On the Third Day of Die Hard, My True Love Gave to Me...

Video game adaptations of movies are generally allowed to play fast and loose with the material. Movies tend to have a number of scenes that aren’t worth adapting into games, especially when it came to older games that had limited resources and not as much room to put in things like cut scenes, voice action, animation, and more. The more complex a story was, the more it had to get dumbed down for a video game. The best adaptations of movies tended to focus on the action, giving just enough traces of the story that you felt like you got to experience the tale while still placing the player in control of the real action.

Still, despite being allowed some leeway, you should expect that certain video games will hit the necessary basics of the movie’s plot to feel complete. In the case of Die Hard, a game working from that framework would have specific beats that seem relevant: a lone hero trapped in a building, forced to foil their various attempts at stealing a treasure. There will be explosives to steal, computers to destroy, and glass to walk through barefoot. Most adaptations of the game (both the DOS and Commodore 64 versions we’ve already discussed, and the NES version we’ll get to soon) understand this and work as much of this material into their games as they can because, well, that’s essential. It just makes sense.

But then we get to the TurboGrafx-16 version, which throws all of this out the window. Developed by Pack-In-Video, who also handled the NES conversion later, this game is about as far from a proper adaptation of the first movie as you could get. Yes, it has a hero named John. Yes, he fights terrorists. Yes he gets into a building… eventually. But in just about every way that matters, in every way that makes this game feel like it actually knows the plot of the movie it’s working from, the TG-16 game fails to deliver. It’s basically a generic action game with the Die Hard logo thrown on afterwards.

The game finds hero John McClain standing outside the grounds of the Nakatomi Plaza building. Somehow he knows that terrorists are in there and that they’ve taken his wife hostage, so John heads in, going from the gardens to the ponds around the building, and then slowly scaling up through the basements to the top floors, and then to the roof, taking out any terrorists that get in his way. Armed with his fists, and then the guns he picks up off the bad guys, John has to get to the roof and shoot down the terrorists’ helicopter before they can escape, all to save his wife and save the day.

The game really doesn’t resemble Die Hard in any meaningful way. None of the plot makes it into the building, with the whole scenario starting from a different place and ending nowhere near where you expect from something bearing the name “Die Hard”. About the only things that seem like the movie are that John walks around in a white tank top, and that he has to be in a building. And, really, those are details you could get from the poster for the film. It leaves me wondering whether the designers for this game even watched the film at all before putting the game together.

So, let’s not look at it as a Die Hard game. Clearly the programmers weren’t interested in making a legit adaptation, so let’s just see how the game plays on its own merits. And, by that measure the game is… fine? It’s a pretty generic top-down shooter, in the vein of many other arcade experiences. A lone hero, going through maze-like levels, picking up weapons and power-ups so they can take on the endless, and respawning, horde of villains while he goes stage-by-stage through their evil complex. It’s not anything new, per se, but it does hit those expected beats.

It’s really not a bad shooter. The basic game has wide hallways in which two to three dudes can show up at a time. They’ll shoot, either guns or missiles, and you have to dodge their attacks while throwing out your own. Controls are tight and responsive, and it’s easy to walk around or jump over many attacks launched your way. The hit boxes are actually really small, which is nice when you have a lot of bullets flying at you at once as you’re never unfairly hit by the projectiles even when they just barely skirt past you.

Meanwhile, John does get a solid complement of guns to work with. His basic fist isn’t great, just because of the small range for it, but once he gets a machine gun the game picks up. Later additions of a flamethrower and a grenade launcher help to up the firepower and add some strategy to the levels. If you know a particular pack of enemies will show up somewhere, you might want the grenades. If a boss tends to fight from a distance, the machine gun or flamethrower would be better. It lacks the variety of a ContraStarted by Konami in 1988 the run-n-gun platform series Contra was, for a time, one of the flagship franchises for the company. game, but on its own merits it’s not bad. Plus, anything more extravagant would feel out of place in a more grounded game like this.

Although, really, would they feel that much more out of place in a game that’s already abandoned most of the Die Hard trappings anyway? Sure, John using a laser gun or the spread gun would seem weird, but he doesn’t use a grenade launcher or a flamethrower in the movie, either, and he’s allowed those here. There had to be some other weapons they could give him that would work in context and add some zest, right? Maybe some explosive charges he could throw and set, or a few different versions of rapid fire guns. John’s complement is fine, but basic. More could have been really nice.

And, honestly, I am a little stuck on how little of the game made it in. Sure, the developers didn’t want to use the meat of the story, or have John do any of the side tasks you’d expect, but would it have been so hard to add in some little cut-scene graphics for the game. When John shoots down the helicopter, for instance, why not put in a shot of Hans falling down the building? It almost works even if how he fell down would have been different. The game feels so generic, so basic, it’s like the developers took a game they were already working on and just put the logo on top. Which, really, they probably did.

Die Hard for the TG-16 is an okay shooting game, but where it counts, as a Die Hard, it’s pretty damn bad. This is as generic as it gets, a shooting game without any style or soul. It might entertain for a bit, and provide a modicum of challenge for fans of the genre. But for anyone actually looking for a game based on the movie, they should look elsewhere.