snapdragon PCs · Older PCs
macOS 12 or later
Also for Intel Macs
AppImage, x64 or ARM64
Also for ARM64
Computer, tablet or phone
Touch controls, and it works offline once loaded
Version 0.4.0 · every download, OMF Studio and the first start · release notes
Credits
Jared WoodruffHuman coder
Hadal StaticThe credits' song, Twenty Ninety-Seven (Remix)
Following the reverse engineering of OpenOMF. All credits and the license
