Obscurity can either be the best friend or worst enemy of a nostalgia nut like myself. Typically, the harder it is to find information for the sweeter the chase, however, there are occasionally a few duds that emerge from the mists of my memory and today’s Head Game is definitely one of them. Best described as infuriatingly awesome, Barbarian is a game that was first developed back in 1987 by Psygnosis (now called SCE Studio Liverpool) for the Atari ST (later ported to the PC) and proved to be as hard to find as it was to play.
A point and click type of adventure game, Barbarian‘s controls were unforgiving in their clumsiness and more often than not lead to either a quick death or a collision with a dungeon wall. I should probably note that this was also still the time when every came on floppy disks, so you can imagine how limited my gameplay choices were– suffice to say I made to make the most of what I had.
You play as a (wait for it) Barbarian who is basically a blonde-haired, blue-eyed version of every other musclebound chump with a big sword. Apparently, you were on a quest to defeat an evil wizard named Necron though I never made it far enough back then to have known. Come to think of it the game never really offer a story of any kind, throwing you into the turbulent wind of fate. On the upside the game did feature an assortment of really cool enemies including, dragons, orcs, demon knights, trolls, and… man-eating boulders.
The game did offer some minor relief when it came to its cartoonish depictions of the barbarian running into walls or fleeing from danger like an uncontrollable child. However, this far from makes up for the rest of its faults which scream almost as loud as the game’s intro did in my tiny ears… “BAR-BARIAN!!!!”
Images courtesy of Death Knight.
