Shadow Warrior, often known by its initials SW, is a first-person shooter

First-person shooter

First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

 computer game developed by 3D Realms

3D Realms

3D Realms is a current video game publisher and former video game developer based in Garland, Texas, United States, established in 1987...

 and released on May 13, 1997 by GT Interactive. Shadow Warrior was developed using Ken Silverman

Ken Silverman

Ken Silverman is a game programmer, best known for writing the Build engine used in Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, and more than a dozen other games in the mid- to late-1990s...

's Build engine

Build engine

The Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms. Like the Doom engine, the Build engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites to populate the world geometry with...

 and improved on 3D Realms' previous Build engine game, Duke Nukem 3D

Duke Nukem 3D

Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter computer game developed by 3D Realms and published by GT Interactive Software. The full version was released for the PC . It is a sequel to the platform games Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II published by Apogee...

. Mark Adams ported Shadow Warrior to Mac OS

Mac OS

Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

 in August 1997.

The game's improvements included introduction of true room-over-room

Room-over-room

Room-over-room is a term used to describe placing a room directly above another, often used in reference to id Software's Doom series. In the original Doom games, all mapping was done in 2D, while height variance was done via numbers, so getting the effect to work was an achievement at the time...

 situations, the use of voxel

Voxel

A voxel is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. This is analogous to a pixel, which represents 2D image data in a bitmap...

s instead of sprites

Sprite (computer graphics)

In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene...

 for weapons and usable inventory items, transparent water, climbable ladders, and assorted vehicles to drive (some armed with weapons).