Blackthorne - Now Free!

A classic from the past, built by the Warcraft smithy's known as Blizzard, Blackthorne creeps back up from the abyss to your awaiting hard drive. Back in the DOS days, platformers were pretty abundant with titles like Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit heading the pack with their cartoony and mostly violence-free gaming that were a staple of the consoles. PC owners on the other hand were still slavering after a small shareware title called Doom that was most likely still on their Multi-Megabyte MFM hard drives after a year of being released.

A large distinction that separated the PC from the consoles was a bigbrother-free market. This allowed what would be called an AO rated game such as the Shareware version of Doom to be freely downloaded from any BBS and enjoyed without anyone's approval. Doom employed blood, gore, violence and satanic symbols with wild abandon and the PC market was in love with the sheer brutality of it all. Cute characters on the consoles only inflamed the scorn PC users felt towards being treated like a child watching Saturday morning cartoons and helped sowed the seeds of the PC vs Console debate that has raged ever since.

Blizzard surely noticed the attention that Doom had attained and while smart platformers such as Prince of Persia existed on PC, it lacked a certain bloodlust that had grabbed the PC market. Enter a marriage of the two: Blackthorne.


Now Blackthorne is not the wanton carnagefest that Doom happily propagates, but having a shotgun that visually inflicted bloody damage was new to platformers. Killing things such as your own people, who are chained to a wall, backhanded blind fire ala Evil-Dead style was taboo and a guilty pleasure for the time.
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