On the First Day of Die Hard, My True Love Gave to Me...

My original plan was to come in, look at the old 8-bit Die Hard game (which seemingly was released on various consoles and computers, the most popular of which was the NES), and then move on to other titles. But, as so often is the case when I’m delving into old games from the 1980s and 1990s, one title for various devices ends up being a whole fleet of different, completely unrelated adventures. Such is the case with the games based on this first movie of the whole Die HardThe 1980s were famous for the bombastic action films released during the decade. Featuring big burly men fighting other big burly men, often with more guns, bombs, and explosions than appear in Michael Bay's wildest dreams, the action films of the decade were heavy on spectacle, short on realism. And then came a little film called Die Hard that flipped the entire action genre on its head. franchise, which saw its first video game adaptation back in 1989, a year after the film was released.

Developed by Dynamix, the DOS version of Die Hard is one of the first 3D action games ever released. Note that I don’t call it a first-person shooter because it very clearly isn’t that. Even though it is presented from a behind-the-back presentation, with the hero going through maze-like, 3D levels, this isn’t like Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. This is a very rudimentary, almost grid-based game with simple controls and not a lot of shooting. Compared to games that would come out even a couple of years later, this game feels positively archaic, but to get to those titles we had to go through adventures like this, which were still feeling their way along.

The DOS Die Hard kind of, sort of follows the plot of the movie. Our hero, John McClain, is at Nakatomi Plaza to visit his wife when the building is taken over by terrorists. Out on his own, John has to work through the various terrorists dotting the building, taking them out and stealing their supplies. His goal is to find a way to foil their plans. Their goal is to hack through the seven locks protecting the Nakatomi vault and steal the goods within. John has to work fast, and within the time limit, to foil the plans, get to the final villain, Hans Gruber, and save his wife.

Starting off in a single room on the 32nd floor, you have to take John and move him around through the 32nd and 33rd floors as well as two sections of the roof. You can move along the four cardinal directions, back and forward as well as side-to-side strafing. You can also turn ninety degrees at a time rotating around and taking in the various rooms and hallways. When a terrorist shows up you can either punch them to death or try to shoot them. Eliminate them and you can then search their body and take their stuff.

Note, most of the stuff isn’t super useful, especially if you know what you’re doing. You can pick up food, lighters, and cigarettes, which all go into your inventory if you’re so inclined. More important, though, are the guns and bullets, which let you shoot at the terrorists, as well as one unlucky sod carrying the detonators. Like in the movie, John needs to get the detonators to help styme the terrorists and delay them getting into the vault. Get those detonators to effectively open up the back half of the game.

As you travel through the game you’ll come across certain cut-scenes that tie the game into the film. At one point you’ll have to kill a terrorist and drop his body out a window, alerting Officer Al Powell to your presence and the stuff going on in the building. Other times you’ll see the cops arriving, the terrorists plotting, your feet walking over glass, and more. It helps to add to the experience, assuming you’ve seen the movie before, but if you are going into this as your first Die Hard experience (which, back in the day, maybe you did), this game doesn’t really give you a lot to go on. It’s like other, classic games that required you to read the instruction manual to get the story because this game barely tells you anything at all.

In basic function, the DOS Die Hard works well enough. It’s a tad clunky and very basic, but if you know what you’re doing you can get through it eventually. I will admit that the combat in the game is awful, with basic brawling with the terrorists boiling down to button mashing as your character faces them and hoping you do damage to them without them killing you too much. Likely you’ll die, a lot, and have to restart the game over a few times until you get the hang of things… and that’s only if you really care to try.

The game is obtuse in what it expects you to do, dropping you into a free-roaming, open recreation of the building and expecting you to figure it out. Do you remember that you need to go turn off an alarm? Can you find the guy with the detonators? Did you kill the one dude with cabling in his hands, and did you remember to grab it so you can make your escape from an exploding roof, ten minutes later? If you know every objective, and can remember where to go and what to do, then you could theoretically breeze through the game in 15 minutes or so. Getting to that point, though, would take a lot of trial and error. Dozens of playthroughs of it, and that assumes you don’t get beaten down by the terrorists over and over before you even get going.

Die Hard for DOS doesn’t really care if you have a good time or not. It’s a kind of “classic game hard” experience where everything is put out there and you have to just figure it out. Can’t get a handle on the combat? Too bad. Don’t know how to hit every objective in the time provided? Tough luck. There is no assistance, no second chances, no hope if you get lost or stuck or confused. The game expects perfection and if you don’t provide that then you’re just going to die and start over again and again. Most gamers, I’m sure, just quit rather than beat their head against this cruel game.

About the only thing the game has going for it is that it does a credible job presenting 3D graphics. It does it through a combination of enemy sprites and 3D rendered levels, not unlike what Wolfenstein 3D would do a few years later. It certainly looks better than Bethesda’s The Terminator, and that game came out in 1991, although Die Hard isn’t anywhere near as ambitious as that game, to be fair. This is a very early 3D game, and it manages to be mostly playable (for a certain definition of the term). Just achieving that alone is an accomplishment.

But when you go in and try to play the game you’re met with a very messy experience. It’s not fun, it’s not well designed, and it really just doesn’t want you to get anywhere at all. Die Hard works as a tech demo for what could come down the pipeline, but as a game on its own, it’s one that no one is going to want to experience again.