‘I consider it a millennial shooter’: The FPS dev making hit shooters by leaning into ‘2007-core’

Welcome to the first FOV 90 of 2026. In this quiet period for games, I hope you’ve been returning to old FPS favorites or finally firing up ones you’ve been meaning to try. If it isn’t already on your radar, let me tell you why Echo Point Nova should be one of them.

Imagine if the gun ballet of Doom Eternal, the “2007-core” guns of FEAR or Modern Warfare, and the high-velocity locomotion of Tribes were distilled into a grand open-world adventure FPS. It’s got trickshots, hoverboards, bullet time, triple jumps, grapple hooks, and Crackdown-style agility orbs—it is pure, uncut FPS adrenaline, and best of all? It’s got four-player co-op. Echo Point Nova was my favorite FPS of 2024, and it even earned a spot on PC Gamer’s Top 100. There is nothing quite like it on Steam right now, and I wanted to know why.

Late last year, I sat down with Greylock Studio founder Matt Larrabee to talk about the success of Echo Point Nova, his background as a former public school-teacher-turned-game dev, and how his games fit into the growing indie FPS scene. You can use the navigation bar (left on desktop, up on mobile) to cruise around to specific topics.

Interview edited for length.

Greylock origins

PC Gamer: Before we talk Echo Point Nova, I’ve gotta know about your background in games. Tell me about yourself.

Matt Larrabee, Greylock Studio Founder: I used to be a public school teacher, and actually taught programming to middle schoolers. And if you’re teaching programming to middle schoolers, of course you’re gonna teach them how to make games. So I did that for five years, and then at some point I decided I should try to make games on my own. In the afternoons, I was tinkering with game engines. I started off modding Morrowind. That was my first thing. And then from there, I went into messing with Unreal Engine, and I just started sharing clips of what I was making on the internet. And that actually got the attention of publishers. That was Severed Steel, my previous game.

Around 2020 I signed with a publisher, and then I went into full-time game development. I launched Severed Steel in 2021, and that was successful enough that I could keep doing it. I’m a game developer now—it’s just what I do and I’m able to sustain myself.

How does that feel? To make that transition?

You know, life is funny. Like the idea of the hedonic treadmill, you always get used to it. So I have to stop and be intentionally thankful that, like, holy shit, I’m living the dream. I’m making games. But usually I’m just so absorbed in the work and I lose sight of it. But it is awesome.

(Image credit: Greylock Studio)

So for Severed Steel, you were just posting clips of this cool bullet time game on Twitter and got DMs from publishers?

Yeah basically. It may have been a DM, it may have been email, but somehow publishers started talking to me saying “Can you send us a demo of the game?” It’s funny—I was rejected a lot because the game looked cool in a five second gif, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. It was a jank fest [at the time]. So I got rejected a lot, but the publishers I interacted with were kind of nice. Digerati, the publisher who finally signed me, they soft-rejected me. They gave feedback and said, “Why don’t you give us another demo if you can integrate this feedback?” And I did, and they said OK.

Have you always been obsessed with FPSes? Did you experiment with other genres too?

Well, I love FPS. My two genres are FPS and RPG. By RPG, I specifically mean Bethesda-style games. I love Morrowind. There actually is something I released that no one played—it’s called Greylock. It’s a prototype game based on the open Morrowind engine, total jank fest. It’s just a little stupid, silly thing. And I think that’s somewhere on the internet.

Like a little custom campaign?

Yeah. I really wanted to make it into a full game, but an open-world RPG is just a suicide mission for a first-time developer. So many devs do it because the open-world RPG is such a romantic vision. But that did not pan out. So I went for something more straightforward, Severed Steel.

Severed Steel & Echo Point Nova

I want to hear about your big inspirations behind Severed Steel and Echo Point Nova. They’re both movement shooters. They involve bullet time and entering a flow state, right? That really stands out, because movement shooters are an established thing, but they’re not really the indie scene’s favorite FPS to make. We see more “boomer shooters” or throwback FPSes, right? Why are you interested in this other lane?

Yeah, it’s funny. People do call my game a boomer shooter sometimes. I consider it more like a millennial shooter. More in line with Max Payne and FEAR—stuff like that. I liked Doom as a kid, but those were the games that were coming out when I was in high school and got me amped up. Anytime there was a shooter with bullet time, I was in. If I were a bit older [Larrabee is 36], I’d be making more boomer shooter games.

And where did you start with Echo Point Nova? Obviously it shares qualities with Severed Steel, but the open world and mobility were a major step up.

After Severed Steel launched, I made another shot at my open world RPG. I started working on the technology for that, so I was able to generate a voxel landscape and I had characters running around in it. And I was looking at my to-do list and thought, “God, it’s another massive project.” Honestly, I didn’t know if I had the skills for it, because it’s just so daunting.

So then I said, OK, maybe I should make another shooter, but it’ll be open world so I’m still building the skills to make my dream RPG. I took all the work I did on the open world and then put guns into it. At the start, it was going to be more tactical—there was going to be sprinting, crouching, stuff like that. I was really inspired by Metal Gear Solid 5’s open world.

(Image credit: Greylock Studio)

But I wasn’t having a lot of fun with the combat. I remember one day I was in the shower thinking about the game, saying, “This isn’t fun. How do I make it fun?” Then I realized, well, Severed Steel is fun, so maybe make it more like Severed Steel. So I made the character faster, then the slide mechanic evolved into the hoverboard, which is basically an infinite slide. And the co-op came along because again, stupid me, I wanted to make my open-world RPG co-op, which is so dumb. If I do my dream game someday, it’s not going to be co-op, but I had the beginnings of co-op networking there, so I just kept it. And thus, Echo Point Nova was born.

And when did Echo Point Nova’s map become a giant sky archipelago?

At first, the map was one connected continent like the Under The Clouds expansion pack, but I was having trouble making moving between those spaces interesting. Then I watched trailers for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom showing off those sky islands, and I thought that would make all this empty space interesting, because the spaces between islands become jumping puzzles instead of just “hold Shift to slide.”

Echo Point Nova’s reception

Echo Point Nova lets you go fast—like really fast. You need to keep up constant speed and learn to aim while moving, or die. It feels impossible at first, but you get used to it, or at least I did. Did you ever worry that people wouldn’t jive with the speed or stick with it long enough to learn why it’s fun?

What inspired EPN’s speed was pros playing Titanfall 2. They had this movement tech which lets them just soar across the map, and I was thinking well, why should that be an exploit that takes skill and training? Why can’t you just be moving like that within the first ten minutes of the game? The only intimidating thing about it was making the technology work so that arenas could stream in extremely quick. You can’t have the whole world loaded at once. You have to load in chunks as the player moves, and it was quite a headache getting that down.

As far as finding the right audience, I guess the Steam algorithm helps a lot. For example, Echo Point Nova has 96% positive reviews right now [with an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating], but if you took 100 random gamers and gave them Echo Point Nova, I don’t think 96% of them would like it. Not even close to that. So I just have faith that the algorithm and the trailer will filter the players. You watch the trailer and you know if you’re going to like it or not. So it wasn’t a big worry. I just had faith that, if you build it, they will come.

And they did come, right? It seems like it’s done pretty darn well.

Yeah, I think done as well as a small indie team can hope for. I look at other similar indie games and it’s among the top [sales-wise]. Trepang 2 [an FPS more directly inspired by FEAR] sold more. Ultrakill sold more, but you can’t compare yourself to Ultrakill. It’s solid.

That’s kind of what I’m getting at. Ultrakill has cool movement and guns, but it still feels like it’s from a lineage of boomer shooters, which I don’t say pejoratively. It’s different vibes: It’s arenas, it’s evolved from Quake. And I don’t really know what Echo Point Nova is evolved from because it feels like its own thing.

Yeah, it is very different vibes. You’re fighting human enemies, so it keeps that Call of Duty and FEAR lineage.

And the guns, too. They’re very Modern Warfare and Fear in their shape, time period, attachments, and aim-down-sights feel. It’s very 2007-core.

Haha yeah, 2007-core. That’s a good way to put it. Even when I played Unreal Tournament as a kid, I would use mods to add in M4s and AK-47s. I’ve always been more attracted to realistic weapons than energy weapons and stuff.

You mentioned before that you conducted playtests by inviting friends and neighbors to come play Echo Point Nova in your kitchen. Did any of that feedback ever say, “Maybe you should rethink letting people go 100 miles per hour at all times?”

People do say that online, but none of my in-person playtesters said that. People say Severed Steel is too fast, too. It’s funny because I added an option to lower the game speed in Severed Steel, but not in EPN. Back then part of me was kind of worried the speed would be too much. But also, you can play Echo Point Nova with unlimited bullet time. I was happy to add that as an option.

My games are hard, but I’m not someone who thinks you have to earn your way into my game. So I guess I was worried that it might be too fast, but instead of changing EPN’s identity, I added options for people who feel that way.

Do you have any other thoughts on how Echo Point Nova has been received, or where it sits in the FPS space?

I do think about how, for both games, a lot of reviews say that “this game is slept on” or “why is no one talking about this?” or “it’s such a hidden gem.” And that makes me wonder: Is there something I should be doing to get it out to more people? Should I be marketing? Should I be like Clash Of Clans, paying podcasters to talk about Echo Point Nova? I don’t know. My last publisher tried that for Severed Steel, and it was never obvious to me that it paid off. I don’t know, [FPS YouTuber] JackFrags covered Echo Point Nova. What more can I do?

Part of me thinks they’re just niche games. Like, I’m a niche games guy! My favorite Elder Scrolls is Morrowind, the jankiest of them all. I prefer the original Deus Ex over the newer ones. I like my weird things, so maybe I just make weird games that a small amount of people play and love and it’s enough for me to live. And maybe that’s fine. It would be cooler if more people played it, but maybe this is the limit. That’s cool with me.

The state of the FPS, Greylock’s next game

That leads me to my other question: How do you feel about where the FPS is right now?

I guess it’s sad in a way, but I think the indie space is where shooters thrive. Selaco is incredible. I don’t know if you played that, but that’s one worth keeping an eye on. I’m not super engaged with the triple-A new game thing. When I think of shooters these days, I just think of indie games.

Yeah, I think that’s increasingly the case if you’re not a multiplayer person.

I’m kind of into multiplayer. I’m interested in Battlefield 6, people were saying that’s good.

What about co-op? You mentioned co-op only happened in Echo Point because of your RPG project. Did you ever regret committing to such a big feature for an open world game with terrain deformation?

God, constantly. Regret was the primary emotion. It’s very difficult. Adding any feature was like 50% harder. It adds so much complexity. I guess I’m happy I did it because I’m not gonna do it again. I just wish I had a way to measure how many people play co-op versus singleplayer. My assumption is singleplayer dominates. I suspect it’s 80% singleplayer.

(Image credit: Greylock Studio)

I played through the whole game with one friend. It was the perfect game to just relax and shoot the shit while enjoying this meditative trance of bullets. We talked about anything but the game because we were just having a great time hoverboarding from fight to fight.

That’s great. Alright, that makes me feel better about it. That’s why I added it. I played through Abiotic Factor recently and I don’t think I would have played that game if it didn’t have co-op.

So what’s next for Greylock? Do you have ambitions to grow the studio?

I think I’d like to continue at this very small size [of 5-6 people]. It’s worked so far. I mean, I do want to take another shot at the open-world RPG, and for that I’ll probably need more level designers and a foliage artist, stuff like that. But I don’t think the team is going to get much bigger—I have no interest in renting an office space and having 20-30 employees. But if I’m trying for the dream game, I’ll definitely need a larger support staff.

I hope you can pull it off, it sounds pretty ambitious.

Yeah, thanks. Every dev tries this project. It’s a rite of passage.