Dusk and Iron Lung creator David Szymanski on the games that shaped him

A developer who wears his influences openly

David Szymanski has never been shy about where he comes from. The independent developer behind Dusk and Iron Lung built both games on foundations of nostalgia, mechanical obsession, and a deep respect for shooters that most of the industry had long stopped making. So when PC Gamer sat down with him to talk through the games currently on his PC, the conversation landed somewhere genuinely revealing.

The headline takeaway, as reported by PC Gamer, is a sentiment Szymanski stated plainly: the mid-2000s was the golden era of first-person shooters. That claim will feel obvious to anyone who grew up clutching a mouse during that particular stretch of PC gaming history, and it will feel like a provocation to everyone else. Either way, it is the kind of opinion that makes a lot of sense coming from the person who made Dusk.

What Dusk and Iron Lung tell us about his taste

Szymanski’s two most recognized games sit at opposite ends of a certain kind of spectrum. Dusk is loud, fast, and drenched in the aesthetic vocabulary of late-1990s and early-2000s shooters, the kind of game that rewards players who strafe constantly and never think about cover. Iron Lung is almost the inverse in feel, a slow, suffocating horror experience set inside a submarine with no windows, where tension comes from what you cannot see.

What connects them is craft and specificity. Szymanski is not making games that gesture vaguely at older genres. He is making games that reflect a very particular and well-developed point of view about what makes those genres work. The PC Gamer feature, which put him in conversation with the actual contents of his library, is the kind of format that tends to make those points of view concrete.

The mid-2000s argument and why it still matters

The claim that the mid-2000s represented a high point for first-person shooters is not a trivial one. That era included titles that pushed both technical ambition and design philosophy in directions that are still being argued about. It was also the period that eventually gave way to a decade of cover-based mechanics and regenerating health bars, changes that a vocal portion of the PC gaming community never fully accepted.

Szymanski building games that push back against those changes, and then articulating a preference for the era before them, forms a coherent creative philosophy. Knowing what is on his PC fills in the specifics of that philosophy in a way that a straightforward interview rarely does.

A small studio with an unusually clear voice

Not many solo or near-solo developers generate the kind of ongoing cultural conversation that Szymanski does. Iron Lung in particular crossed over into mainstream awareness well beyond the usual indie audience, helped along by a film adaptation that brought new eyes to his work. That broader visibility makes features like this one more useful than they might be for a developer working in quieter obscurity.

Understanding what Szymanski plays, and what he thinks about what he plays, offers something practical for anyone trying to understand where games like Dusk come from and where that tradition might go next. His library is, in a real sense, part of the argument he is making with every game he ships.