Death Sword

Year 1988, I'm sitting at a monitor with orange phosphor and for the first time I see two muscular guys with swords slashing through the air in a resolution that wouldn't even draw a sneer today. And yet — it was something. Death Sword, back then known more by its original name Barbarian, was on PC one of those games you just had to own.

Palace Software originally released Barbarian in 1987 on Commodore 64 and Amiga, with the PC version following shortly after. Genre-wise it's a one or two-player fighting action game — two giant warriors meet on screen and one of them leaves without his head. Literally. The inspiration was more than obvious: Conan, Schwarzenegger, Frank Frazetta and that whole wave of muscular barbarians that flooded cinemas and comic book shops in the eighties. The game went at it without scruple.

The controls are surprisingly decent for what PC architecture was pushing out back then. Several different moves and strikes were at your disposal — not just one "hit" button. The characters were large for the time and animated with a certain grace. The most famous moment remains the decapitation of your opponent, after which a goblin runs in and kicks the head away — in 1988 that was more shocking than anything I'd seen in a game before. Different versions of the game existed with varying graphics and sound quality depending on the platform, with the PC port not being among the prettiest — the C64 and Amiga led the way there.

We remember Death Sword because it came at the right time. Fighting games in this style didn't exist on a mass scale yet — Street Fighter was also from 1987, but on the PC home scene it was Barbarian who showed that this thing works. Did the game age well? Mechanically, hardly — without sound feedback and with a stiffness that nobody would get used to on a first afternoon these days, it's not exactly comfortable. The atmosphere and boldness remain, though.

Today you can play Death Sword in your browser mainly for that blast from the past — to check if the memory matches reality. It matches halfway. For those who remember it, it's a window into a time when a game could cause a scandal just by cutting off your head. For younger players it's more a historical artifact than living entertainment. Both have their value.