The other day, Phil Spencer expressed hisdesire to revive older games from Blizzard’s back-catalogue (should the Activision-Blizzard acquisition ever go ahead, that is). Naturally, this has led the internet to speculate about what games he could possibly be referring to. We may know Blizzard today as ‘thatDiablostudio,’ ‘thatWarcraftstudio’ (or even ‘thatWorld of Warcraftstudio,’ if you’re a complete ignoramus and don’t know of the Warcraft RTS games), but they actually did quite a few other games back in the day. I’m not sure there’ll be many calls to revive The Death and Return of Superman or Rock n’ Roll Racing, but I would probably be one of the few to welcome some kind of return for one of their less well known games–a cinematic platformer-shooter released in 1994 calledBlackthorne.
Now, Blackthorne was by no means a perfect game, but it did have a few things going for it. First, there was that amazing box art drawn by legendary Marvel comic artist Jim Lee, as well as the fact that the chunky style of orc that’s so recognisable as the ‘Warcraft orc’ actually first appeared in Blackthorne a couple of months before Warcraft was released.
But most notably of all, Blackthorne had what’s quite possibly the most badass move in videogames–so simple in its principle and execution, yet so incomparably cool: the no-look backwards shot.
Picture the scene: you’re Kyle Blackthorne. How someone with a name like Kyle found himself on the planet Tuul trying to defend the people of Androth from the nefarious Ka’dra’suul is anyone’s guess, but that’s not important right now. You’re walking amidst the craggy blue rock formations of the hostile planet, striding with that chest-out straight-back gait of the Terminator. Suddenly, a gun-wielding orc emerges from the shadows behind you. Continuing to look dead-head without so much as a flinch, you take your gun in one hand, point it backwards, and shoot the creature dead, its censor-friendly green blood oozing seeping into the cracks of the blue ground below.
How. Fucking. Cool.
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It’s such a simple thing, yet from a time when games were often simple enough that having that one star mechanic like this would be enough to keep me coming back to them again and again. Blackthorne is a decent game in itself, with some innovative ideas like being able to press your self up against a wall in the background to take cover from enemy gunshots before popping out to deliver your own, but it was that no-look backwards shot thatreallycompelled me to keep going back to it–just to repeat that move again, and again, and again. There was something just incomparably cinematic about that one move.
Once upon a time, there just weren’t that many cool moves in 2D videogames. The Matrix was still some years off, and its influence on games can’t be understated; the very concept of bullet-time unlocked so much creativity for cool action-movie ideas to be implemented in games, and the rise of 3D graphics in the late 90s played its part in that too, as games could start properly replicating ideas from action cinema.
In 1994, meanwhile, combat in platformers generally involved either jumping on enemy heads or firing some kind of derpy projectiles from your derpy weapon. In being a slow-paced cinematic platformer in the vein of Prince of Persia, Blackthorne was less about having tons of enemies mindlessly running at you Contra-style, and more about atmosphere, exploration, and puzzles. As with similar games in this genre, there was a big focus on making fine, detailed animations as stylish and deliberate as possible (even turning around involved the character rotating towards the screen before facing the other way).
The no-look shot is the kind of move that really made the most of its 2D plane as well. Your omniscient view over everything going on around Kyle meant you had complete control over your surroundings, and translating that onto the character himself framed him as the perfect super-soldier. Even when enemies hid in the background, you could still see them, letting you line them up and set the stage for those sweet, sweet no-look shots. One plucky YouTuber I stumbled upon even committed themselves to defeating the game’s final boss using only this move. Admittedly, it loses a little bit of its lustre seeing it done over and over again, but I appreciate the commitment.
Over the years, there have been a few game mechanics that are so unthinkably slick that I never get bored with doing them; there’s deflecting bullets using a sword (Metal Gear Rising, Katana Zero), the knee-slide shooting (Wet, Vanquish), and the slow-mo lining up of multiple enemies then returning to real-time to shoot them in quick succession (in the style of Red Dead’s Dead Eye), to name a few.
But Blackthorne’s no-look shot camewaybefore all these, and it was the first time I experienced such a cool bit of gunplay in games. Somehow, Blizzard, distilled a flash of 90s action-movie coolness into videogame at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing.
