Atom Zombie Smasher, a 15-year-old game, just got updated out of the blue on Steam

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Atom Zombie Smasher has been in my Steam account about as long as I've had one. I held out for as long as I could, but eventually games on CD started demanding I install Steam to run them, so I caved and soon after got Portal and a handful of digital-only indie games like Audiosurf, Uplink, and Blendo's zombie tower-defense game. It was basically all over for my free time from then on.

Which is why it's wild, more than a decade later, to be reminded of Atom Zombie Smasher's existence by it being patched. This 15th anniversary update isn't going to transform the top-down rescue sim where the zombies are tiny pink squares into The Last of Us 3, but it does add a horde of little changes.

For starters, where before you could slow time down to 10%, now you can drop it all the way down to 1%. That's so slow you're basically making Atom Zombie Smasher turn-based, a change I approve of in any tactics game. Also changed: you can deselect units with the Escape key; the seams around cutscene vignette art are gone; and when you're on the Behind the Scenes screen the scroll limit works so you don't scroll too far and end up looking at the game as it would be seen from a passing aeroplane.

A Mac-specific startup bug has also been removed, along with outdated social buttons, and a secret reset key that was never supposed to ship. If Atom Zombie Smasher does crash on you now, a form will pop up to help your problem be addressed.

If you've never played Atom Zombie Smasher it's currently 50% off on Steam and well worth a look. From there developer Blendo Games went on to make some of our all-time favorites, like Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, and the winner of our Best Immersive Sim award in 2025, Skin Deep. Honestly, I'd still rate Atom Zombie Smasher against any of them.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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