For Return to Castle Wolfenstein's 25th anniversary, modders are bringing its console-exclusive levels to PC at last

It's wild to think the developers of Redneck Rampage—a game I enjoyed at the time because I was a kid, not because it was anything special—went on to make the much more well-received Return to Castle Wolfenstein, resurrecting id's abandoned FPS and laying down the foundations for its modern revival.

If you're playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein today you're probably playing it via RealRTCW, the mod with its own Steam page that overhauls, modernizes, widescreenifies, and rebalances the 2001 shooter. Not content with all those improvements, the makers of RealRTCW have announced they're also resurrecting its previously console-only prologue as free DLC.

The Cursed Sands expansion will add the seven Egypt-set levels as well as their unique enemies and variants to PC for the first time. It'll also be chock-full of customization options. You can choose between the Xbox version's HUD and the PS2 one as well as between their loading and briefing screens, and enemy variants. You can even set it to randomly pick which of the skins to use for individual enemies, meaning half the elite guards will be in Xbox camo and the other half will have traveled to Egypt in PS2 leather.

The level of customization is a bit nuts, to be honest. You can choose between different sound packs if you prefer the gun or environmental sounds from other games in the series, or even swap in the firerate from spin-off Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. You can also swap between modernized and classic assets with a click.

Cursed Sands will be available from May 6 on Steam and GOG.