Considering Terminator 2 is arguably one of the best films ever made, it seems strange to think that it’s taken 34 years for the video game industry to finally create what looks like the first truly faithful Terminator 2 game, the upcoming Terminator 2D: No Fate from Bitmap Bureau.
Retro gamers will know that there have been plenty of attempts to create a great video game tribute to Terminator 2 over the years. From home computer and console side-scrolling action games through to handheld ports and arcade light gun shooters, this myriad of cash-grabs inevitably varied in quality. Some were bland and boring and some were meh, OK, I guess, but none of them were particularly great. Not a single one, however, would be as weird as the first Terminator 2 video game ever released, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
But, before we get into all of that nonsense, I’d first like to share a cool little Terminator 2: No Fate anecdote with you which I found very interesting – in a super nerdy, everything inspires everything kind of way.
It’s no secret that No Fate’s gameplay was clearly inspired by Konami’s Super Nintendo game Super Probotector (which is also known by its inferior American name, Contra III: The Alien Wars). Nowhere is this more evident than in the first Future War level from No Fate, where you play as a grizzled John Connor. In preview gameplay (which you can see in my video above) during this mission, John takes on a boss called The Defensive Wall, which is a clear nod to a very similar set piece seen in Probotector.
It’s another boss in Probotector that raises eyebrows, though. Big Fuzz, the boss of the Factory Zone (who has arguably the least intimidating name for a giant killer robot that I’ve ever heard) looks eerily similar to the T800, and that’s because he was actually based on the Snatchers from Hideo Kojima‘s video game of the same name, Snatcher. Kojima’s Snatcher designs were blatantly inspired by the iconic cyber skele ton design of The Terminator’s T-800, which means that the Terminator tributes have gone full circle. Starting with the original Terminator movie in 1984 inspiring Snatcher in 1988, leading to Big Fuzz in Probotector in 1992, and finally back around to Terminator 2D: No Fate with its Contra inspired set pieces in 2025. Which, in a way, is kind of like a Terminator-esque time travel time loop all of its own. Now who’s got my clothes, boots and motorcycle?
But anyway, let’s get back to the topic at hand, 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, for the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and DOS a game that has probably aged about as well as Edward Furlong. Visually, for the time, it’s pretty good looking, with big chunky sprites, digitised stills from the movie and, even on the limited palette of the ZX Spectrum, a lot of bright, bold colours. Gameplay wise however, it’s a different story, featuring a bizarre mish-mash of ideas and genres that are cobbled together in order to cover off most of the film’s big action scenes.
There’s one-on-one fighting sections between the T-800 and T-100 in the Shopping Mall, Hospital, and of course the climactic Steel Mill set piece, where your final objective is to ‘Totally Destroy T1000’. Then there are two top down driving sections, consisting of the famous truck chase that takes place in the LA Flood Channel, and the Helicopter chase on the Freeway from later on in the movie. And then, for a break in the action, there’s even a couple of bonkers block sliding puzzles to complete, which simulate the T-800s repairs to the tendons in his wrist and later, his eye.
The more powerful Amiga and PC ports also threw in a short side-scrolling shoot-em-up mission for good measure, taking place alongside an unfathomably lengthy perimeter wall around Cyberdyne Systems. Here, Arnie is pummeled by heavily armed SWAT units which he must defeat using a grenade launcher that seems to be loaded with ping pong balls. Despite the extra firepower however, this sequence is just as unimaginative and, well, I’m just going to say it, as crap as the others.
But why was Terminator 2: Judgement Day such a horrible hodgepodge of barely connected ideas? Well, the game was first released on the ZX Spectrum in August of 1991, the same month that the movie hit theatres, with other ports rolling out soon after. This obviously meant that development had to be done way before the movie was even finished, let alone while it was playing out in front of the popcorn munching masses. Considering Terminator 2 was a massive Hollywood license, you’d think that a video game adaption would have been developed in some multi million dollar studio in America. This was the beginning of the 90s however, and the biggest publisher of movie tie-ins at the time was Ocean Software, a British company that had previously pumped out playable versions of huge licences like Robocop, Batman: The Movie and Short Circuit.
Ocean secured the rights to the Terminator 2: Judgement Day while the film was still in production, and it decided to give the development of video game adaption to a small UK development studio called Dementia. Instead of being based somewhere on the sunny coasts of California like a lot of big studios are today though, Dementia was actually located in the West Midlands city of Wolverhampton, a place that is famous for two things: being the 5th worst city in the world, and also, one of the UK’s unhappiest places to live.
According to interviews in both Your Sinclair and CU Amiga magazines after the game was released, Ocean gave Dementia six months to complete the project. However, Dementia’s only access to the movie before release was a copy of the script that it received in January of 1991. Because of the secrecy surrounding the film’s production, all Dementia’s developers could do was pick a handful of scenes from this script alone and convert those into levels. It sounds like a rather daunting task, especially with such a big licence, but nevertheless, they cracked on with the job at hand. Then, two months later in March, the first trailer for the movie dropped and this was the first time that the devs were able to see what Cameron’s vision for the film actually was. Using the snippets of footage from this trailer, Dementia was then able to alter the game’s tone and visuals to match the movie, and also, most importantly, add digitised stills from that trailer into the game.
The thought of the visuals for video game tie-in for a movie of this magnitude being cobbled together by bits of a trailer that the developers probably received on VHS is kind of mind boggling, in this day and age, but that’s just how things were done back then.
This ultra-limited access to anything resembling the final version of the film goes a long way towards explaining why parts of its game poorly reflect what happens in the movie, and why the final product feels like a bit of a jumbled mess. When you put all of that into consideration though, it’s no real surprise that Terminator 2: Judgement Day wildly missed the mark compared to Terminator 2D: No Fate. With No Fate, Bitmap Bureau will of course have been able to examine the iconic movie frame by frame, in order to fully absorb the look and feel and to perfectly recreate the pixel-based renditions of its many locations.
Sure Terminator 2: Judgement Day is about as playable nowadays as a Switch 2 with a smashed screen and a couple of broken Joycon, but at the time, I don’t think many developers could have done much better. And so will Bitmap Bureau’s upcoming attempt be the definitive Terminator 2 video game experience? After multiple delays and another new release date, this time of December 12th, it’s worrying, but I think it’ll be a case of ‘No Problemo’ in the end.