Call of Juarez at 20: Techland Before the Zombies

On September 5, 2006, Call of Juarez hit French store shelves. Twenty years later, Techland's name conjures almost exclusively Dying Light and its zombie hordes. This dual anniversary—of a game and an erased studio identity—deserves more than a wistful nod.

An FPS Like Nothing Else in 2006

At a time when the western genre in gaming amounted to a handful of footnotes, Techland built an FPS with two playable characters whose mechanics were radically different. Billy Candle, a fugitive with acrobatic mobility, and Reverend Ray McCall, a ruthless gunslinger specialized in concentration mode—a time-slowdown mechanic that transformed every duel into a genre tableau. The switch between protagonists wasn't a gimmick: it imposed two ways of reading each level, two paces, two relationships with violence.

In 2006, Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004) had just redefined FPS storytelling and F.E.A.R. (Monolith Productions, 2005) had made bullet-time a marketing hook. Call of Juarez borrowed from neither: it sought its own grammar, in a genre—the western—that gaming still treated as second-rate window dressing.

Techland in 2006: A Studio Finding Its Voice

At that moment, Techland wasn't the polished outfit it would become. The Wroclaw studio was emerging from a string of smaller projects—driving simulators, ports—and Call of Juarez represented its real creative gamble. The direct sequel, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009), would solidify the formula with a tighter prequel that performed better commercially. Gunslinger (2013) was probably the franchise's most refined installment, a game that embraced its B-movie heritage with refreshing meta-awareness.

Then Dying Light (2015) changed everything. The open-world survival horror's commercial success relegated the western license to catalog curiosity. Dying Light 2 Stay Human (2022) confirmed Techland had found its niche—and had no intention of leaving it. Call of Juarez became an anomaly in an increasingly monolithic catalog.

What This Anniversary Reveals About the Industry

Call of Juarez's trajectory illustrates a recurring pattern in gaming: franchises orphaned by studios that found their winning formula elsewhere. Ubisoft saw this with Might and Magic after Assassin's Creed exploded. Konami with Silent Hill, forced into hibernation while Winning Eleven kept printing money. The pattern is identical: one massive success monopolizes resources, riskier projects get suspended indefinitely.

At Techland, nobody officially discusses resurrecting Call of Juarez. The studio is focused on Dying Light expansions and Dying Light: The Beast, announced for 2025. The western license sleeps in a drawer, intellectual property with no identified shepherd.

Honest answer: partially. The shooting mechanics have aged poorly, Billy's levels show their years in sometimes clunky level design, and the Chrome Engine 2 technology shows its limits the closer you get to faces. But the narrative architecture—that alternation of viewpoints transforming the same event into two different gaming experiences—remains a solid idea few FPS games have replicated since.

This isn't nostalgia talking; it's an editorial observation: the industry has produced dozens of westerns in twenty years—Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar, 2010) and its 2018 sequel dominated that space—but Techland's dual-protagonist FPS/western formula remains singular. Its relative commercial failure says nothing about its creative merit.

Techland chose zombies, that's settled. But Call of Juarez deserves to be revisited for what it is: proof that a Central European studio could, in 2006, design an FPS that refused the conventions of its era. That's no small thing. In hindsight, it's even braver than we thought.