The City

Lore & Background

In the Serious Sam universe, the City represents a slice of ordinary modern life violently interrupted by the same extraterrestrial or supernatural threats that plague the franchise's other locations. Civilians are long gone by the time Sam arrives; what remains is an empty grid of glass towers, shopping districts, and residential blocks, all now serving as cover and kill-zones in a relentless assault.

The architecture is deliberately generic and contemporary—concrete overpasses, glass-and-steel office blocks, a central plaza with fountains, and narrow side streets lined with shuttered shops. This mundanity is part of the tone: the horror is not an alien war-torn wasteland but a Tuesday-afternoon city simply emptied of people, its traffic lights still cycling, its vending machines still humming, while Sam's gunfire shatters the silence.

Croteam has used the city setting to push its own engine to its limits, layering reflective surfaces, interior lighting, and large open sightlines that let the player see dozens of enemies converging from multiple directions at once. The result is a level that feels less like a corridor and more like a living, breathing urban space under siege.

In Their Own Story

The traffic light on Fifth and Meridian cycles green, yellow, red. No cars. No pedestrians. The fountain in the plaza still throws its lazy arc of water into the afternoon sun, catching the light in a thousand tiny prisms. Sam checks his shotgun, the barrel still warm from the last alley. Somewhere two blocks east, something large is dragging itself across a rooftop, the gravel shifting in a long, slow slide. The city hums its empty hum—HVAC units, a distant transformer buzz, the tick of cooling glass. He moves toward the overpass, boots ringing on the concrete, and the light turns green for no one.

Reader's Guide

Tone and palette: The City reads as late-afternoon urban realism—warm concrete, reflective blue glass, muted greens from sparse street trees, and the flat grey of asphalt. Lighting shifts from open-sky brightness on rooftops to the amber and fluorescent glow of interior corridors and underpasses. The overall mood is tense but not gothic; the threat is the sheer number of enemies closing in from every street and stairwell.

Key set-pieces to expect: a wide central plaza or park that opens the level and forces early wave survival; a stretch of multi-storey office or residential interiors with stairwells and balconies for vertical combat; a street-level corridor flanked by shops and overpasses that creates a natural choke point; and a rooftop or elevated highway finale with long sightlines and exposed positioning. Watch for breakable cover, hidden alcoves behind signage, and the occasional interior room that opens onto a completely different enemy composition.

Lore in the environment: empty storefronts, a still-running news ticker on a building facade, and scattered civilian belongings (a shopping cart, a child's shoe) hint at the sudden evacuation that preceded Sam's arrival. These details are easy to miss in the chaos but ground the level in a specific, implied moment in time.

Introduced in: The City as a distinct level appears in the mainline Serious Sam entries (the original 1999 title and its sequel Serious Sam 2 both feature urban stages). The HD remasters (Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and HD: The Second Encounter, both 2009) updated the visuals with higher-resolution textures and improved lighting while retaining the core layout. Serious Sam 3: BFE (2011) and Serious Sam 4 (2020) continue to use city environments as core settings, evolving the scale and interactivity of the urban space.

Did You Know?

• Croteam, the developer behind the entire Serious Sam franchise, is based in Zagreb, Croatia, and built its own game engine (Croteam Technology) to handle the dense, large-scale environments the series is known for.
• The franchise is famous for its 'crowd' combat design—levels are built around the player facing dozens or even hundreds of enemies simultaneously, a design choice that city-level open sightlines make especially intense.
• Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and HD: The Second Encounter (2009) were remasters that rebuilt the original 1999 and 2002 titles with updated graphics, and the city levels in those remasters feature significantly im
• The protagonist Sam's full name is simply 'Serious Sam'; the franchise has never given him a surname, a detail that has become a running joke in the community.