Even before Datasoft's Conan, there was an attempt at licensing Conan for a video game but unfortunately it wasn't entirely finished. It is, however, still playable as a prototype.
This Conan game was to have been released exclusively for the Bally Astrocade, an impressive but obscure console competitor to the Atari 2600. The Astrocade had especially colorful graphics, good sound, and was programmable, but it reputedly suffered from a serious design flaw that could cause the system to overheat without much trouble.
What survives of the game is an intriguing combat arena in which the player controls Conan as he battles various monsters. The player must move Conan, push a button to switch his direction, and use the paddle-knob on the Astrocade controller to swing his sword up and down. As Conan defeats monsters, he replenishes and gains stamina and other RPG stats and then moves on to greater challenges. Perhaps, if the game had been finished, Conan would have had a proper quest to complete or something to give the game just a bit more depth. As it is, with the blank play area and the bizarrely rendered creatures - which in a novel feature seem to be randomly assembled from individual parts - the game comes across as a bit abstract.
Bally Alley did an outstanding rundown of the Astrocade Conan, but to summarize, Astrocade Inc. began hyping Conan in 1981 as the "first 'real-time' dungeons and dragons video game and first to spin off from a movie." The company promised that players would be "exploring perilous dungeons, outwitting and slaying monsters, casting magic spells, confronting fearsome wizards...all without stopping the action to type in instructions."
Unfortunately, the company wasn't able to secure the Conan license (perhaps this was when Datasoft entered the picture?) and the game was retitled Quest for the Orb. Alas, Quest for the Orb wasn't finished and it doesn't appear that there are any surviving versions of it online. The Astrocade itself hung around until 1984 before ceasing production.
There was an era of fighting games before Street Fighter 2 more or less codified the genre. Games like Warrior, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Karate Champ, and its various clones such as Way of the Exploding Fist and International Karate. Hither came Barbarian, designed by Steve Brown and programmed by Stanley Schembri, released by British publisher Palace Software.
After working on the Cauldron games, Brown had the itch to create something with more ambitious graphics, and being a Conan fan settled on the idea of a one-on-one swordfighting game. The game comes in two parts, the first being a practice/2-player mode in which players fight in various rural areas, and the second part being the single-player mode in which the player has to battle through the palace of Drax the wizard, taking down one opponent at a time while Drax and the princess watch from a gallery above, until facing Drax himself.“The story is just your basic sword and sorcery riff: take a princess, an evil wizard, a disgusting henchman, and so on, and the same is true of the character design – it’s all very Conanesque,” Brown said.
Brown oversaw the re-creation of fighting moves used in the Conan movie, including a sword-twirling attack that he injured himself performing while gathering some reference footage, with the most renowned move being a backward-spinning chop at the opponent's neck. If perfectly executed, with the right timing and spacing while the opponent's guard is down at the precise moment, the opponent is decapitated and the match ends instantly. It's a move that gives hope to even the lousiest players - you're always just one perfect move away from winning no matter what. Adding insult, a squat, pot-bellied goblin will kick the loosened head offscreen like a soccer ball, then cackle while dragging the bleeding carcass off-screen. It was an early game to depict violence so graphically, although such gory action tends to look hilariously cartoonish when rendered in 8-bit graphical styles.
Richard Joseph provided a growling, percussive soundtrack inspired (of course) by Basil Pouledouris's work on Conan, as well as Elmer Bernstein's score for Kings of the Sun.
Like many fighting games, the single-player mode is fun and provides a stiff challenge, but the most fun is in player-vs.-player. Matches have a hyperactive rock-paper-scissors feel in which certain moves are ideal for countering opposing moves. If the players are too close together, a headbutt is useful for scoring a minor hit. If space is needed, or if a player wants to close in quickly, a roll can be executed. Attacks are performed by holding the joystick button and pushing in a direction, while movement is done while the button is left alone.
The photographic cover and advertisements for the game sparked a minor moral panic in the UK. No one much cared about bodybuilder Michael Van Wijk in his bare-chested, Conan-ish gear, but nude tabloid model Maria Whittaker was considered too sexualized by some. The controversy apparently helped boost sales. It would be easy to say that the game was so good that it didn't need any help, but it does appear that the game did considerably better abroad than it did when Epyx released it in the U.S. under the title of Death Sword, with blander cover art. Among European fans, Barbarian is a major classic of PC gaming, but the game doesn't appear to have nearly the same recognition among Americans.
There's not a lot of information available on Blade Master, but it was released by Irem in 1991, and was known as Cross Blades! in Japan.
It's a beat-em-up game in which players can control either the dual-sword-wielding Roy or the spear-and-flail-wielding Arnold as they battle their way from left to right in pursuit of Roy's girlfriend, Princess Emina, who's been kidnapped by the demon lord because she possesses a spell that can seal him away. Roy has a headband that with his long brown hair kind of makes him resemble Miles O'Keefe in Ator, while the hulking Arnold is kind of obvious, although in both cases the portraits in the upper corners of the screen simply look like a couple of Asian heroes.
Unlike a lot of beat-em-ups, Blade Master's gameplay doesn't involve a lot of combos, but instead it's a countering/parrying system that demands timing during attacks. There are also some simple moves like a downward strike that come in handy. Many of the bosses can be knocked down and then leaped on to start hammering into their chests. Beating people when they're down is always such a satisfying element of this genre. Enemy AI isn't very impressive as enemies will sometimes become immobile depending on the player's approach.
Irem's games around this time were known for lush graphics and this one makes a good first impression. The heroes and the assorted humanoids they fight look good for their relatively modest heights. Bosses are imposingly huge, including a kraken with gorgeously animated tentacles and a biomechanical, Giger-esque giant with a retractable neck.
The backgrounds feature attractively rendered sights such as cities rising above clouds, a distant sunset, and rocky valleys, but it doesn't take long to notice that there's a lot of repetition, like seeing the backgrounds cycle in old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The final two of the seven stages disappointingly recycle the same endless bridge graphics, and it's a long game by beat-em-up standards so seeing the same imagery for minutes at a time gets wearisome. There's a section in which the heroes ride on the backs of giant flying bugs, but it's all too brief. The game could have used one or two more imaginative setpieces like that. The game also resorts to recycling the humanoid bosses as it continues - one becomes two or three later in the game.
Not a bad game but one that feels like it could have used some extra care to become a must-play.
Blackthorne isn't a sword-and-sorcery game so much as it's shotgun-and-sorcery. The introduction explains that on the world of Tuul, a faction of orcs (or at least creatures close enough to the traditional image of orcs) lead by Lord Sarlac are completing their conquest of the planet. The human king Vlaros, making his last doomed stand at "Stonefist, South of the Borderlands," has his wizard transport his son, Kyle, to Earth to grow up in relative peace and safety. Twenty years later, Kyle, aka Blackthorne, has grown up to be a decorated soldier turned drifting mercenary before he's unexpectedly whisked back to Tuul to have his vengeance on Sarlac and liberate the men of his kingdom through the use of his trusty pump-action shotgun. There's also some gobbledygook involving a Light Stone and a Dark Stone both sides are fighting over that isn't very important. The setting is a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi, mostly blended according to Rule of Cool and hearkening back to days when storytellers were daring enough to mix peanut butter with their chocolate.
Blackthorne was created by Blizzard back when they were a scrappy independent studio and in many ways it's a classic Blizzard creation in that there's virtually nothing original about it, but what it does have is a lot of coolness and sheer playability. It's a cinematic platforming game in the mold of Prince of Persia or Flashback, but classics as those are most people would likely reckon that Blackthorne is just cooler than those games. Blackthorne himself is a gritty, Snake Pliskin-like figure with his long black hair; white tank top, jeans, and boots; and a pair of sunglasses that he never, ever removes. The heroes of Prince of Persia and Flashback are relatively humble in appearance - the prince having to traverse dungeons in what appear to be baggy white pajamas, and Flashback's Conrad Hart running around in his sneakers - while Blackthorne is jacked up like an 80s action hero. Everyone who's played Blackthorne remembers that the coolest move in the game is having Blackthorne extend his gun backwards to do a no-look blast. It's a move that has almost no practical use, but the fact that you can do it and it looks totally badass is enough. Blackthorne is also the only original game that features cover art by comics artist Jim Lee, back during his mid-90s commercial peak no less. Say what you will about how Lee stacks up to great cover artists, his red-hued image of Blackthorne against a black background really leapt off store shelves at the time and probably earned Blizzard a number of extra sales. The soundtrack alternates between moody horror and propulsive action to great effect.
Otherwise, Blackthorne plays like a typical example of its genre, albeit a well-polished one. Blackthorne himself is smoothly rotoscoped and must climb ledges and carefully make leaps across broad chasms. He can talk to imprisoned slaves to get hints and items. Special items such as keys, bombs, and portable elevators must be used to overcome obstacles. The gunplay centers around the characters leaning into the background and then popping out of cover to nail a shot before the opponent can duck back again. The enemies get increasingly smart about how they fight as the game progresses and mastering the timing needed to bring them down can get tricky and unfortunately somewhat tedious. There's a bit of tension between the game's hard rockin' imagery and the genre's insistence on patience and careful, measured play. One has to wonder, had Blizzard waited just a bit longer to develop it, if the game would have been more fast-paced to compete with the mid-90s explosion of the first person shooter.
Someone at Saber Software must have been a fan of Vicente Segrelles's El Mercenario because aside from a general fantasy theme this art doesn't have much to do with the story of Demon's Forge, Brian Fargo's first game. But if there's one thing bands like Molly Hatchet and Cirith Ungol taught us, it's that it never hurts to just use classic fantasy art instead of commissioning something new.
Age of Barbarian - created by Italian studio Crian Soft, headed by Christian Fanucci and Catherine Thalman - is about as pure a representation of sword and sorcery in games as can be found. It pays homage to the entire genre, both the best (Robert E. Howard) and the more questionable parts (80s B-movies like Deathstalker). It apologizes for nothing.
The player can choose between a male or female character. The man, Rahaan, is a thinly veiled Conan stand-in (even including a gap in his teeth like Schwarzenegger) whose village is destroyed and who survives being crucified by the dark lord Necron, while the woman, Sheyna, is a warrior princess who escapes Necron's slavers. Depending on which character is chosen, the game will change somewhat beyond their particular stats (Rahaan: stronger, Sheyna: faster), with distinct opening levels and cutscenes. Each character wears as little clothing as possible and they are as physically idealized as the creators could imagine.
The player must choose a level from a world map, and those levels scroll strictly horizontally, similar to Rastan but with occasion rooms to enter and multiple exits to different sections, which become particularly important when uncovering secrets. The characters are exceptionally large compared to most such games (closer to something like Gladiator) and the combat system is relatively simple but still complex enough to demand the player's attention. The player can choose among high and low attacks, combos, a kick to separate from enemies too close to hit, blocking, rolling, or simply switching direction. The kick and roll moves and some of the special techniques such as the spinning decapitation move are straight out of Barbarian for the C64, so the game isn't just a tribute to books and movies but to other games as well. The deliberate platforming elements, including climbing, leaping over pits, and avoiding lethal spike traps, are from Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia, for instance. There are mild RPG elements, including inventory to manage and experience points/leveling.
Every aspect of the game is hellbent on creating a true S&S experience. The bestiary almost entirely eschews Tolkien/high fantasy influences. There are masked slavers, lizardmen, apemen, giant spiders, crocodiles, zombies, etc. There are no elves, orcs, or dwarves present, and when something like a basilisk appears as a level boss, it's presented as something that is disturbingly singular, alien, and deadly. Wizards are similarly rare and dark-natured. Necron of course is basically swiped from Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta's Fire and Ice, and one of his chief henchmen is Frazetta's Death Dealer. Some levels include hostages, particularly scantily clad maidens, that need to be rescued and, in a unique touch, escorted to safety (thankfully, the escorting part isn't especially difficult or tedious). The player will traverse mountains, forests, swamps, spider-haunted temples, and Roger Dean's floating rocks in the skies. Combat is gory, full of disembowelments, decapitations, dismemberments, and harsh executions, and the game is uncommonly frank about nudity (although there is a censor option). The player can activate a filter to get some extra grindhouse movie flavor in the visuals. The game is also quite funny, but it's a humor that comes from love and knowledge of the genre rather than mockery from afar. Rahaan's crazed death glare in response to enemy taunts is always a highlight.
Graphically, the designers went for a very particular mid-90s look like something created on an old Video Toaster. The characters are lifelike but embellished rather than using straight digitizations of actors and it's quite an effective job. The backgrounds are reasonably well-rendered, with garishly colored skies and moons. The soundtrack is appropriately epic, and the voice acting certainly does evoke 1980s B-movies.
It's certainly not perfect. The game is a low-budget indie effort (maybe that's only fitting) and bugs are common. The spider cult DLC is particularly prone to crashing at odd times. The controls have a knack for becoming unresponsive, extra frustrating when the player is faced with an instant-kill trap that requires precision to pass. The animations sometimes jerk about. The English translation is rough. The menus and user interface are awkward and feel perfunctory in some ways.
But like the Millennium Falcon, it's got it where it counts.
