Liero (1998)
Finland's Cult Freeware Split-Screen Classic Fusing Real-Time Worms with Quake Ferocity
Liero (Finnish for 'earthworm') is a legendary 1998 MS-DOS freeware action game programmed by Finnish developer Joosa Riekkinen. Famously described as 'real-time Worms meets Quake,' it pitted two players shoulder-to-shoulder at a single keyboard inside 100% pixel-destructible subterranean dirt arenas powered by grappling-hook physics, custom reload timers, and relentless subterranean firepower.
Turbo Pascal Pixel Blitting, Ninja Rope Momentum, and Zero-Reload Mayhem
Coded in Borland Turbo Pascal 7.0 with inline assembly routines to drive blistering 320x200 VGA Mode 13h particle effects, Joosa Riekkinen's Liero built upon Finland's fertile 1990s shareware cave-shooter tradition (such as MoleZ) while discarding Worms' polite turn timers. Two tiny earthworms duel in split-screen across dense dirt caverns studded with indestructible boulders, using an ever-present Ninja Rope grappling hook to sling themselves through freshly blasted shafts. Selecting five weapons from an outrageous 40-item arsenal—including the Chiquita Bomb, Mini-Nuke, Larpa, and Gauss Gun—players frequently set reload times to 0%, unleashing continuous tunnels of shrapnel.
The Lost Source Code, Computer-Lab Folklore, and Influence on Soldat and Noita
Shortly after releasing definitive version 1.33 in February 1999, Riekkinen suffered an unbacked hard-drive crash that destroyed Liero's original source code, freezing the classic executable in amber. Compact enough to fit onto a single floppy disk, Liero spread virally across school computer labs from Finland, Sweden, and Poland to Turkey. Years later, programmer Erik 'Gliptic' Lindroos painstakingly decompiled the binary with Riekkinen's blessing to preserve frame-accurate OpenLiero. Liero's kinetic rope-swinging and granular pixel destruction directly inspired Michał Marcinkowski's Soldat (2002), Teeworlds, and Finnish falling-sand roguelike masterpiece Noita (2020).