I thought this would never happen—I fully believed that it couldn't happen—but here we are, on August 4, 2017, and it has happened: Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, an RPG that's been in development since the mid-'90s (1994, I think, but it might have been '97) is now available for purchase on Steam. 

This is a remarkable moment because of Grimoire's long history of hype and broken promises. Arguments about the game, and the solo developer behind it, Cleve Blakemore, can be found in archives of old Usenet threads and forum posts going back to the turn of the century. It was meant to be a Wizardry-killer, and who even knows what Wizardry is anymore? An old Indiegogo campaign promised, in italics and with multiple exclamation marks, that "this game will ship in May 2013," and it did not. When it first appeared on Steam it bore a July 7 release date and I let myself believe that maybe, this time, it was really going to happen. It did not. 

But now, finally, it has. The manual apparently isn't available yet, and Blakemore said it should be ready to go early next week (although under the circumstances I wouldn't hold my breath on that). Steam keys for Indiegogo backers are slated to go out tomorrow. Blakemore also said that he plans to issue weekly patches and monthly "feature upgrades," and he's already released one patch, accompanied by perhaps the most magical update announcement of all time. 

"Sapiens thinks if you have a clinically tested IQ of 183 it means you're better at solving the jumble in the newspaper. This is what Sapiens actually believes. There are other things you can do with a super powered atomic brain nearly 6 full derivatives greater than the intellectual distance between the ordinary man and Koko the Sign Language Gorilla," Blakemore wrote. 

"An ordinary man might be delirious and babbling after 72 hours without sleep, these bug reports forced me to bring on another 0.002% of my brain capacity to solve them with a few keystrokes and upload a new binary to Steam." 

OK then. As for the game itself, it is 100 percent old-school, with "hand-drawn" 2D graphics, MIDI music, and 8-bit sound effects. It promises up to 600 hours of play "in a single game," more than 244 maps to explore, 240 unique monsters, 64 NPCs, and a slew of other features and mechanics. How, or even whether, it all works is hard to say: Steam reviews were positive when it first went live, but over just a couple of hours have sunk to "mixed," as people spend more time with it; the response on other RPG sites is similarly chaotic, caught between the excitement of the moment and the reality of the work. 

Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar is available now (it still feels weird to say it) for $36/£27/€33 on Steam. And now, I invite you to enjoy one of the greatest pre-release hype trailers of all time—from 2012.

Update: So close, and yet not quite. With less than two hours before the scheduled unlock on Steam, Grimoire's release date very suddenly switched to "coming soon." 

"Will be working all day to complete, as soon as I have verified remaining areas that underwent some editing I will begin building deployment packages," Blakemore wrote in a new update. "Sorry but I am just one guy and normally during this crunch time on any software project you have more than one person to help you when the going gets tough. It's all on me and it only gets fixed because I fix it, I can't delegate that bug to a team member."

Blakemore said that he'll put up a "deployable package" on Steam as soon as it's ready, but gave no indication as to when that might be.

Original story:

Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar is one of the most infamous videogames ever to be (almost, but not quite) created. In development since the mid-'90s, it promises players a massive, sprawling old-school RPG/dungeon crawling experience with traces of Wizardry, Might and Magic, Eye of the Beholder, and other first-person, party-based classics. It's missed an untold number of release dates over the years—gamers were joking about it at least as far back as 2010—and so when it turned up on Steam Early Access earlier this year, I figured it was doomed to languish there forever. 

But it looks like I was wrong. Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar was not only given the Greenlight, but it actually has a release date of July 7, and holy cow, that's today. 

"Been working around the clock here to finish up every possible detail before Friday. The game is looking really good. It has been very enjoyable to review areas I have not looked at in a long time and discover they are even more fun than I remember," solo developer Cleve Blakemore said earlier this week. "There are still going to be parts of the game that are not quite polished but the game as it currently stands is truly a one-of-a-kind classic. I have successfully played through all four endings of the game using save points and cheat codes and I found my own product to be more satisfying than any of the Wizardry games and even better than the original Eye of the Beholder series." 

As an old-time gamer and RPG fan, it's honestly a little hard to believe that this is actually happening. To put it in perspective, Grimoire underwent its first beta test in 1998—the same year that games including Baldur's Gate (the original), Half-Life (the original), Unreal (the original),  Fallout 2, and Thief: The Dark Project were released. If you're a teenager, then you almost certainly weren't even born when work on this thing began. That's the kind of development schedule that makes Valve Time look downright punctual.   

Despite Grimoire's looming launch—it's scheduled to go live around 7 pm ET—there's still no price attached to it, although Blakemore said the "proposed price" is $40.