In Germany, the game wound up in court for its excessive violence. In the UK, the outcry was largely reserved for Barbarian’s salacious advertising. Indeed, Barbarian’s controversy also prefigured Mortal Kombat’s, and it’s interesting to compare the public reactions to the game in Britain and Germany. Barbarian was, in short, the first fighting game in the world with a deadly finishing move, and predated the grisly spine-rippings and other executions in the headline-grabbing Mortal Kombat by several years. ![]() This meant that, in theory, you could forget about slowly chipping your enemy’s health down with several well-timed blows, and simply decapitate them with one grandstanding attack. The moves were simple yet satisfying to execute: straight sword swings were accompanied by a kick and a head-butt (perfect for pushing your enemy back or getting out of a tight spot), and an over-head sword swing was good for gruesome blows to the head. The game depicted a one-on-one sword fight to the death in an arena presided over by a villain named Drax. The result was Barbarian, which featured some of the largest characters ever seen at the time. He filmed himself performing sword-fighting moves on videotape, and then, having laid pieces of clear plastic over his television screen, traced them, frame by frame. I really want a game with huge, huge characters – like, the whole screen.”ĭetermined to create the most convincing pixel warriors he could, Brown came up with a simple yet ingenious method of capturing live-action footage and using it as a reference. “You know these fighting games?” Brown said at a pub meeting one day, “They’re okay, but the characters are too small. When that game enjoyed glowing reviews and an uptick in sales, Brown presented his next idea: a fighting game inspired by the fantasy movie Red Sonja, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and also Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Konami’s hit arcade fighting game. It was Brown who came up with the concept behind Cauldron, a shooter-platformer hybrid featuring a witch. ![]() One of the very first licensed games of its type in the UK, The Evil Dead wasn’t exactly a classic (it iss essentially involved closing doors and windows before demons got into your log cabin), and even co-designer Peter Stone admits that it “needed better graphics and better gameplay.”įor their next game, Palace Software hired artist Steve Brown, whose ideas were pivotal to the fledgling studio’s next phase. The studio’s parent company had already released the movie in the UK in 1982 – complete with Graham Humphreys’ wonderfully lurid cover art – and the decision was made to create a video game to go with it (“ The Evil Dead was Palace Video’s big product and we had the rights, so we thought, why not?” recalled Palace Software’s Peter Stone, according to the book Britsoft). An offshoot of independent film company the Palace Group, Palace Software’s dramatic debut was a tie-in game based on Sam Raimi’s controversial, gleefully violent horror The Evil Dead. Barbarian marked something of a turning point for Palace Software, which had entered the software market three years earlier.
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