Resurrection | Blackthorne

By Michael Sterrett

Cast your minds back to 1994.

Kurt Cobain kissed the barrel of a shotgun in April of that year. The Tutsis and Hutus were turning Rwanda into a hell on earth worthy of Bosch. OJ Simpson was elbow deep in the blood of a crime for which he would never be punished and, perhaps worst of all, the BBC had commissioned a second series of the Nicholas Lyndhurst time travel comedy Goodnight Sweetheart.

Yet for an awkward, oddly bloated 12-year-old with no friends – not to mention a burgeoning interest in my parents’ drinks cabinet and the kind of vaguely pornographic European art house films found late at night on Channel Four – there was only a pervasive sense of restless boredom. Aye friends, I was as adrift and rudderless as a ghost ship at sail upon the high seas of pre-pubescence. No wonder I would soon find myself staring into a morrow as cold and black as a shark’s eyes, with only an inevitable asphyxiwank death in a hotel cupboard offering any future respite from the sheer maddening desperation loosed upon me from the moment of birth. But hey, that’s for my therapist and blank-eyed, chain-smoking, sham-marriage wife to deal with.

//Peep show
Amongst the numerous high profile titles of the time, such as Earthworm Jim and Virtual Fighter 2, I was to fall in love with a decidedly flawed gem of a game: Blizzard Entertainment’s Blackthorne. The game owes a lot to 1989’s Prince of Persia, with its horizontal scrolling gameplay replete with lots of jumping onto ledges and pulling the main character onto high precipices. Yet for me Prince of Persia was always something of a bloodless exercise, a kind of virtual dry-hump that failed to offer anything like the grubby delights present in the burgeoning host of more adult games, ones that weren’t afraid to throw a healthy dose of mindless violence and narcissism into the mix.

Indeed, Blackthorne mainly consists of the gun-toting eponymous hero, looking uncannily like Escape From New York-era Kurt Russell, dispatching a host of identikit baddies in one of those bewildering fantasy environments, in which the inhabitants seem to have mastered laser technology and inter-dimensional travel yet appear to have built most of their finest structures from mud and sticks. Furthermore, the Land of Tuul (I’m not making this up) is exclusively populated by men, so Christ knows how the hell they aim to procreate in this Turkish prison-style nether world. But once past the fact that the whole premise is about as convincing as David Mitchell’s ‘common man’ voice, it is hard not to be drawn in to the game’s satisfyingly repetitive problem solving and bomb-blasting hijinks.

Let’s be honest: Blackthorne has many flaws, most noticeably the frankly impossible-to-kill end-of-game villain Sarlac. And compared to the richly textured and realised world of a game like Donkey Kong Country, which was also released that year, the whole thing seems painfully one-dimensional and oddly restrictive. In fact Blackthorne is perhaps a genuine contender for one of the last non-ironic, straight-up platformers that saw frustrating and infuriatingly circular gameplay as a virtue. It’s an example of a more primitive time, when Lou Diamond Philips was considered Hollywood Box Office gold, Michael Barrymore and John Leslie were light entertainment royalty, and the music of Britpop was viewed as some kind of positive revivalist fun as opposed to the defiling of an already knackered musical blueprint by cynical, coked-up halfwits with Rickenbackers. And though we may look back upon this time with knowing smirks and embarrassed guffaws, there will always be a special place reserved in my heart for that roguish vigilante Blackthorne and the unforgettable land of Tuul.