Poor timing was just the first of many failures that befell the official Nintendo Entertainment System video game adaptation of James Cameron’s The Terminator. By late 1992, the original Terminator movie was already eight-years-old, and even the blockbuster sequel (that presumably inspired the release of this game) had left theaters almost a year and a half earlier. Further, the NES console itself was pretty much on its last legs at that point, having largely been supplanted by the North American introduction of the Super Nintendo in 1991.

Even with all that noted, that the NES version of The Terminator would turn out to be abjectly terrible on every level seems nearly inexcusable. Video game development for the console should have been mature enough to produce something better than this. The Terminator plays like a game that might have been made for the Commodore Amiga around 1985, and probably would have felt disappointing even back then.

Title:	The Terminator
Year of Release:	1992
Publisher:	Mindscape / Bethesda Softworks
Gaming Platform:	NES

Licensed video games based on movies had an extremely dicey track record on the NES, with most being pretty awful. The Terminator was hardly an outlier in that respect. If anything, a good Terminator game might have been a bigger surprise. Nevertheless, I tend to have a high tolerance for these things. Back in the days when you could rent games from the local video store for a couple bucks each, I played just about every movie game that hit the NES console. I still have tremendous nostalgia for that time, even when the games themselves are less than great. The Terminator, though, is such a dog even I struggle to find any enjoyment in it.

Structured as a side-scrolling platformer, the game opens in the post-apocalyptic future, where your hero character (presumably Kyle Reese, though not explicitly identified) must navigate through collapsed buildings – with inexplicably working treadmills floating in mid-air – and fight off robotic Terminators on your way to a time machine that will transport you back to 1984. That’s the first level, and is frankly as far as I ever plan to go.

Everything about this game sucks. The graphics, sound effects, and music are all terrible, and the gameplay is even worse. Your character’s primary weapon is a laser pistol, which he must stop and kneel down to shoot for no logical reason whatsoever. Along the way, you can pick up hand grenades, but switching to them is a slow process that leaves you open to attack, and they don’t particularly do any more damage than the pistol, if you’re lucky enough to toss one anywhere near an enemy.

The controls and game physics are so bad that surviving even the first level feels like an impossibility. The Terminators themselves are perhaps the least of your problems. You’re far more likely to fall to your death. Attempts to leap over hazards result in failure more often that not, as the crappy graphics make it difficult to discern solid objects from open holes in the floor. You get exactly three lives, and the game offers no ability to save your progress or continue without starting over from the beginning.

This was actually the second Terminator video game from Bethesda Softworks. Two years earlier, in 1990, Bethesda released a DOS first-person-shooter based on the movie that received a fair amount of acclaim and was successful enough to be followed by four sequels. Sadly, title aside, the NES edition shared no other attributes with that DOS game. Instead, development wound up in the hands of a Canadian studio called Radical Entertainment, leaving distribution on the NES to a collaboration between Bethesda and Mindscape (the latter also responsible for the lousy Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom game).

In what can only be classified as a missed opportunity, Sunsoft (makers of the exemplary Batman: The Video Game) had reportedly begun development on a Terminator 8-bit game in 1989, but lost the license because the planned storyline didn’t follow the movie closely enough. However, rather than let that effort go to waste, the project was reworked to remove references to the Terminator franchise, and was released in 1990 under the title Journey to Silius. I’ve played that game, and while not quite up to the same standard as Batman, it’s certainly a lot better than this pile of garbage.

Related

• The Terminator (1984)
• Terminator Zero: Season 1 (2024)