Space Hulk

Year 1993, I'm thirteen years old, and a friend describes a game where you command Terminators — elite space marines in massive power armor — through abandoned space hulks full of genestealers. Sounds like a dream. Then I fire it up and reality is a bit grittier, but not necessarily worse.

Space Hulk by Electronic Arts is based on a Games Workshop board game. You find yourself on a massive space hulk where genestealers have multiplied — fast, merciless, coming from every corridor. Your mission is to complete tactical objectives with a handful of Terminators, where each warrior is precious and their loss stings.

The interface is what immediately surprises you about the game. Most of the screen is taken up by a first-person view from the soldier you're controlling, with tiny windows around it showing the view from other squad members. Genius idea. Practice is messier. Each soldier is controlled separately, time constantly flows and genestealers won't wait, so by the time you switch attention to the guy on the left, the one on the right already has claws in his chest. The game offers a slow-motion mode, without which it's basically chaos in uniform.

The atmosphere holds up today. Narrow metal corridors, flickering red light, the sound of footsteps from an approaching swarm — that's exactly what you expect from Space Hulk. The graphics are acceptable for their time, sound does more than visuals. But the controls carry all the sins of early nineties PC strategy: it's not intuitive, the manual is required reading, and on modern hardware you won't get to it without DOSBox anyway. Difficulty is sometimes brutal not because the game is clever, but because the genestealers' AI is simply fast and merciless.

Today you can play Space Hulk in your browser via emulation and it makes sense for two reasons. First, the feel of that space claustrophobia still works — this combination of tactical strategy and first-person perspective wasn't something you saw every day in 1993. Second, it's a historical artifact from when EA still released things people were willing to take risks on. If you're looking for relaxation, you won't find it here. If you want to know what an ambitious and unpolished idea looked like at the best possible time for ambitious unpolished ideas, Space Hulk is the exact answer.