654 - The Terminator : SkyNET

The 1984 movie The Terminator opens on a hellish version of 2029. A blasted wasteland patrolled by killer robots bent on eradicating all human life from the planet. The Terminator : SkyNET lets you live there.

First person shooters were really only a few years old by the time that SkyNET came out. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992 and SkyNET came out in 1996, the same year as Quake. That’s not a lot of time to go from the origin of a genre to fully 3D game engines.

While Quake might have been the more advanced 3D engine at the time, The Terminator : SkyNET was the game that truly nailed the first person 3D controls. You know, the important part. It wasn’t quite using wasd yet, but you could set up a pretty competent control scheme in the standard options menu. For quite a while quake would have players modifying text files to set up mouse and keyboard controls.

As soon as you wrap your head around the first person 3D controls, or modify them to your liking, you suddenly feel immersed in the world of The Terminator. It is bleak and eerie and hostile right from the very first location. You will learn to fear the sound of hunter-killer robot servo-motors since the robots seem to be able to hide virtually everywhere in the post apocalyptic rubble.

It’s unsurprising that developer Bethesda and Todd Howard in particular, would go on to be know for creating living, breathing fantasy worlds for you to play in. By comparison SkyNET is extremely linear, but it does everything it can with its early 3D engine, to feel like a real place. You move around in it like it’s a real place. It reacts to your actions like it’s a real place. It’s primitive, and your interactions are limited, but everything feels solid and connected in a way that wouldn’t happen for again for a few years.

If Quake was the best expression of the first person 3D action game, The Terminator games, Future Shock and SkyNET, were the industries first forays into the world of immersive sims and roll playing. It only gave you one roll to play, but SkyNET felt real in the way that the Elder Scrolls series would later go on to perfect.

I fired up SkyNET just a few nights ago. After changing the keyboard to a more comfortable wasd, I fell right into it again. The game holds up and feels challenging and immediate in a way that almost nothing from its era did. It is, after all, one of the Best Games