<img src="https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p/?c1=2&amp;c2=10055482&amp;cv=4.4.0&amp;cj=1"> Skip to main content
PC Gamer PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
flag of UK
UK
flag of US
US
flag of Canada
Canada
flag of Australia
Australia
  • Games
  • Hardware
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Guides
  • Video
  • Forum
  • More
    • PC Gaming Show
    • Software
    • Movies & TV
    • Coupons
    • Magazine
    • Newsletter
    • Community guidelines
    • links
    • Meet the team
    • About PC Gamer
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
Why subscribe?
  • Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag
  • Try a single issue or save on a subscription
  • Issues delivered straight to your door or device
From$32.49
View
Popular
  • Memorial Day Deals
  • Computex 2025
  • TES4: Oblivion
  • Elden Ring: Nightreign
  • GTA 6

Recommended reading

An image of a corpse with the text &quot;You&#039;ve been re-educated.&quot;
Adventure I played the lost videogame sequel to 1984, and came away more nostalgic than ever for gaming's awkward adolescence in 1999
Doom Will It Run Limited Edition with Box that plays Doom
FPS A new limited edition of Doom comes in a box that runs Doom
Ragnarok Battle Offline
Action After punishing my graphics card with Monster Hunter Wilds, I've returned to the rock-solid frame rates of my old hunting grounds: Windows XP
A screenshot from the PC version of Doom: The Dark Ages, using the Ultra quality preset
Handheld Gaming PCs Doom: The Dark Ages is unplayable on handheld gaming PCs at the moment but it's not because the hardware isn't good enough
The very first wave of enemies in Okuplok&#039;s Slaughter Map for Doom
FPS One of classic Doom's most brutal challenge runs is finally conquered after 13 years of mega-scale demon slaughter
Blink and you&#039;ll miss this Evangelion reference in speedy Doom mod Blitz
FPS Doom mod Blitz: Race Against Time only gives you half a minute per map, so it's a good thing Doomguy runs at 50 mph
Sigil
FPS John Romero's brutal megawad Sigil 2 has formally chainsawed its way into Bethesda's Doom + Doom 2 remaster
  1. Games
  2. FPS
  3. Daikatana

How to run Daikatana on Windows 7/8

Features
By Wes Fenlon published 16 April 2015

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an commission. Here’s how it works.

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 1 of 37
Page 1 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 2 of 37
Page 2 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 3 of 37
Page 3 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 4 of 37
Page 4 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 5 of 37
Page 5 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 6 of 37
Page 6 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 7 of 37
Page 7 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 8 of 37
Page 8 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 9 of 37
Page 9 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 10 of 37
Page 10 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 11 of 37
Page 11 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 12 of 37
Page 12 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 13 of 37
Page 13 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 14 of 37
Page 14 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 15 of 37
Page 15 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 16 of 37
Page 16 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 17 of 37
Page 17 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 18 of 37
Page 18 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 19 of 37
Page 19 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 20 of 37
Page 20 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 21 of 37
Page 21 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 22 of 37
Page 22 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 23 of 37
Page 23 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 24 of 37
Page 24 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 25 of 37
Page 25 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 26 of 37
Page 26 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 27 of 37
Page 27 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 28 of 37
Page 28 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 29 of 37
Page 29 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 30 of 37
Page 30 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 31 of 37
Page 31 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 32 of 37
Page 32 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 33 of 37
Page 33 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 34 of 37
Page 34 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 35 of 37
Page 35 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 36 of 37
Page 36 of 37

Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.

How do you follow up the enormous success of Quake, two of the most influential PC games ever made? For John Romero, the answer was the huge and ambitious Daikatana, a first-person shooter jumbling together cyberpunk and feudal Japan and Greek mythology and a dude named Superfly Johnson. Daikatana is a weird game. It’s also an infamous flop. After two and a half years, it turned out gamers didn’t really want to Suck It Down—they decided to play Deus Ex instead, which was released a mere month after Daikatana.

Unlike many of the games features on Pixel Boost, Daikatana isn’t a classic. It’s not one of the PC’s legendary bests. But it is a fascinating curiosity, sprawling with varied environments and enemies. Thanks to GOG, Daikatana is easy to play today—and thanks to a great fan patch, it’s playable in widescreen, at 4K and beyond. There’s still a community centered around Daikatana’s multiplayer. Here’s how to play John Romero’s Big Sword on modern Windows.

Install it

You can buy Daikatana from GOG for $6, or on Steam for $7. Both versions of the game come patched to 1.2, the last official patch. But to play on modern Windows, there’s an even better fan-made patch waiting to be installed.

After installing the game, go to DGibson’s Bitbucket page, home of the Daikatana 1.3 project. Head to the s page, where you’ll find several options: a pak9 file with community maps, map updates necessary for playing online on the 1.3 community’s servers, 32-bit textures, and a Windows version of the 1.3 patch. I recommend ing them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then the “Windows pre-Beta version from 2015-01-23 FULL PACKAGE” file and extract it into the main Daikatana directory. You’ll overwrite a few files, including the game’s executable. With that, Daikatana 1.3 is installed. Time to boot it up.

Run it in high resolution

Run Daikatana and go into the game’s video options. Here you can choose your monitor’s native resolution. The Daikatana 1.3 patch actually s up to 5120x2880, should you have a 5K display. Make sure texture quality and anisotropic filtering are turned all the way up. You may also want to nudge up brightness.

Daikatana should now run at a smooth, high resolution 60 frames per second.

Mod it

The 1.3 community patch for Daikatana, along with the -created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential for playing at high resolutions, and the -made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can a standalone Daikatana Deathmatch client, if you just want to get your multiplayer on.

Page 37 of 37
Page 37 of 37
Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Social Links Navigation
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before ing the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

Read more
An image of a corpse with the text &quot;You&#039;ve been re-educated.&quot;
I played the lost videogame sequel to 1984, and came away more nostalgic than ever for gaming's awkward adolescence in 1999
Doom Will It Run Limited Edition with Box that plays Doom
A new limited edition of Doom comes in a box that runs Doom
Ragnarok Battle Offline
After punishing my graphics card with Monster Hunter Wilds, I've returned to the rock-solid frame rates of my old hunting grounds: Windows XP
A screenshot from the PC version of Doom: The Dark Ages, using the Ultra quality preset
Doom: The Dark Ages is unplayable on handheld gaming PCs at the moment but it's not because the hardware isn't good enough
The very first wave of enemies in Okuplok&#039;s Slaughter Map for Doom
One of classic Doom's most brutal challenge runs is finally conquered after 13 years of mega-scale demon slaughter
Blink and you&#039;ll miss this Evangelion reference in speedy Doom mod Blitz
Doom mod Blitz: Race Against Time only gives you half a minute per map, so it's a good thing Doomguy runs at 50 mph
Latest in FPS
Tim Sweeney arrives at U.S. district court in Oakland, California, U.S., on Friday, May, 14, 2021
1741 days after being kicked off iPhones, Fortnite is back on the US App Store
Borderlands 4 screenshot
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford tells anyone worried about an $80 Borderlands 4 pricetag that 'if you're a real fan, you'll make it happen,' reminding us all of the value in choosing not to tweet
Rainbow Six Siege: Rauora key art
The 'new era' of Rainbow Six Siege means you're going to need some newer hardware if you want to play
A close-up of Strelok&#039;s face in Stalker.
Stalker remaster reviews crater to 'Mostly Negative' as players lament deleted Soviet monuments, yanked Russian language, and blurry graphics that I didn't notice in 23 hours playing
The G-Man looking at the camera.
Former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw says he 'retired too hard', but there's no way he's coming back for Half-Life 3: 'We need new stuff, [not] me going 'Well the G-Man wouldn't do that in my day''
Borderlands 4 teaser image
Borderlands is the latest battleground for Steam review bombing, but the justification is extremely flimsy
Latest in Features
Geralt of Rivia&#039;s white hair
The original Polish Witcher comics are available in English if you can get past the way Geralt's fringe looks like the mustache of a cartoon walrus who is also a circus ringleader
Nicolas Cage as John Madden and Christian Bale as Al Davis, inset picture of Cage looking crazy from Vampire&#039;s Kiss
Which version of Nicolas Cage will we get in the Madden movie? Boy, I hope it's the unhinged one
Key art for 14 underappreciated games feature, including characters from SKin Deep, Solium Infernum, 1000xRESIST, MechWarriror 5: Clans, and more
The 14 most underappreciated games of the last year that you shouldn't have ignored
A large illuminate structure explodes in the middle of a Super Earth city in Helldivers 2.
In my first hour with Helldivers 2's new city maps, I've caused millions in property damage, been to several Illuminate raves, and committed treason in the fog of war
Trucks in a disaster zone
This hardcore driving sim about rebuilding towns after natural disasters is, surprisingly, a super-chill hangout game for up to 4 friends
Yennefer in The Witcher 3.
ing The Witcher 3's toughest choices (and the objectively correct answers)
  1. Annapro carrying case, GameSir Nova Lite controller, SteelSeries Arctis GameBuds, and Asus ROG Falchion RX Low Profile keyboard on a blue background with PC Gamer Recommended logo
    1
    Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads
  2. 2
    Best graphics card for laptops in 2025: the mobile GPUs I'd want in my next gaming laptop
  3. 3
    Best mini PCs in 2025: The compact computers I love the most
  4. 4
    Best 14-inch gaming laptop in 2025: The top compact gaming laptops I've held in these hands
  5. 5
    Best Mini-ITX motherboards in 2025: My pick from all the mini mobo marvels I've tested
  1. Onimusha 2
    1
    Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny review
  2. 2
    Blades of Fire review
  3. 3
    NZXT H9 Flow RGB+ case review
  4. 4
    Soundcore Liberty 5 earbuds review
  5. 5
    Keychron M5 review

PC Gamer is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • Future's experts
  • and conditions
  • Cookies policy
  • with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

Please or to comment

Please wait...