XIII

XIII is a 2003 first-person shooter developed and published by Ubisoft Paris, released November 18, 2003 for Windows and PlayStation 2 and a week later for GameCube and Xbox, with a Mac port by Feral Interactive in June 2004. It is loosely adapted from the first five volumes of the Belgian graphic novel series by Jean Van Hamme and William Vance, and it looked like nothing else on the shelf: cel-shaded on Unreal Engine 2, with headshots shown in pop-up comic panels and gunfire written on screen as BLAM and TAP TAP TAP. It holds Metacritic scores of 72 on PC, 73 on PS2 and GameCube, and 74 on Xbox, sold below Ubisoft’s expectations, lost its planned sequel, and spent the next two decades becoming a cult favourite — a status cemented, oddly, by a 2020 remake so poor that it sent players back to the original.

This card covers the 2003 game. The 2020 remake by PlayMagic and Microids, and its 2022 Tower Five overhaul, have their own page.

Technical Specifications

A Tattoo, a Beach, and a Dead President

A man washes up on a Brooklyn beach with a bullet wound, no memory, a key to a safe-deposit box, and the Roman numeral XIII tattooed on his collarbone. Within minutes assassins are trying to finish the job, and within hours he learns why: he is wanted for the murder of President William Sheridan. The campaign follows him — possibly Jason Fly, possibly someone else — through FBI custody, a military prison, an asylum, a snowbound mountain base, and a submarine, unravelling a conspiracy by The XX, twenty numbered conspirators planning a coup. General Carrington (Adam West, perfectly cast) and Major Jones (the rapper Eve) are his uncertain allies; David Duchovny voices the lead with a flatness that reviewers either read as Mulder-style deadpan or as boredom. The game ends on a cliffhanger — the identity of Number I is left open — intended to set up a sequel. The sequel never came, and that unresolved ending became the most-discussed thing about the game.

Comic Panels, Onomatopoeia, and the Sixth Sense

The presentation is the reason the game is remembered. Thick black outlines, flat colour, and comic panels that slide onto the screen for a headshot or an approaching guard; sound effects rendered as lettering; enemies’ footsteps shown as TAP TAP TAP through walls thanks to XIII’s “sixth sense“, which doubles as the stealth radar. Beneath the art is a fairly conventional 2003 shooter with some good ideas: sixteen weapons, improvised blunt objects (chairs, ashtrays, bottles), hostages taken as human shields, lock picks, a grapnel, and a split between loud missions and ones that fail on detection. Critics praised the look and the pacing of the story and faulted the shooting itself — enemy AI, hit feedback, and some stealth sections that were stricter than the systems supporting them. Multiplayer ran up to sixteen players with Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Sabotage, and The Hunt, varying by platform.

The Sequel That Never Shipped

Sales were below Ubisoft’s targets and the sequel was shelved, leaving the cliffhanger permanent. The brand limped on in odd shapes — XIII²: Covert Identity, a 2007 Gameloft side-scroller for phones, and XIII: Lost Identity, a 2011 hidden-object game — and the comic itself kept going for decades. The original quietly built a following in the meantime, helped by being one of the few Ubisoft games of its era with a genuine art-direction argument. When Microids announced a remake in 2019, the reaction was warm; when the remake arrived in November 2020 with a Metacritic 29 on PC and a joint apology from the publisher and developer, the reaction was to go and buy the original — UK sales of the 2003 game rose after the remake’s launch.

Where to Play It Today

XIII is on GOG ($12.99, regularly discounted to under $2) and on Steam as XIII – Classic ($5.99), both published by Microids, both Windows-only and DRM-free or near it, and both single-player only — the official multiplayer did not survive the re-release, though a community-run dedicated-server scene keeps the 1.4.2-patched versions playable online for the determined. The PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox versions exist only on disc; the original Xbox build is not backward compatible on later Xbox consoles. Twenty-three years on, the shooting is dated and the art is not — and the ending still isn’t resolved.