Bad Toys launched in 1995 for Windows 3.1, developed by Czech brothers Pavel and Libor Valach, and was later re-released as a colorized version called Bad Toys 3D by Tibo Software in 1998. It was promptly forgotten by almost everyone. A toy company gets bought by a defense contractor. A security guard shoots his own daughter and blames the merchandise. A SWAT team vanishes. You punch a factory self-destruct button and get a paragraph of badly proofread text about your character staggering outside. Game over.

Thirty-one years later, developer Cody Blate has dug up that skeleton and built something genuinely unsettling on top of it.

Toyful Wonderworld, released April 3 on Steam and itch.io, is a retro first-person shooter “heavily inspired” by Bad Toys 3D, according to its store page. You explore a corrupted toy factory where the mascots — the “Toyfriends” — have gone homicidal. Three weapons, seven levels, six enemy types, a boss fight. The price: $5.24 on sale, or free on itch.io, where Blate wrote that he made it accessible “so that it’s more accessible to people.”

Two reviews on Steam. Both positive. One player calls it “SOOOOO fun, with some pretty neat fast-paced combat and weird little toys trying to kill ya.” The other delivers the verdict that matters: “A wonderful homage to Bad Toys 3D that keeps the spirit, yet adds so much more that it exceeds the original by far.” They single out the soundtrack and level pacing for capturing “creepy vibes” — something the 1995 original managed partly by accident, pairing serene music with rough weapon sounds in a tonal clash that TV Tropes catalogues as “Soundtrack Dissonance.”

This is the niche retro revival at its purest. Not Doom, not Duke Nukem — those games spawned entire subgenres and never left the conversation. Bad Toys 3D was one of the first shooters built for Windows when the genre still lived on DOS, and its legacy is a barely legible victory screen and a purchase page on Tibo Software’s website that’s somehow still active.

Blate isn’t just paying tribute. He’s rescuing a game that was barely alive to begin with — and according to the few who’ve played both, building something sharper. Two concurrent players. A perfect review score. Sometimes the smallest launches tell the best stories.

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