A cult ’80s strategy-sim is getting a surprisingly serious second chance. Mike Singleton’s Midwinter is being rebuilt from the ground up as a modern PC remaster in Rust and Bevy, with the blessing of the current rights holder. It’s called Midwinter Remaster, and there’s already a pre‑alpha you can poke at.
Developer DrEvil is aiming for a faithful recreation rather than a reimagining. The game will have the same 32 recruitable characters, the same desperate guerrilla war against General Masters, same frozen 160,000 square mile island to ski, drive, and hang‑glide across. Underneath that, though, everything’s been rebuilt on a modern stack, with a new engine, better draw distance, and quality-of-life tweaks layered over the original mechanics. The current public build is labeled pre‑alpha, with the developer openly calling it a work in progress.
If you’ve never touched the original, Midwinter was seriously ahead of its time, a hybrid of open-world exploration, first-person action, and turn-based grand strategy where you juggle multiple resistance fighters, recruiting allies and sabotaging an invading army across a huge snowy island. You’re skiing into sniper duels, hijacking vehicles, and watching the war evolve as time advances piece by piece, a kind of proto-immersive sim and sandbox tactics game long before those terms were common.
The dev is actively asking for feedback from people who remember “skiing into combat with nothing but grenades and a sniper rifle,” and according to the website, they’re actively seeking contributors as well. If Midwinter Remaster sticks the landing, it could become one of the more important preservation wins of the year.
Source: Midwinter Remaster Website via Indie Retro News
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