Giantkiller

When after ninety seconds you realize that in Giantkiller you are shooting at giant flowerpots, you know you have bumped into a peculiar game. The year 1987, MS-DOS, no grand name on the box — simply an action shooter that almost nobody knows today.

You are a small figure on a pixelated screen and your task is clear — destroy the bigger enemies. Do not look for comparisons with Donkey Kong or the other hits of the time. Giantkiller is more of an experiment, an attempt at what a shooter with a bottom-to-top orientation might look like. The giants (or flowers, or whatever they are) come in waves, you sneak across the screen and stick shots into them until you have burned enough to make them fall.

The controls are simple, so that does not matter — only one thing interests you, whether you have enough time and space during the clashes to avoid their return. Sometimes it comes off. Elsewhere you are bored, because the opponent moves more slowly than sadness on a Friday evening. The graphics are modest, the sound even more so. You will find neither atmosphere nor ambience here, just an honest pixel spectacle without big pretensions. The game will not take two hours of your time, rather an hour and a half.

What makes it interesting today? Really only the fact that it exists. It is a testament to a time when every creation had a chance, even if it ended up forgotten. Giantkiller has nothing to give you — no fun on the level of the classics, no brilliant game design. But when you launch it in an emulator and watch those little figures circle around the flowers, you feel something of the old-world magic of the early years of computer games.

Give it a go if you are curious what these experiments looked like before shooters learned to fly. It is not wasted time, just a little strange. And that is worth it.