It was “cute” characters with a simple goal, moving (usually) to the right side of the screen, fighting bad guys, avoiding death, et cetera. Lost Vikings was obviously an act of multi-pronged revisionist adoration, directed at the whole of the Japanese side of the Pacific Ocean. Though we have seen the present of Blizzard, and though we realize that the future includes Diablo III, we cannot shake our understanding of the past: that this humble company that would end up accidentally picking a cola war with Dungeons and Dragons fans (Dungeons and Dragons ran an ad campaign last year that encouraged people to at least invite over “real-life” friends if they wanted to pretend to be an elf in their basement) got their start as just another group of dudes who loved Nintendo games. (That is to say, in World of Warcraft, there’s a decent enough amount of fun to have without breaking the law.) Starcraft was Warcraft for people who preferred “Star Wars” to “Lord of the Rings”, and World of Warcraft is apparently the one massively-multiplayer online role-playing game to try if you’ve ever been curious about pretending to be someone else on the internet and are simply afraid you might end up breaking the law. Diablo was obviously an experiment, and a successful one: it accidentally created a genre. Then there was Diablo, which was a lot like a real-time strategy game in which you control only one character. Along the way, they made Warcraft for PC, which was a lot like other existing real-time strategy games, only streamlined according to the laws of common sense. Between then and now, Blizzard would make an excellent racing game ( Rock and Roll Racing), an excellent sequel to The Lost Vikings, and an incredibly excellent platform-action-adventure game that successfully attempted to pare Lost Vikings‘s mechanics down into a game in which you controlled one guy instead of three ( Blackthorne). They are a provider of multimedia content. As the button-mashing game kids of the late 20th century divided into two camps - those who preferred the “speed” of Sonic the Hedgehog and those who preferred the “exploration” of Super Mario - Blizzard clapped together a platform-action game based on the simplest common-sensical mechanics, believed in their core concept, focused the majority of their attention on level design, polished the package until every stage was arranged in an immaculate order, and nonchalantly released a masterpiece.Įventually, Blizzard would find the real-time strategy genre more worthy of their time a decade and a half later, the little developer that made Lost Vikings now sits atop a throne made of bricks - bricks of hundred-dollar bills - and is recognized worldwide as more than a videogame developer. It was released in 1992, the era when everyone and their brother was just starting to grasp the moneymaking possibilities of putting a T-shirt on a bobcat. Of all the side-scrolling mascot-flogging jerk-off games of the 16-bit era, Lost Vikings is perhaps the only one to score extra credit on the test of time.
For four: Lost Vikings most succinctly fits the criteria of an Action Button Dot Net Manifesto Selection, in that it is straightforward, intelligent, puzzling, actioning, buttoning, and it does not stop until it exhausts all the labyrinthine possibilities of its simplistic game mechanics. No, we don’t like World of Warcraft, though only for tenuous reasons: we’re just afraid that if we ever played it, we’d like it too much.) For three, no one seems to ever really scream too much about Lost Vikings, so we’re taking it upon ourselves to, uhh, well, talk half-passionately while drinking something delicious with you in a dimly-lit cafe. (There were previously plans to include Diablo II, Starcraft, and Blackthorne on this list as well, which would have probably looked ridiculous and gotten us flamed for not including World of Warcraft too. For two, this list would be incomplete without acknowledging Blizzard at least once. For one, this list would be incomplete without a game about vikings.
Bottom line: The Lost Vikings is “the best viking game ever.”Ĭalling Lost Vikings one of the twenty-five best games of all-time is something we here at Action Button Dot Net do out of a four-fold sense of duty.
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