Blaster! Is Back: The 1997 Shooter CD Projekt Published Before The Witcher
Some re-releases bring back a classic everyone remembers. This one brings back a game most people outside Poland never played — which makes it more interesting, not less. Katharsis, released in the West as Blaster!, a horizontally scrolling shooter from 1997, has returned to PC this week as a restored edition from TopWare Interactive, available on GOG and Steam.
A Polish Shooter With an Unusual Family Tree
Katharsis was made by Metropolis Software House, a Warsaw studio founded in 1992 by Adrian Chmielarz and Grzegorz Miechowski. In Poland, it was published by a small distributor called CD Projekt — more than a decade before The Witcher, and long before Cyberpunk 2077. TopWare handled the UK release under the Blaster! name, and it’s TopWare bringing it back now.
The people involved went on to bigger things. Chmielarz left Metropolis in 2002 and later co-founded People Can Fly, the studio behind Painkiller and Bulletstorm, and then The Astronauts, makers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Metropolis itself was eventually bought by CD Projekt in 2009 and closed the same year. So this small DOS shooter sits at the start of a surprisingly important line in European game development.
What the Game Actually Is
The setup is pure 1990s sci-fi. A colony ship carrying 1,000 settlers leaves Earth in 2616 and vanishes. Two thousand years later, an unknown spacecraft attacks one of Earth’s cities, and you’re one of the few survivors, flying a ship called the Eagle against the invasion.
What set it apart at the time was ambition. Half of its twenty levels take place in space and half underwater, where you escort a bomb meant to destroy the enemy base. You can move in every direction, use an afterburner, and the end-of-level boss fights play out against 3D backgrounds — a lot for a shareware shooter in 1997.
What’s in the New Version
This isn’t just the DOS original wrapped in an emulator. The restored release lets you switch between the original 1997 graphics and sound and a modern, enhanced presentation — the same toggle that’s become standard in good remasters. On GOG it runs natively on Windows rather than through DOSBox, with English, German, Polish and Russian text.
On Steam, the standard edition is £7.99, and the Master Edition bundles the game with its soundtrack and a Digital Deluxe upgrade. The two add-ons are also sold separately at £2.65 each. It’s on GOG too. (Prices correct at time of writing. Both stores are running a 40% launch discount until 23 October, bringing the game down to £4.79 on Steam.)
Worth a Look?
If you grew up on R-Type and its imitators, Blaster! is a curiosity worth a few pounds: a reminder that the 1990s shoot-’em-up scene wasn’t only Japanese and American, and that some of Europe’s biggest studios have roots in games almost nobody remembers. And with the original visuals a single toggle away, you can see exactly what Polish players saw in 1997.
Related: Looking Back: R-Type (1987) · Best Retro Games to Play on PC in 2026
