Skip to main content
PC Gamer PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES
UK EditionUK US EditionUS CA EditionCanada AU EditionAustralia
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
  • Games
  • Hardware
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Guides
  • Video
  • Forum
  • More
    • PC Gaming Show
    • PC Gamer Clips
    • Software
    • Codes
    • Coupons
    • Movies & TV
    • Magazine
    • Newsletter
    • Affiliate links
    • Meet the team
    • Community guidelines
    • 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$1
Subscribe now
Popular
  • NEW: PC Gamer Clips!
  • Resident Evil
  • Arc Raiders
  • Best PC gear
  • Game Quizzes
  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 affiliate 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 Doom and 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 downloads 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 downloading them all.

As the website says, extract the first three files into the /Daikatana/data folder. Then download 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 supports 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 user-created levels, are its most significant mods. The 1.3 patch is an essential download for playing at high resolutions, and the user-made levels are essential for playing online.

There aren’t any other significant Daikatana mods that I’ve seen, but you can download 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 joining 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).

  • Facebook
  • X
  • Whatsapp
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest
  • Flipboard
  • Email
Share this article
Join the conversation
Follow us
Add us as a preferred source on Google
PC Gamer
Get the PC Gamer Newsletter

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.


By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

You are now subscribed

Your newsletter sign-up was successful


Want to add more newsletters?

GamesRadar+

Every Friday

GamesRadar+

Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.

GTA 6 O'clock

Every Thursday

GTA 6 O'clock

Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.

Knowledge

Every Friday

Knowledge

From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.

The Setup

Every Thursday

The Setup

Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.

Switch 2 Spotlight

Every Wednesday

Switch 2 Spotlight

Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.

The Watchlist

Every Saturday

The Watchlist

Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.

SFX

Once a month

SFX

Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!


An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Subscribe to our newsletter
Latest in FPS
A charging daemonette blurs with speed
Looks like Boltgun 2 will be the Warhammer game to finally give the setting's horniest Chaos god its due
 
 
Doom: The Dark Ages, a game by id Software, image showing the Doom Slayer.
Doom: The Dark Ages director says the upcoming DLC is 'basically like a sequel': 'It's just ginormous'
 
 
Aiming at a crab in Cicadamata.
If you love Marathon's vectorheart style but not its PvP, get your aesthetic fix from the gorgeously overstimulating demo for this time trial FPS instead
 
 
marathon
Is Marathon's time-to-kill too fast, or am I too Arc Raiders-pilled?
 
 
Marathon: The Destroyer shell leaping backwards off a ledge, firing a weapon.
Marathon Server Slam update: Bungie says if you're not getting enough PvP action, maybe you're just not looking for fights in the right places
 
 
The player clutches a semi-automatic rifle, standing in the centre of a street surrounded by police cars.
The creators of Postal just announced a new FPS where you play as a victim of the Postal Dude's original killing spree, which is certainly an angle
 
 
Latest in Features
A warlock stands in the middle of standing stones as they're hit by lightning
Why I love Diablo 2, Act 1
 
 
A ruined skull being investigated
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 2, 2026)
 
 
Lady Dimitrescu fires a rocket launcher in the streets of Raccoon City
Classic Resident Evil mutates into a comedy fever-dream through the power of BioRand
 
 
A Fortnite version of Kill Bill wields a long rifle, which glows red at the end.
Fortnite's no-aim-required lock-on assault rifle is an all-time stinker, and I hope Epic vaults it into oblivion
 
 
Stardew Valley - a player uses a heart emote in front of a complete community center
Stardew Valley has basically become the Tolkien of cozy gaming
 
 
Bubblegum Galaxy
Almost all the cozy games of March have demos to try and I've been snapping up as many as I can
 
 
  1. Pick the products from our latest recommendations.
    1
    Best gaming PC builds: Shop all our recommended system builds as we ride out the RAMpocalypse
  2. 2
    The best fish tank PC case in 2026: I've tested heaps of stylish chassis but only a few have earned my recommendation
  3. 3
    Best Hall effect keyboards in 2026: the fastest, most customizable keyboards for competitive gaming
  4. 4
    Best PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming in 2026: the only Gen 5 drives I will allow in my PC
  5. 5
    Best graphics cards in 2026: I've tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today's top cards
  1. A Phanteks XT V3 PC case on a desk with various PC parts.
    1
    Phanteks XT V3 case review
  2. 2
    ThunderX3 Solo 360 review
  3. 3
    MSI MEG X870E Ace Max review
  4. 4
    MSI MAG B850 Gaming Plus Max WiFi review
  5. 5
    Wooting 60HE v2 review

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

Add as a preferred source on Google
  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

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

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...