Since its launch in 2012, Brian Provinciano has been bringing Retro City Rampage, his homage to ’80s games and pop culture, to just about every platform on the market. In 2013, he even released a limited prototype that could play on a real NES—hearkening back to the project’s beginnings as an attempt to make a version of Grand Theft Auto that was developed on Nintendo’s old standby. But yesterday, Provinciano took his obsession with vintage verisimilitude even further by announcing Retro City Rampage 486, a new version built to play on computers from as far back as 1989.
Unlike the NES experiment, according to Provinciano, this is a complete conversion that includes all of the game’s missions and modes. The “486” in the title is a reference to the Intel 80486 processor, first released in 1989. Aside from one of those cutting-edge CPUs, your rig will need to run MS-DOS and pack a whopping 4 megabytes of RAM (plus 3.7 megabytes of disk space) to handle this puppy. Or if you don’t happen to have a 26-year-old computer lying around, you can just play it in an emulator like DOSBox once Provinciano releases it for free to owners of Retro City Rampage’s modern PC edition. But then you might find yourself longing for the halcyon days of floppy disks and tiny CRT monitors as you stare at the disgusting perfection of your LCD screen.