You Have Been Eliminated

There is no denying that The Terminator, released in 1984, is a fun movie. It’s dark and action-packed, with a cool hook that keeps you invested in the story. A woman, who seemingly is just going about her life, is targeted by a killing machine from the future, with her only help being a human soldier from the future sent to protect her. It leads to a fantastic chase film with so many great moments, and it helped to launch the career of star Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film launched a massive franchise and continues to be held up as one of the great sci-fi films of the 1980s.

Surprisingly, then, it took until 1991 for a video game based on the first movie to ever come out. Although various studios had made attempts at getting their own game off the ground – Robotek acquired the license but couldn’t get the game in development before the studio went under, and then Sunsoft tired, although their game was so different from the movie that the license was stripped from it (and the company eventually released the title as Journey to Silius). It wasn’t until Bethesda Softworks stepped up with their own ideas that an eventual game could come about.

Bethesda’s concept was pretty simple: you play as either the Terminator or as protector Kyle Reese, dropped into the middle of Los Angeles, with a single mission: find Sarah Conner and either kill her or save her. In either case, your requirements are the same: get cash, get weapons, find a car, and get moving. And then it’s all just action, tracking your targets, evading the Terminator (if you’re Kyle), and attempting to fulfill the mission whatever it takes. You can expect a lot of attempts, and a lot of failure, before you finally get the mission right.

Considering it’s time of release, it should come as no surprise that The Terminator is a rudimentary first-person shooter. As either controllable character, you get plunked down into the middle of L.A. with only a map and a page from a telephone book as your guides to the city. The L.A. in the game is 60 square miles big (10 mi x 6 mi), based on the actual city of L.A. It’s surprisingly big, and detailed, requiring you to learn the locations and get used to driving around this remake of the city. Knowing where you’re going, and what to do, is paramount if you’re going to complete the game.

Of course, knowing where you’re going is easier said than done. While the whole of L.A. for these 60 blocks, is remade, it’s not so easy to actually figure out where you are. Even with an in-game map (and, if you were lucky enough to have a physical copy, a map in the game), it’s easy to get turned around and lose track of where you’re going. Everything in the city is rendered in the same low-poly, basic shapes, and one city block looks a lot like another. Even with indicators on screen showing where you are, locationally, in the blocks of the city, I still found it hard to keep up with where I was and where I needed to go.

Part of that is because you really do have to get all your stuff together and collect yourself before the mission. There are a ton of stores available to you, from convenience stores and ammo shops, to secret storage facilities, gyms, and more. The city is huge, and there is a lot you can do, which is a credit to the designers of the game. But that also feeds into a bit of overload since there’s so much to do and no indication as to what you should do or how you should do it. You’re just there, in the city, and it’s your job to figure it out.

Now, sure, that is also how the movie worked. Both the T-800 and Kyle were dropped into L.A. and they had to figure out where to go to get Sarah Connor. That’s fair. But just because the movie does it, that doesn’t mean it’s actually fun to have to go through the motions of it myself. What this game taught me is that if I had to play Kyle Reese for real, running around collecting clothing and guns and medical supplies all while fleeing the cops and the Terminator, I would die. Sarah, and the future, are totally screwed if this is what I have to do.

The game is easier to play as the Terminator since, as you would expect, he’s a nearly invincible killing machine who can take a lot of damage without flinching. Hell, he can even self repair in quiet moments, meaning you can take damage, heal, and then go back for more without it even being a big issue. The T-800 is easy mode, in effect, not that much of this game is truly easy by any stretch. You just have less to worry about, in the long run, when you play as the assassin instead of as the hero.

But then you’re still battling the game all the same. The basic movement in game is a slow plod, even with a car to cruise around in. The city is huge, and even when you know where you’re going it still takes time to get there. And that doesn’t even take into account that, after playing the game for hours, I was still no closer to figuring out how to find Sarah and get to her. I needed more help, a few more on screen identifiers, to guide me to my heroine and save her. Normally I’d just die, or watch her die, before I could even be the hero I was meant to be.

And the game doesn’t even make it easy on you for basic controls. Everything is mapped weirdly, with different key presses for every mechanic. Reviewers back in the day likened it to finger pretzels just to try and drive a car in the game and I wouldn’t deny that. A joystick (or other mapped controller) does help this some, but you’re still playing a game where each menu has a variety of keyboard commands, each with their own keystroke mapped, and nothing is consistent from one menu to the next. This was a game you were meant to memorize, inside and out, before you could even make progress through the title.

In the end, all you get is a single mission with a single objective. Either kill the girl or kill the Terminator. The title isn’t deep at all, and the only reason it’s long is because the city in the game is huge and you’re expected to traverse all of it. If you can somehow get your bearings and get going, you could finish your mission in less than an hour… but then once you’ve done that you have little incentive to play again since nothing much about the game changes from one playthrough to the next. Get in, get guns, get Sarah, one way or another.

The Terminator, the DOS game, follows the plot of the opening act of the film, but while it strikes an impressive level of fidelity for a 1991 game, what it lacks is entertainment. This is a game where the programmers figured out they could make a first-person shooter of this kind, and do it in a fairly complete representation of L.A., but then they didn’t figure out how to actually add in the fun. This feels more like a tech demo of a game than a real title, and without that fun there’s no reason to go back in and experience all this struggle again.