What Space Quest 2099 is
Space Quest 2099 is a stylised multiplayer sci-fi first-person shooter built around Quake 3 style combat and movement. It plays like Quake 3 meets Command and Conquer: fast shooting, arena-style fights, and a cooperative campaign that leans hard into comedy. Expect live action cutscenes with special effects, terribly cheesy one liners, and a story that knows exactly how silly it is. The tone sits in that late 1990s and early 2000s cheese made famous by Raven Software, with parodies, memes and satire threaded through robots, aliens and futuristic settings. It calls itself an old school project that got completely out of hand, started by a developer at seventeen as a way to avoid A level maths and finished a few years later. The soundtrack uses Blake Robinson's Synthetic Orchestra on a royalty free basis.
Playing it with friends
The main way to play together is the cooperative campaign: you and your group take control of Thunderchild's intrepid crew and shoot baddies across episodes of intergalactic space adventure. Movement and combat are built on Quake 3 engine designs, so the group stays in constant motion and the shootouts stay quick and direct. When you would rather fight each other than alongside each other, the game includes a deathmatch suite where you blow each other to smithereens. Both online co-op and online PvP are supported, so a group can split between working through episodes or turning the arenas against itself.
Before you start
Go in expecting comedy first and spectacle in the rough-and-ready sense: the game states openly that it was created on a budget of £40, and that taste may vary if you want a higher budget space adventure. The humor is deliberately crude and satirical, with memes and parody baked into the presentation rather than played straight. It is a first-person shooter with a cinematic, colorful, stylised look and 3D arenas, tagged old school and arena shooter, so the appeal is fast shooting and silly company rather than realism. It works alone or with a group, and it is free.