Greetings, and welcome to Isometrics, a slightly askew analysis of video games. Ordinarily, this would involve training a literary eye on gaming past, present, and future to see if that perspective can reclaim games that were otherwise forgotten, or find a new solution to gaming dilemmas. Here though, we are going to explore two things that are very special to me: Doctor Who and obscure computer games.
There are an absolute ton of Doctor Who video games, especially if you count the unofficial ones, so for the purpose of this piece we are going to focus on only the games that were officially licensed by the BBC, just to show you British geeks that your License Fee money is not going to waste! There is a point to all this, beyond the celebration of Doctor Who on Geek Pride: the Doctor Who games are, in short, a reflection of the British history of computer games, and so to talk about these games we do have to talk about the computer world in Britain.
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In 1982, the British Broadcasting Corporation decided that this funny old computer business was probably going to be quite important, and so decided to create a television show to demonstrate the power of the forthcoming Micros. To this end, they created a set of specifications that were actually quite tough for 1982, and then negotiated with the major computer companies of the time, in particular Sinclair Research (who were at the time finishing up the legendary Spectrum), Newbury Laboratories (who created, among other things, the Grundy Newbrain, and were the company the BBC actually wanted), Dragon Data (who no one remembers for good reason, the good reason being the Dragon 32), and Acorn. Eventually the Acorn Proton was chosen, and became the BBC Micro, which ended up in every school in the land, and the focal point of several computer based shows until the end of the decade.
“Now,” I hear you cry in your sleep, “that lecture’s all well and good, Old-But-Not-Old-Enough Man, but what does this have to do with Doctor Who?” Well, the answer is simple: Everything! Computers were part of the props, were used in creating the effects, the Teletext technology that allowed news and literature to be available as you watched television was powered by a small cluster of the things, and television shows such as “Micro Live” showed you how you could do anything, from write hello world to creating robots, using your special buddy. And then there were the games.
The BBC managed to get around the ethical mire of marketing commercial software based on a property that was funded by the tax and license payers of the country by claiming it was part of the computer literacy project (unlike now, where they simply don’t bother), and so, in 1983 we were blessed with the first official Doctor Who game, Doctor Who: The First Adventure, a game that, like most of the BBC’s games at that time, turned out to be a crap set of minigames.
And my oh my were they crap! You had a dodgy maze minigame, where you move a stringy dot through the dreaded Mine of Awkward Collision Detection, before moving on to the dreaded Awful-yet-obligatory Frogger Clone Escape. That level, titled creatively “Prison Escape,” is probably the most carcinogenic, with it’s painful palette serving only to blind in a kaleidoscope of hot pinks and murky blues. The final two levels, an uninspired shooter and an inexplicable 3D minesweeper-esque game, smack of desperately poring through old magazines for simple BASIC games to add to the package. Credit must go to the poor sod who typed up the instruction screens, and thus had to have an imagination rivaling that of CS Lewis to fashion any story out of the blocks on screen, let alone a story even tangentially related to the good Doctor!
There is more familiar territory with the follow up, Doctor Who and The Warlord, which in 1985 followed in the footsteps of the text adventure version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, right down to getting former Doctor Who producer Graham Williams on board. It’s nigh impossible to find these days, but was advertised heavily on BBC TV to go with the Computer Literacy Project.
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Far more interesting, and more of an actual, game came in 1986, when Micro Power released Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror. A heavily ambitious game that began life as the sequel to the very popular Castle Quest, and then Dinosaur Planet, (Turned into a licensed game mid-development), Mines of Terror came with an extra ROM chip that was needed to run the BBC Micro version of the game. The reason for this is that the game could scroll, and was actually a rather big metroid-esque adventure game, albeit with no weapons outside of your trusty and totally not copyright-sidestepping cat Splinx, who could, with the help of LOGO programming,, take on the fearsome Not-Daleks. It didn’t sell brilliantly, and even if it had, the sheer costs of making the game would have killed off Micro Power anyway, once again leaving the Doctor’s adventures in a protracted limbo.
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Respite would not come until 1992, three years after the cancellation of the series, in Dalek Attack. Without the Doctor Who name, it appears that it might have been part of the Absalom Daak project at one point, or tied in to the popular comic book series. The game definitely looks the part, with sharp colourful graphics on the Amiga or PC versions that depict the second, fourth, or seventh Doctor quite nicely (though, of course, loses out if you play the ZX Spectrum), but sadly that is where most of the positives end, because the game is really not good.
The main problem is epitomised by the first level, a non-representative scrolling shooter where it’s easy to be hit, and pretty tough to hit anything else. There is no invincibility after taking damage either, so it is easy to lose several lives simply by touching a wall or the awkwardly placed two headed dragon at the end of the level, whose hard to avoid fireballs will take the rest of your lives. If you get past that (or use a trainer programme to give yourself the infinite health you need to get past it), you get dumped into the game proper: an awkward platform shooter that was all the rage on the Amiga by people desperate to ape Turrican. You collect holograms, and when you get them all you can pick up a key card, which lets you fight the boss. This, surprise surprise, makes the game end up becoming a repetitive slog, despite only being six levels long. I might be being a bit too hard on the game, not because it’s actually of merit, but because the developers, Alternative Software, tried to sue Amiga Power for doing the same thing!
After the final rerelease of Dalek Attack came by far the most interesting of the Doctor Who games: a full on FMV 3D action adventure by the name of Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctors. Developed by Studio Fish and published by the BBC themselves, the game is really odd, and difficult to categorise. It is, in essence, a first person shooter with adventure elements, clearly taking more than a little inspiration from the game Descent, with tank controls, sway, and six degrees of movement (though not quite with the mind bending gravity defiance that Descent had).
Notable in that it is the only game in this article where you do not in fact play as the Doctor himself, but as a strange floating organism known as Graak, who is challenged by the Master (played for the final time by Anthony Ainley) to save all seven of the Doctor’s incarnations (this of course despite the fact that there was an eighth Doctor by this point!). You do this through a mix of puzzle-solving, and very awkward combat, the Descent-like engine not entirely designed for the tight corridors and puzzle-solving this game provides. Graphically the game looks actually really good, especially for 1997, when the only real competitors were the admittedly gorgeous MDK, and Quake 2 by the end of the year.
The control scheme isn’t brilliant, struggling to mix the mouse controls of an adventure game with the keyboard controls of Descent, and comes without the ability to map the keys at all, which means that certain frantic moments will inevitably cause frustration.
That said, it is probably worth a look as a rare abandoned piece of Whovian history, but do keep in mind that with games this old you have the inevitable issue of compatibility: It will not work on Windows 7 natively, and problems are reported with Windows Vista and XP, so if you do plan to seek it out, Windows Virtual PC or another virtual machine is probably your best bet. Even after getting it to work, you get problems with screen tearing, and that, combined with the canted camera angles, can serve to make you feel sick.
As a game it’s a mixed bag, but as a celebration of classic Doctor Who it does manage to hit the right notes, with Anthony Ainely and all the living actors participating and just having the faintest air of that mystery, that adventure, and, to a degree, that horror of travelling time and space.
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There would be no Doctor Who games for thirteen years after Destiny of the Doctors (because let’s face it, Doctor Who Top Trumps barely counts!), but, as David Tennant cried how he didn’t want to go, and we learned that fans will eat any disgusting thing if it’s on their favourite show, the great and powerful Sumo Digital, makers of games such as the Devil May Cry reboot and the sensational port of Outrun 2 for the Xbox, started work on a new Doctor Who game. And my was it ambitious! A big budget action adventure game with all the cast and crew (well, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan at least) with television pacing was a big ask, particularly since the game would be released for free in the United Kingdom (Which is still the case). It sounded almost too good to be true!
Guess what it turned out to be!
It had a bunch of design flaws that really hampered the game, some of which, like the awful control scheme, could have been fixed post release, but simply were not, and the schizophrenic novice-of-all-trades gameplay. This would be fine if the adventuring was more involved, the actors didn’t sound like they were woken up at two in the morning and shoved into an accurately-sized police box to record the lines, and the action gameplay wasn’t focused on stealth and escort missions. These two elements more than anything cripple the game, as the only thing worse than a badly implemented stealth section is having to babysit Amy Pond while you do it, especially since she travels about fourteen yards behind you and thus makes timing your path through the myriad foes a nightmare. And then you get levels which consist of three rooms, showing the deep problems with the episodic game model as well.
What is by far the worst thing, though, is that Doctor Who The Adventure Game is far and away the best Doctor Who game released this century. Everything else is so much worse than this. Doctor Who: Return to Earth for the Wii feels like a cheapened, even less controllable version of the Adventure Games. Evacuation Earth on the DS is the shoddiest Professor Layton knock-off ever conceived (a miracle given the vast numbers of shovelware puzzle games on the DS), Worlds in Time is less a game as a legal cute means to financially exploit children, and The Mazes of Time is as generic an iOS game as they get.
Out of the new batch of Doctor Who related games, the only one that comes close to even being a game is The Eternity Clock, and even that is riddled with problems. The game plays similar to older rotoscoped platformers like The Prince of Persia and Flashback, although with a lot more minigames, as per Doctor Who game tradition. It’s a Doctor Who game in only the most superficial ways: there’s the Doctor, there’s River Song, there’s the TARDIS and the Daleks, and that’s your lot. Pretty much everything else can be found in better 2.5d platformers like Shadow Complex or Rocketbirds’ Hardboiled Chicken (though that’s not really 2.5d).
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So, what have we learned from our rich and perhaps overly detailed romp across time, space, and really awkward computer games? Well, it is that invention is at the heart of Doctor Who. Invention and creativity, despite everything, makes the show work, and gives it that wonder and, indeed, that horror that has made it a teatime favourite for generation after generation. Translating invention into a licensed video game is one of the hardest jobs in the world, but even attempting it makes the game stand out. It is a total shame more Doctor Who games did not exploit that potential, and really make something innovative and mind-bending. Or should I say, time-bending?
Do you have a particular memory of Doctor Who gaming, or disagree with my rather harsh verdict on the series as a whole? Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the article, on Facebook or via the Geek Pride Twitter page @geekpride1 . Thanks for Reading!