Human Killing Machine

“He’s the Meanest Son of a Snake You’ve Ever Seen!”

“Screen shots from Atari ST format.”
Spin-kicking art by Zach McCue (@Zoddman).

The original Street Fighter arcade game is something of an oddity; in that it’s responsible for spawning a hugely successful franchise, and yet it is also treated as the proverbial “red-headed stepchild” within that series. Hell, Ryu’s hair was even colored red in this initial outing, which feels oddly prophetic in hindsight? In any event: It feels like folk often forget (or reject) that the first Street Fighter was, in fact, a modest success in its time — selling through somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 coin-op units during its initial production run.^[1] Whether that estimate accounts for apparent recalls of the ‘Deluxe’ cabinet variant – requiring players to literally pound their fist into pressure-sensitive buttons in order to execute heavier attacks – is unfortunately unknown. What we can account for are the immediate influences this inaugural entry had on the fighting game genre; such as normalizing the oft-imitated world tour template, moving theming past the traditional karate and boxing fare, and the innovation of “special” techniques hidden behind specific input strings. Naturally, producing a sequel would prove an effective way for Capcom to capitalize on the game’s momentum — as well as serving as something of a genre shake-up in its own right.

Lots of folk will claim to know the road to Street Fighter II: The World Warrior from there; including the first Final Fight originally being envisioned as a ‘Street Fighter ‘89,’ before ultimately kicking off a franchise all its own. But that spun-off beat ‘em up represents just one fork in the road — one of several branching paths which Capcom could’ve alternatively chosen to travel down. What if the company had decided to look past Street Fighter’s arcade earnings, and determined that the home computer market was where the franchise futures lied? Crazy as it is to think about now, it may well have been a viable option back then: Conversions of the game to computers of the era had done reasonably well in their own right, and examples did exist for other arcade properties successfully spinning off on the PC front. As a matter of fact, one of Capcom’s publishing partners in this field had even gone so far as to pre-emptively develop their own take on a sequel, and pitch it for approval by the Osaka offices.

Though Capcom would elect to turn down this proposed game, its producers would still eventually end up bringing it to market, albeit lacking a planned ‘Streetfighter II’ subtitle. The resulting software would now be known simply as Human Killing Machine, and see release across the various computer platforms of 1989. And for as pivotal The World Warrior would prove in cementing Street Fighter’s place in the history of video games, HKM may well have proven to have utterly doomed the fighting franchise had Capcom chosen to travel down its darkened path. Between completely broken gameplay mechanics, an utter lack of production efforts, and a gameplay progression which sees you kicking dogs on Moscow streets en route to combating terrorists in Beirut; you’ll find it hard to believe that this game ever had a snowball’s chance in Hell at being the sequel to Street Fighter. But so it was, and here we are.

It now falls on us to examine the circumstances between the franchise dead end that could’ve been, and to explore the depths of its content as a standalone release. Will we survive this challenge to fight another day, or will we face defeat at the hands of the infernal machine? That may sound like dramatism, but believe me when I say that no game has ever come quite so close to besting us.

“Kwon is Strong.”

“In this game you take the part of a Street Fighter who travels the world.”
Street Fighter for Commodore 64.
(North American cover)

The computer games market of the mid-to-late 1980s belonged to the British. Between your Codemasters, Gremlin Interactives, Imagine Softwares, and Ultimate Play the Games; the bulk of the decade’s most notable software houses all seemed to hail from the United Kingdom, credit due to an unprecedented boom in accessible microcomputer hardware. At a point where literal dozens of platforms co-existed within the market simultaneously – all boasting distinctly different hardware and software standards – the only constant felt to be Britain-based games publishers and developers, who often aimed to release their games across the whole lot of them. Practice had been established as commonplace to release versions of a title across the likes of the ZX Spectrum (the cheapest / most abundant British micro of the times), Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and DOS-compatibles — before even getting started on the lines of computers targeted toward the Asian market and beyond. I hope you can keep all those different product lines in your memory, as I’ll be quizzing you on them later.

In all seriousness: It can certainly be difficult to keep track of the various home computers of the era, and which respective platforms a given game might have released across. Have you ever heard a self-professed “game historian” discuss how supposedly confusing it was for consumers to navigate the home console market of the early ‘80s? Well, you can be sure that these so-called experts don’t honestly know what they’re talking about, as that tired old narrative has since been debunked past the point of plausibility. But when it comparatively came to the home computer market of the ‘80s? Here, you can understand how a consumer might get genuinely overwhelmed by their options. Sure, the ZX Spectrum topped the sales charts in the UK, and the Commodore 64 may have ran away with things in North America; but with the Amiga and Atari ST proving themselves capable of outperforming these platforms in a pinch, the Amstrad CPC serving as a value alternative with its included monitor, the emergence of Apple’s early offerings, and DOS ultimately proving to be the operating system of the future (for at least a few years time) — it becomes more difficult to determine concrete “winners and losers” here.

There was only one certainty in this time: Microcomputers made for big business, and the games industry was due a slice of the pie. As such, British software houses seeking their shares would do so primarily in one of three different ways: The first would see publishers going the “budget label” route, where smaller games were often sourced from bedroom coders and sold for cheap (less than or around £5.95), often in compilation packs alongside similarly amateur efforts. A second option would see software houses putting more sizable production behind premium titles — games intended to stand on their own and sell at higher prices (anywhere between £7.95 and £25 depending on the platform), with different versions likely making their way to the multiple formats. The third alternative would serve as a sort of variation on the second; where computer publishers sought after popular arcade and console licenses, and would offer to produce and publish conversions of them to PC. Needless to say, there was plenty of competition between different computer publishers vying for these particular licenses, and it would typically behoove the rights-holders to settle for the lowest bidder.

This isn’t to say that all these contracted conversions ended up being shoddy work. In seeking an example of an arcade-to-computer translation exceeding expectations, look no further than Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun — better known by many for its English-language localization as Renegade. A formative beat ‘em up developed by Technos Japan and published by Taito in 1986; conversions of the title for the European computer market in 1987 were contracted to British company Ocean Software (operating under their ‘Imagine’ label), who brought the game to the likes of the Amstrad, C64, ST and Speccy. At the same time that Technos and Taito had set to work franchising the property for Japan and North America – serving as the foundation for the long-running ‘Kunio-kun’ series, as well as spawning the likes of River City Ransom in the West – Ocean had spun Renegade off in their own direction, resulting in a highly-regarded sequel Target: Renegade. Critics would hail its smooth animation, the addition of weapons to pick up and wield, and the inclusion of cooperative play; all serving as demonstrable iterations on Taito’s original arcade. This sequel even eventually made its way to the NES, complete with kick-ass Tim Follin soundtrack.

In this way, you could trace two separate paths branching out from the original arcade release, with both resulting in distinctly regional properties. While the home computer road would end with the contentious Renegade III: The Final Chapter in 1989 – a time traveling misadventure with ill-implemented platforming segments – the fact that Ocean had been allowed to strike out on their own in the first place had indicated a golden opportunity for other games software houses: If you could get your hands on an arcade or console license, and then successfully bring it to fruition for computers, there was the chance that the original manufacturers might let you pursue your own sequel plans! At that point, an enterprising PC publisher might continue to benefit from that name and brand recognition, while not remaining beholden to the original game creators / having to wait for “official” sequels to arrive in arcades or on home consoles. As a worst case scenario; a software house could see their requests to develop further titles rebuffed, and have to wipe away their tears with the tidy profits already made on the back of their initial port jobs.

All this likely elicits the question: How many computer publishers were actually given the green light to develop their own officially-sanctioned sequels? As it would turn out, not actually all that many. Having brought Tecmo’s Bomb Jack to various home micros (including Amiga, Amstrad, Commodore, Spectrum and ST), England’s Elite Systems were granted a license to develop and publish Bomb Jack II across most of those same platforms in 1986, before being trusted again to handle conversions of the “real” sequel Mighty Bombjack. I realize this actually serves as an example predating Renegade and its sequels, but I feel like I should be allowed to list it out of order here, on the grounds that Bomb Jack isn’t nearly as noteworthy a franchise. More interesting might be a 1991 sequel to Capcom’s Gun.Smoke — titled Desperado 2 by its publishers at Topo Soft. With localizations of Gun.Smoke for the Spanish home computer market taking on the name of ‘Desperado’ (while copies marketed in the UK retained the original name), it was only appropriate that Topo Soft continue to use that branding in developing their own sequel for that same audience.

Beyond those two cases? There’s actually only a total of two more titles I’m aware of… which I’m deliberately holding back the titles of for the time being, for reasons which will only become apparent much later in this article. Y’all are just gonna have to stick with me on this one. Getting back to the matter at hand: Even ignoring the potential for independent franchising, the conversion business was already a decided cash cow, and it fell on British software houses to milk it for all it was worth. And perhaps no company hailing from the United Kingdom would suckle that teet quite so fervently as ‘US Gold’ — whose name might read as something like a misdirection, at first glance. See, their business plan had originally centered around the idea of importing titles by North American studios – the likes of Datasoft’s Bruce Lee and Access Software’s Beach-Head, for example – and converting them for the likes of computers more popular in the European (mainly British) markets. In this way, they were positioning themselves as selecting the best of US-developed software for redistribution in the UK — sifting for gold, as it were.

At some point though, they must’ve realized that limiting themselves to just North American imports was holding them back — that they could likely just as easily strike deals with emerging Japanese game manufacturers as well. Specifically, the epiphany appeared as a result of noticing the success of rival publisher Elite Systems, on the back of their computer conversions of Capcom’s Commando (“We were psychologically scarred by Elite getting Commando” ~ Tim Chaney, GM for US Gold).^[2] It wasn’t long at all until they began to expand their repertoire: Conversions of Namco’s Xevious in 1986, Tecmo’s Rygar and Solomon’s Key in 1987, and SEGA’s OutRun in 1988; just to name an early few. Perhaps one of the more pertinent titles from this period though came with their 1987 conversion of Namco’s Rolling Thunder, on the merit of their choice in contracted developer behind it: An upstart studio by the name of Tiertex Design Studios, whose arcade-to-computer conversion here represented just their second [or third] contribution to the games industry. Having found their way into US Gold’s good graces, the publisher soon saw fit to purchase a majority stake in the developer, and began relying on them for ports of premiere arcade titles.

“Tiertex was very quick at arcade conversions. US Gold must have been pleased with the speed of output and I had the impression that Tiertex had the pick of the best arcade games that US Gold licensed. A lot of people used to complain about Tiertex games, but when you think that virtually every one from Tiertex was coded and published within six months it’s pretty impressive. The programmers had no access to the original arcade source code – the game had to be played over and over again in order to make the conversion accurate.” ~ Anthony Ball, programmer for Tiertex^[2b]

This should begin to shine some light on US Gold’s modus operandi: A penchant for dirty conversions done dirt cheap, as applied to some of the most popular international licenses of the times. Not only that, but the company proudly partook in the business of “stiffing” — effectively bullying retailers into shelving mass quantities of product – to the detriment of their businesses – for the purposes of inflating sales numbers. At a point in ‘86, it briefly seemed as if these practices had finally caught up to the publisher, with the disastrous reception of football title World Cup Carnival: A re-packaging of a then two-year old release (‘World Cup Football’) sold at twice the price as it had originally been sold for, hastily assembled as result of running short on time on a license to develop software around FIFA’s ‘86 World Cup. Ultimately though, US Gold were able to weather a storm of nuclearly negative reception, and come out financially undamaged as a result of having successfully bluffed / stiffed both distributors and retailers.**

Most of the time though, US Gold dealt in more simple means of getting their less polished software to pass: Schmoozing and buying off magazine reviewers, and utilizing paid-for positive reception to help sell decidedly middling games. And as multiple staffers from within US Gold would testify, the job of swaying reviewers fell primarily on one employee: PR representative Danielle “Woody” Woodyatt. Though she had no real interest in playing video games or apparent understanding of how they worked, what she brought to the table was an “enormous personality and passion” which helped her in successfully convincing magazines to give Gold’s games potentially undue praise.*** As former producer Simon Hadlington would succinctly put it: “Quite honestly US Gold just released stuff with bugs in it, and didn’t care because that was Woody’s job to cover it and try to get the good reviews even if the game was a pile of crap.”^[2c] In this way, the actual quality of US Gold’s products only really mattered up to a certain point, where their grip on reviews and marketing could push even lacklustre games towards becoming top sellers.

This all brings us back to the subject of Tiertex, and the conversion work they had been continuing on US Gold’s behalf. In 1988, they were given the assignment to bring Capcom’s Street Fighter to the various home computer formats, and proceeded to do so to a fairly passable degree. Seeing as the original Street Fighter was – with all due respect to its legacy – a pretty mediocre effort in itself, matching it playability-wise shouldn’t have made for a particularly herculean feat. To their credit, Tiertex would manage to turn in some fairly impressive graphics respective to each platform, as well as retaining the full range of opponents and stages — lacking in only one of the two bonus minigames. Where they fell more noticeably short was in programming appropriately challenging AI (where most opponents can be beaten by strategic spamming of single attacks), not matching the speed and feel of the original gameplay, and failing to incorporate any of Ryu [and Ken]’s special attacks. You reckon Tiertex may have figured that with the gameplay being rendered as effortless as it is, there was no need to recreate the likes of the ‘Hadoken’ or ‘Hurricane Kick’ — not when rapidly roundhouse kicking could be just as devastating.

With US Gold’s marketing machine ensuring prominent magazine advertisements and presence of the game on retail shelves – as well as Woody working to shore up the review score average – the computer conversions of Street Fighter proved major winners. This was an essential thing for the company, too; as US Gold had paid £750,000 in order to secure a ten-game license deal with Capcom, and to prevent the likes of Elite / other competitors in the computer space from stealing away future smash-hit cabinets from the company.^[2d] With other Capcom conversions from this period including the likes of 1943: The Battle of Midway, Bionic Commando, and Side Arms; Street Fighter stood out as likely the most high profile title in this lot, and certainly as the most prominently featured among them. In fact, Street Fighter had arguably become the flagship product for one ‘GO! Media Holdings’ — one of several labels established by US Gold for various different business purposes. In the case of GO!, the label had actually been created as a means of circumventing a contractual agreement with Ocean Software,**** but ultimately served to help categorize the bulk of their Capcom-licensed releases.

The only problem with Street Fighter as a top-bill title for US Gold / GO! was the fact that Capcom weren’t poised to follow it up with an immediate sequel. Sure, there was Final Fight briefly flirting with the ‘Street Fighter ‘89’ branding as mentioned earlier, and Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight eventually slated for 1990 release on NES; but The World Warrior as we know it didn’t arrive in arcades until March of 1991. US Gold were simply not content to wait that long in following up one of their most successful releases. Cue the potentially lucrative business proposal as mentioned earlier; wherein US Gold pitched their own planned follow-up to Capcom, and even went so far as to preemptively inform magazines of the sequel plans in motion. By October ‘88, the ZX Spectrum-centric Crash magazine had already begun promoting ‘Human Killing Machine – Street Fighter II’ as being “on the books at Capcom,” and quoting US Gold’s Dave Baxter (credited as a ‘Capcom representative’) as contending that “HKM will ‘knock your head off and slash your throat.’”^[3] It appeared to readers that not only would HKM be serving as the officially sanctioned sequel to Street Fighter, but that it would also apparently be taking the series in the direction of ultraviolence and gratuitous gore!

Needless to say, Capcom weren’t particularly keen on this direction, and opted to decline US Gold’s offer. We can likely assume that Capcom had at least some idea of the direction they wanted to continue taking the burgeoning franchise in, and that Gold’s pitch was simply incompatible with that vision. Now, whether or not the Japan offices were aware of US Gold already marketing HKM as ‘Street Fighter II’? While we don’t know for sure, my money is on “no”; based on Capcom Japan’s degree of detachment from their business operations in Europe, and the fact that the developer didn’t elect to end their licensing agreement on the spot. There’s also the matter of some future dealings between the two companies, which would seem to point to their relationship being stronger than ever in the wake of HKM‘s eventual release. More on that later. First, we need to ask whose idea the title was in the first place? Luckily, we actually do have an answer to this query: None other than US Gold’s general manager Tim Chaney, who intended to stir up some degree of shock value with the verbiage.

“We did Human Killing Machine (HKM), which was actually a Tim Chaney brainwave. We had delivered Streetfighter [sic], and Tim wanted us to do another Street Fighter-ish game and came up with the title. I think there was a little bit of controversy over the name, which I’m sure Tim would have been quite pleased about.” ~ Donald Campbell, founder of Tiertex^[2e]

From this point forward – and despite magazines still misattributing the upcoming title as “the follow up to Streetfighter”^[4] – Tiertex were left to their own devices in developing an original game. Unfortunately, due to lack of in-game credits, we can’t tell how much of the team assigned here were carried over from the original Street Fighter; with the only confirmable name [at this time] being artist Leigh Christian. At the very least, the crew behind this new project were evidently able to repurpose much of the program code from the existing Street Fighter conversions across each platform. At this point, you may be forgiven for presuming that HKM would serve as a simple update to the original game, just with newly swapped-in characters and stages to differentiate from the original license. While Tiertex certainly committed to the latter / providing a full new fighting roster, calling the resulting game an “update” might be… well, I suppose we’ll see for ourselves.

** There’s so much fascinating history surrounding this infamous cassette, and it’s unfortunately impossible to get into it all within the context of this article, so we’re just gonna have to put a pin in it for now and resolve to cover it further at a later date?

*** Oh, and to be clear here? You shouldn’t go hating on Woody for being a “fake gamer” or whatever other bullshit: Understand that her role is still practiced to this day by every employee of every marketing department across every major games publisher, where I’m willing to wager that the majority of employees (male, female or otherwise) have no personal interest in playing the games products they are responsible for selling. You don’t actually have to love a product in order to effectively sell it, so long as you’re sufficiently charismatic / manipulative.

**** With Ocean Software having effectively funded the foundation of US Gold, an arrangement was eventually written wherein company owners Jon Woods and David Ward were due a whopping fifty percent of profits made from every US Gold release. In an ill-fated attempt at sneaking some of that money past their benefactors, general manager Tim Chaney would admit to launching GO! in order to “shift products away from US Gold into another brand and company and keep them out of Jon and David’s hands.”^[2f] Of course, when Ocean discovered that advertisements for GO! Media carried the same business address as US Gold’s offices, the jig was up fairly quickly.

“Kwon is Tired.”

“He’s the Human Killing Machine!”
ZX Spectrum cover.

“Tough and mean …. you’re the Human Killing Machine.” If that single sentence somehow isn’t enough setup to firmly plant you in the kung fu shoes of our taekwondo-practitioner protagonist, consider the remaining description on the back of the game’s box: Being “the meanest son of a snake” the copywriter assumes you’ll have ever seen, our hero Kwon sets out on a “path of destruction” in order to “stamp out [his] supremacy,” across a range of wildly disparate opponents. Whether this is all part of a sanctioned tournament, or some sort of fantastical martial arts pilgrimage as seen in the movies? The game never really specifies. You get the implication that there may be some referee tracking rounds and knockdowns, but the rules that should govern this sort of competition are inconsistent at best. Just as likely, Kwon is an asshole who can’t help but get into fights with any given passerby, and who also happens to have a significant travel budget.

And so, your world-faring ways will land you in fights across five countries, each presenting two opponents to be bested. You’ll begin in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, take a trip to Amsterdam’s red light district, find yourself in the center of a Barcelona bull ring, and brawl in front of a German beerhouse; all before landing in the middle of an active war zone in Beirut, where you come face to face with a pair of “merciless terrorists of the Middle East.” Now, putting aside the… “exotic” nature of these locales? You may notice the progression here is quite similar to HKM’s predecessor in Street Fighter, which saw players touching down across five other countries over the course of their enrollment in the inaugural ‘World Warrior’ tournament. With the shadow of that previous game looming large over HKM, it’s likely that this familiar scenario was a matter of deliberate design: Where a proposed plot for US Gold’s Street Fighter II pitch would see a similarly-organized globe-trotting tournament, with each country again putting their top two fighters against the reigning champion. However, something tells me that the selection of opponents as seen in HKM might differ slightly from who Ryu and Ken would’ve been made to compete against. More on that rogue’s gallery shortly.

In the meantime, you can draw some fairly obvious comparisons between protagonists Kwon and Ryu here: The headband paired with white karate gi and red-colored accessories are certainly shared fashion, though Kwon does admittedly forgo a shirt during his fights. That being said, you can still see Kwon donning a white top on the game’s title screen, in which his five o’clock shadow (which he sports in his in-game sprites) is also noticeably shaven clean. I don’t reckon it’s too wild a conspiracy theory to suggest that Kwon’s likeness on the title screen was, in fact, intended as Ryu’s — before decision came down from high to star a new protagonist. I guess nobody wanted to take on the task of updating the graphic on the title screen, though. Oh, I should probably also mention the fact that Kwon’s moveset style of fighting is identical to Ryu’s as seen in the other Street Fighter computer conversions. This is to say, Kwon shares the same nine attacks, the same means of inputting / executing them, and the same inability to perform the arcade-exclusive special moves. The absence of any techniques beyond the standard nine is particularly disappointing here in HKM, where your range of moves feels particularly inadequate for the tasks at hand.

Seeing as we’re dealing in an era where single-button joysticks were the standard for computer games, it should be no surprise that HKM conforms its controls to this standard across all platforms (same as Street Fighter before it). Bearing this in mind, the only effective way for a developer to implement a variety of moves involves combinations of pressing the button and moving the joystick — matching the directional inputs with corresponding attack angles. In example; holding down and toward your opponent followed by your fire button will execute a sweeping kick, whereas down and fire will result in a crouching punch. Furthermore, holding down and back before pressing fire will result in an odd-looking [but incredibly effective] ‘spinning crouch kick.’ You’ll get two other upright variations on your spinning / turning kick, plus two more kicks and punches on either the ground or in mid-air. The manual would additionally seem to suggest that “the shorter the time which the FIRE button is depressed the harder the kick,” but I’m skeptical as to whether or not this is actually implemented in the final product.

In any case, you’ll certainly have to learn to make the most of that limited moveset if you plan on stamping out your supremacy or whatever. And given some of what your opponents are capable of, you’ll soon find yourself feeling inferior in various different ways. But before we get too deep into matters of the game’s mechanical failings: It should already be fairly obvious that we’re going to be spending a fair amount of uninterrupted time dunking pretty hard on all of HKM’s multitude of downgrades and flaws. So, maybe it’s worth it to try and highlight some of the positives before all that? Let it be said that the variety of opponents and stages presented here is charming, and that Tiertex were clearly aiming to put in a distinct entry to the fighting game genre. For as oddball an assortment of opponents Street Fighter may have pitted you against – between club-wielding dapper gents and shuriken-tossing ninja – Human Killing Machine truly serves to one-up that mismatched cast of characters. As far as I can tell, HKM may very well be the first fighting game to stage battles between man and beast — specifically, having you fight against a jet black shepsky (creatively named ‘Shepski’) and a Spanish fighting bull. Certainly a novel attraction, to say the least.

There’s also commendation due to the detail seen in the stage backgrounds, as drawn by the aforementioned Leigh Christian. The rendition of St. Basil’s Cathedral in particular – as seen in the first two fights – is certainly an impressive sight to behold, and perhaps made more impressive when you’re aware of some of the challenges behind its creation. With the Atari ST version of the game apparently serving as the foundation for all the other versions, and with that system’s hardware forcing the game to operate within a limit of 16 simultaneous colors, the Amiga version is also made to retain this limited color depth as a matter of parity (or perhaps simply out of sheer efficiency). Working within limited color palettes can certainly prove a challenge for artists, and it’s neat to see those who are able to thrive given these restrictions. When we eventually find what Leigh was able to accomplish when presented with mere black and white to work with [on the ZX Spectrum], you should come away with an appreciation for his abilities as a digital artist.

I’ll also take this opportunity to address something of a perceived inadequacy across several versions of the game [including the Amiga release], and attempt to somewhat excuse the developers for it. See, with most computer sound chips of the era capable of producing audio across just three or four channels; some developers felt that including sound effects in their games would come at the cost of the quality of their soundtracks, and decided that the trade-off there wasn’t one worth making. And so, for as rightly criticized as the decision to forgo sound effects in Human Killing Machine may be (not even including a toggle on the menu between music or sound playback), it’s important to note that there was plenty of similar precedent at the time. In fact, if you take a look at some of the most iconic / revered PC sound chip soundtracks of the era – Rob Hubbard’s iconic C64 Commando theme, for example – you’ll find that many of them excel at the cost of muted gameplay sound effects. Is all this to say that HKM’s soundtrack is particularly stellar — worthy of skimping out on surrounding sound design? Not really, truth be told. But hopefully, you can at least understand why they thought they might get away with it.

… Welp, that just about sums it up as far as “nice things to say” are concerned! We’re now free to dive headfirst into the negatives, beginning with me retracting the nice things I may have said about the background graphics. So as it turns out, it’s far easier to focus on hyper-detail when you’re dealing with static (non-scrolling / non-animated) screens; representing a major downgrade from the previous iteration of the game engine, and effectively shrinking every arena to the point of tangible constriction. When this is paired with larger character sprites occupying more of the screen, you’re immediately left with a sense that evasion is impossible — that there’s no room to step back, regroup, or otherwise control the pace of the fight even momentarily. Even putting aside the direct impact this has on gameplay, it still represents a massive step backward in terms of presentation, and one which the developers must’ve surely realized graphics-obsessed reviewers of the era would pounce on the chance to criticize? I don’t believe there’s any sort of technical limitation that could have manifested and played a role in forcing this concession: By all accounts, this seems to be a sacrifice made entirely of convenience, in order to shorten development time.

Speaking of shortcuts and cut content, HKM no longer concerns itself with matters of two-player versus gameplay or bonus minigames to break up the fighting action. Say what you will about how little the ‘Test Your Might’-style intermissions from this era of fighting games may have actually added to the genre, but most anyone would be hard-pressed to try and defend the omission of a competitive versus mode here. To be very clear, here: Tiertex had sufficient means and capacity to implement the feature into HKM, and must have deliberately chosen not to as a matter of more easily meeting the project’s deadline. Perhaps they didn’t want to invest the time or resources toward designing a second player character — the proverbial Ken to their Kwon? You might struggle too trying to brainstorm for a thematically-fitting clone^[?] character; in a game whose supporting cast contains the likes of scantily-clad Dutch prostitutes, a Spanish matador complete with red cape, and a stereotypical Arab terrorist clad in keffiyeh. Perhaps it’s for the best that we were spared Tiertex pulling from another untapped nationality in selecting a potential counterpart to Kwon.

Example sprite banks from Donkey Kong on the NES (color-adjusted for clarity).

I suppose this brings us to the subject of one of the game’s most ill-advised design conceits, and a major contributing factor to a multitude of playability issues. So, I believe I briefly mentioned how character sprites are bigger in HKM than they originally were in Street Fighter, right? While larger / more detailed sprites might sound like an improvement in the context of a fighting game (ignoring potential issues of screen real estate), it’s really dependent on how the game in question stores and loads those animation frames. For a brief technical breakdown: Characters in many older 2D video games are depicted as pre-drawn images called “sprites,” where the game is able to load collections of associated sprites (called “banks”) into the system’s memory so it can quickly display them as needed. At their most efficient, developers might break a single sprite down into separate smaller chunks called “tiles,” in order to reuse shared pieces across multiple different larger sprites and animations — thereby saving on how much cartridge / disk space might need to be allocated to containing character assets. Other games designed around more fluid / uniquely-drawn frames of animation may not be able to utilize this sort of tile-recycling optimization, and will be forced to store every singular frame as standalone sprites. Both are equally valid approaches, and which one a developer might pick is determinant on the limitations of whatever hardware is at hand.

Which brings us to Human Killing Machine. If you examine Tiertex’s method for loading graphics into memory, you’ll find that every character’s full range of sprites / animation frames is made to fit inside of individually-assigned 320×200-pixel banks — effectively a single page the same size as the game screen. And without breaking these sprites down into shared smaller tiles [in conjunction with how largely the characters are drawn], this means that these banks only have the space to contain an average of eight sprites total, made to comprise each character’s entire range of animation frames. To put this into perspective, let’s break down the game’s first opponent: Igor has a single frame for standing still, made to alternate with a single second frame in order to represent walking across the screen. He has room for one standing kick attack, two crouching frames (one idle frame and one attack frame), two sprites comprising his knockdown animation, and a single frame for his victory pose. Aaand that’s just about as much as the given dimensions allot for. Even with sprites clustered together as closely as possible within this bank, there’s no space for the likes of any jumping or additional attack sprites — and so, Igor simply has to go without those abilities.

If Tiertex couldn’t fit an extra sprite into the bank for a character depicting a given action, the character in question simply could not perform that given action. As a result, you’ll find most opponents are incapable of jumping (let alone performing aerial attacks), several who are unable to crouch, and most only being capable of performing two possible attacks. Needless to say, this is incredibly limiting as far as allowing for dynamic combat, and generally results in stiff and stuttery animations across the board. Some of the worst offenders in this regard actually end up being the animal opponents; where Brutus the bull is granted a meager six sprites comprising his entire range of movement, and where his attack animations see his single frames made to flip rapidly from side to side in an incredibly janky fashion. Even Kwon’s range of animations is limited by his only consisting of fifteen collected sprites — where closer observation embarrassingly reveals that his facial expression never changes across the entire set, resulting in him looking incredibly bored featuring in this game. I can’t say I blame him.

This lack of available actions on the part of your opponents also results in the most rudimentary of AI routines being programmed for them, as there simply isn’t much they’d be capable of doing in a fight. Even bearing this in mind, you get the impression that some characters might be operating at complete random; where if you stand still and leave them to their own devices, most of your opponents will simply walk back and forth near the edge of the screen, and sporadically attack the air in front of them. Only a couple of the characters seem to have any actual interest in invading Kwon’s space, where I suppose you have to pretend that the rest are playing elaborate mind games to toy with you? As such, it falls on you to close that distance and take initiative, or wait forever on your foe: A lack of round timer means a lack of timeouts, and all the time in the world to spend watching your opponent ineffectually dancing in place. Again, all this represents a massive downgrade from the work previously done on Street Fighter, where the AI at least demonstrates the ability to actively pursue you across the screen.

For as braindead as I may make the computer-controlled opponents out to be – and while that assessment is certainly accurate – you mustn’t mistake that to mean that combating them is easy. As a matter of fact, some of the challengers in this game may well represent the most difficult opponents ever faced in a fighting game. Lacking in cleverness or diverse movesets, they compensate for these inadequacies with raw killing power — where seemingly any given character is capable of executing instant knockout blows. Seemingly broken hitboxes attached to attacks mean that one blow from a foe can strike multiple times across the span of a second, and take you down from full to zero health before you have a chance to even react. Without the ability to block, and where tangible input lag means you can’t really dodge out the way of attacks, these fatal blows can routinely prove nigh unavoidable. In lieu of a Hadouken-type ranged move, you have no choice but to constantly put yourself in that danger zone if you want to have any chance at ending fights.

The cherry on top of all this – what that puts these broken mechanics over the edge – is an incredibly ill-advised implementation for a recharging health system. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that your opponents require just one second to recover the health lost from your standard blow — forcing you to be on a literal constant attack, lest the enemy recover completely. It’s of no benefit to you that your own health can similarly regenerate; seeing as you need to stand still in order to initiate the healing process (the computer is under no such obligation), and that most attacks by the enemy are killing blows in the first place. With how quickly your adversary can recover from damage, there is literally no choice – no other feasible strategy – than to trap your opponent in a corner, spam your attack of choice, and pray that they don’t connect with one of their own instantly fatal blows. Every round then comes down to a complete gamble: Can you keep up your attack spamming for an uninterrupted 20+ seconds, without the computer deciding to knock you out in that time? At a certain point, Human Killing Machine should fail to qualify as a fighting game, and prove to be more an entirely unfair button mashing minigame — where the computer can arbitrarily decide that it’s time for you to lose at any moment.

But HKM still has one more mean-spirited surprise in store for the player. See, each match-up begins by informing you of how many times you [and your opponent] are able to be knocked down before the fight is called. By default / at its most favorable, Kwon can survive four knockdowns, whereas your opponent can only get up twice — the game indicating all this by declaring before a fight that “KWON NEEDS 5 KNOCKDOWNS” and “ENEMY NEEDS 3.” Disregarding the fact that a potential seven-round fight is a tedious proposition: At a glance, this ratio may seem like the game accounting for how unfair its own programming can be, and giving you that much more wiggle room to eke out a win. However, you’ll soon discover this isn’t actually the case. Let’s assume that you’re able to beat a given opponent, where you began the match-up with the max allotment of five “lives” and ended the last round with just one remaining. Rather than beginning anew against your next opponent, the pre-fight screen will instead inform you that “KWON IS WEAK,” and enforce a new onus on you to knock your opponent out a total of five times, where all they’ll need to beat you is three. In effect, a player is punished for succumbing to the game’s difficulty, and made to work that much harder / efficiently in follow-up fights in order to regain lost ground.**

As you’ve likely already guessed, forfeiting all your knockdowns in a given fight will lead to a Game Over, and a swift transition to the high score table / title screen. Existing outside of the arcade environment, there’s no option here to insert coinage and pick up from the opponent who bested you: In order to maximize the value of your diskette purchase, you can expect to start the game from back at the very beginning every time you’re made to concede a match. Of course, this would be an easier pill to swallow if the gameplay were any fun at all, and if the computer wasn’t made to feel like a particularly cruel deity who leaves your chances at progression entirely up to whimsy. But alas; that is where we’re at, and so proceeding through the game to its final boss feels like an exercise entirely up to chance… That is, discounting one roadblock — one opponent who is made to stand as a particularly impassible hurdle. I speak of no other than the man, the myth, the legend himself: Franz.

“Face Igor the Fearless and his rabid dog amongst the sacred Temples of Moscow.”
ZX Spectrum back cover.

Described on the back of the game’s box as the “drunken compatriot” to a previous opponent Hans – serving as the two representatives for the nation of Germany – Franz would be more accurately described as a waiter than as a drunkard: His attire consisting of formal attire (complete with bowtie), while being made to carry a tray of drink with towel draped over his arm. Clearly, his business involves more serving of alcohol than imbibing of it himself. Perhaps even more accurately though, you might elect to describe Franz as the single most deadly assassin ever presented in a fighting game — whose potential to commit cold-blooded murder with a mere bottle of beer rivals John Wick’s knack for disposing of foes with pencils. At range, Franz is able to sling projectile liquors at you at a rate of one every two or three seconds, with each taking off a significant fifth of your total health [if not jumped over]. Of course, if you should get in too close to Franz, he’s just as handy with a quick instant-kill karate chop to reset your efforts. And so begins your mission: Find the pixel-perfect distance at which you can “safely” attack Franz, time jumps against the tossing of his bottles, and continue in a precisely timed and measured pattern for a full minute and a half until you are able to notch a single round against him. Rinse, lather, and repeat as many as five consecutive times in a row.

“Easier said than done” is, of course, the mantra of the day here. The on-the-fly calculations you’ll have to put in for Franz’s constant movements, variables in timing, and imprecise nature of your own controls / input lag all contribute to one of the most single-most frustrating challenges I’ve ever encountered in a video game. Keep in mind the fact that not being constantly on the attack means that Franz can regenerate all his lost health in a matter of seconds, and that a winning strategy requires you to land as many attacks as possible within roughly one-second windows of time, before having to dodge another one in his infinite supply of bottles. All said and done, it took me a total of eight hours to finally luck into the pattern that would see me prevail against Franz. And even then, this was only accomplished through a complete and utter dependence on emulator save states, where I found myself pausing and recording my progress after nearly every successful strike against the bastard. There’s simply no other way to beat the guy: I’m left with the opinion that no player in the world could be capable of managing this feat without the use of cheats / emulator tools, and that Franz must have been deliberately implemented as an impasse to players — a means of keeping folk from confronting the game’s final opponent. But why, you may ask?

Let’s proceed from a theoretical instance in which you – a mere mortal – are able to strike down the angry god that is Franz. This would take you to a fight against the terrorist Sagan, on a war-torn street in scenic Beirut circa 1988. All said and done, Sagan represents a fairly easy opponent within the game: Highly susceptible to stun-locking by means of sweep kicks, and prone to fits of jumping around the arena without remembering to attack you. Compared to fighting Franz; it’s like stepping out from a prolonged stint trapped inside an iron maiden, before immediately being sat on a comfy hammock near a Hawaiian beachfront. And so, you proceed to knock him down the necessary three / four / five times, and further proceed to confront DOS-Error #219 (seek failure) on reading “Disk.1”. And that, my friends, proves to be the toughest opponent of them all: An error on the part of your emulator to read past a certain point in the disk image, rendering the game’s final boss inaccessible. It’s at this point that you might elect to completely lose your mind and scream helplessly into the Twitter void, as I must admit to having done at this point. Even now – writing this portion of the article a month later – I’m genuinely coming down with a headache just remembering this moment in time.

So, here’s the deal: There are two widely-circulated ROM files available on the web for the Amiga version of Human Killing Machine. The older [and most commonly seen] is a cracked copy courtesy of vintage piracy crew ‘World of Wonders’ — indicated by a speech bubble emanating from Kwon’s mouth on the title screen shouting out the group’s acronymed name (“WOW!”). This version of the game comes complete with trainers enabling infinite health on Kwon’s part / disabling the enemy’s recharging health, and allowing you to proceed through battles after scoring as little as a single knockdown against your opponent. The trade-off to this suite of cheats are completely corrupted graphics past the game’s fourth fight: Where the background for battles against Miguel and Brutus take place in Amsterdam rather than Spain, Hans’ character sprites are completely broken (with a distracting layer of overlapping brown-paletted sprites on top), and final boss Merkeva is depicted as a misaligned assortment of Miguel’s sprites. To be clear – and despite what internet rumor mill / misinformed YouTube commentary might demonstrate – these are flaws inherent specifically to the cracked version of the game, and not to the canonical diskette release… at least, up until the point where Merkeva’s sprites don’t load in properly.

Apparently, the broken state of the final boss is a replicable issue on real hardware / a legitimate fault on the part of Tiertex and US Gold; where “[Merkeva] has corrupt graphics because the final track of data was not saved onto the disk” (according to gameripper ‘Codetapper’). Which brings us to the second ROM file in circulation, and the one I primarily played during the course of recording for this article: The “Version 1.1” WHDLoad edition,*** as compiled in 2013 by users in a thread on the ‘English Amiga Board’ forums — namely by authors ‘Musashi,’ ’Flashtro,’ and the aforementioned Codetapper. This release purports to fix that issue present in unmodified dumps of the game, by simply importing a functional / seemingly compatible sprite table from the Atari ST version. However, I can only theorize that nobody involved in creating this new ROM actually bothered to play through the game themselves up to the point of facing Merkeva, and to check and see if their work actually amounted to a functional final boss? If there was, in fact, a verification process done on their end; they must’ve found a way to insert themselves directly before the final fight, rather than suffer the standard course of the game preceding it. In doing so, perhaps they unwittingly bypassed the trigger that I could not avoid in my attempts to play through the whole game, where I consistently crashed and burned immediately before the last stage.

This is likely the point where any sane person would give up: Having realized I picked the wrong version of the game to attempt to beat, I should have walked away and been content to write the game off as being completely broken — undeserving of being double-checked across any other platforms. After all, who would dare to peer review my work in this case? Human Killing Machine has thus far gone this long without anyone attempting to record through to its final boss battle (outside of the cracked / hacked version of the game), and why should I expect anyone else to any time soon? But that’s not how my brain chose to cope with this traumatic event. Instead, I contemplated on the eight hours I had wasted on a single wretched screen, and made the determination that I had already sunk too much time into this waking nightmare to quit now. Failing to find any method for fixing / otherwise bypassing the broken state of my Amiga playthrough, I settled on what sounded like the least painful choice from a suite of other agonizing options: I’d restart my playthrough on the Atari ST version of the game, and hope that the likes of Franz would at least be easier in this incarnation.

** If you’re able to perform slightly better in a fight – winning with three remaining lives – the game will inform you that Kwon is merely “TIRED” instead of weak, and set the stakes at both you and your opponent requiring four knockdowns apiece. And of course, if you are somehow able to win without succumbing to a single knockdown, you can continue enjoying your five to three knockdown advantage. Good luck with that, though!

*** For reference: A ‘WHDLoad’ is a method for packaging / running Amiga ROMs that can bypass having to be launched within Amiga’s OS. The original “Version 1.0” WHDLoad package built for Human Killing Machine – supposedly made to present the unmodified game – actually comes paired with a unique selection of other sprite-loading errors, distinct from the more egregious ones found in the cracked World of Wonders copy. These largely seem to consist of unfilled holes in Maria’s / Brutus’ / Hans’ / Franz’s sprites, prior to the apparently outright broken Merkeva fight.

Atari ST

So, here we go again, in what is actually the truly “definitive” version of Human Killing Machine. Ideally, this should have been the version I played from the very beginning; had I not had a fool misconception in my head that development would’ve begun on the more technically-proficient Amiga, and resulted in later conversion to the ST by Tiertex (rather than the Amiga conversion stemming from the latter). Of course, knowing what we know now, we can more accurately determine this Atari version to be the nexus point, from which all other conversions take their cues / base their assets upon. Is this to say it’s the most proficient / altogether most impressive version of the game? Well, yes, I guess; if only for the merit that it’s actually fully functional from beginning to end, compared against the Amiga version? Outside of that, the two versions are otherwise entirely identical to one another.

About the only visual difference I could note was that the color Kwon’s headband in his health meter graphic is changed from red [on the Amiga] to white [on the Atari], more closely matching his sprites. It might also appear that the color palette across the game is presented as maybe a shade brighter on ST than Amiga, but I’m just as likely to attribute this to a quirk of emulation / as an entirely imperceivable difference on real hardware monitors. Speaking of emulation quirks: I did have a brief moment of worry during the fight against Helga, where misaligned sprites for Hans loaded in her place / I briefly believed I had landed on another totally corrupted version of the game, but this seemed to be a one-off issue specific to the crack I was playing. And so, other than those subtle visual differences – plus some instrumentation changes to the music – the game seems to play exactly the same; with identical control mapping, a shared degree of input lag, and similarly programmed computer-controlled characters.

As a matter of fact, the parity between the two versions is so close, I found myself able to breeze through much of it on the ST in far quicker time than on the Amiga — remembering what tricks ultimately worked in my initial playthrough on other hardware. As such, I was able to bring the time spent facing Franz down from the originally daunting eight hours, down to around a far more acceptable two hours! With this in mind, it’s time for me to pass the savings onto you, dear readers: I’ve only gone and written something like a brief “strategy guide” for the Amiga / Atari ST versions of Human Killing Machine, should you ever be forced to play the game for yourself. We’ll reconvene to discuss some final thoughts and observations on the game shortly thereafter, so be sure to stay tuned!

• Igor: You’re relatively safe to “experiment” in this first fight as you so please, but the most effective solution you’ll eventually land on will see you crouch kicking / punching in order to bully Igor into his respective corner of the screen. As he performs his standing attacks, his hurtbox will enlarge to a point where your crouching attacks are far more likely to hit, while his own attacks will completely miss you by a matter of inches. If you catch him doing his own crouching, you may consider briefly stepping back to reset him into a standing pattern — or you can just continue to wail on him and hope to win in the DPS race.

• Shepski: This pup will more doggedly pursue you (pun intended), and so staying in your own corner and continually performing your spinning crouch kick should serve the purpose of keeping him from gnawing on you. Swap to standard crouching kicks if Shepski stays in place / doesn’t advance toward you as he should, as this seems to work as more effective bait somehow?

• Maria: As quickly as you can, crouch punch Maria until you can move her into the corner of her screen, and switch to crouch kicks. If you move your sprite too close towards hers while standing, she’ll unleash her own spinning kick on you, capable of a dreaded insta-kill. Also, don’t let her jump over you / get on the other side of the screen, as this also seems to allow her to be even more consistently deadly with her attacks. Promptly jump over her head back to your side of the screen, and begin again to try and corner her in the right.

• Helga: One of a few fights in which your opponent may actually try to move toward you on a consistent basis (still not every round, though). You can use your standing spinning kick to repel her some distance backwards, and switch to crouching kicks once you’ve got her cornered (whereas punches will usually whiff). Jumping toward her will result in you getting instantly killed, so don’t let that habit carry over from the last fight.

• Miguel: Standing upright and walking toward Miguel will only result in pain on your part, courtesy of his carving your chest cavity in with his estoc. Instead, if you crouch at any point / distance during the fight, Miguel will be rendered completely motionless. Furthermore, Miguel seems to be more susceptible to being stun-locked on the left side of the screen, which does change the dynamic up slightly. With all this in mind: Get Miguel to jump over your head, toggle between short steps forward and tactical crouches to slowly press Miguel toward your starting side of the screen, and unleash a barrage of crouched attacks.

• Brutus: Crouch punches can quickly flummox the fearsome beast here. You’ll have to hope to avoid his spinning attack — capable of hitting you across the entire bottom of the screen (from either side, to boot), should you attempt to retreat from him. Luckily, once you’ve gotten the bull cornered, your punches will seem to cancel / stun his ability to perform this move effectively. One of his headbutts might knock you back briefly out of striking range, but you can quickly correct for this.

• Hans: Attempting to corner with crouch punches will put you in too close range of Hans, and make you susceptible to some of his killing blows. As such, spinning crouch kick is absolutely the way to go here; whether you’re attempting to shove Hans into a corner, or lure him into your own. Either strategy can prove effective, depending on what level of aggression the computer determines to settle on at the beginning of the round. Generally speaking though, keeping Hans against his own corner is more reliable.

• Franz: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” The only possible strategy here requires expert timing and positioning, as mentioned before: Predicting for when Franz will toss his bottles, and jumping initially backward as he does so. From here, you’ll need to await his second bottle toss, and use this opportunity to leap forward toward Franz — hopefully, landing in a pixel-perfect position where you can land several attacks on him, without him being able to retaliate with a knockout blow. Jumping in place / without moving horizontally back and forth across the screen will result in Franz simply batting you out of the air like a bug. If fortune should favor you – and if you should be practical in your application of save states – you’ll still require the patience of a saint to see you the rest of the way through. Best of luck.

• Sagan: If you’ve reached this point, you’re already an ultimate fighter / master gamer / legally skilled, and should no longer require instruction from the likes of me. If you trust your instincts – don’t think, feel, and be tanasinn – you will surely prevail. Oh, and it also helps that Sagan represents a return to pretty basic programming and close-quarters moveset again, as well as proving highly susceptible to being stunned by crouch attacks.

With Sagan handily dealt with, you will at last face the game’s final challenge: The most “merciless terrorist” of them all — presumably representing the interests of the Palestine Liberation Organization (though he’s actually named after a class of tank manufactured for the Israeli Defense Forces). It is here where you are confronted by Merkeva, as you battle for the very fate of Beirut itself, and to prove yourself as the true human killing machine. Clearly, this deadly duel will test your every reflex and require you to call forth every martial art you’ve encountered thus far, should you stand any chance of prevailing against the elusive brute. And here in this article – for what I do believe is the first time ever fully captured on video (outside of his corrupted appearance in the cracked Amiga version) – is the evidence of his existence:

So, with all of you now having watched that historic clip, there’s obviously a few things that I feel compelled to explain afterward. For starters, you’re no doubt curious as to how many sprites Merkeva’s range of animation consists of? The answer to that question is a shockingly sparse “six”: Two for standing and stepping, two for his attacks (one punch and one kick), and two for getting knocked down. At no point does he deploy the rocket strapped to his back, or utilize the bandolier strapped across his chest. As a matter of fact, he barely even remembers to try and hit you if left to his own devices, and seems to whiff more often than not when he does. Even more intriguing, I’m left to wonder if his frame for kicking is actually implemented into the game, as he seems to instead spin in place [with his default standing sprite] as his primary method of attack? All said and done, the fight makes for a supreme anti-climax — a resounding dud to conclude this exhausting game on.

To be clear, it really does just end there: No cutscene, credits, or so much as a fresh musical cue. You’re simply given the opportunity to add your name to the high score table, before being kicked back to the title should you feel so compelled to begin the game again. And before you go explaining it to me like I’m unfamiliar with retro video games, I’m fully aware this was still an acceptable norm for endings (or lack thereof) back in the day. However, that doesn’t really do much to take the sting out of the ten plus hours I spent beating my head against this thing, does it? I shudder to think how someone back in the day must have felt – having potentially sunk dozens more hours in without the benefit of save states – just so that they could type in their initials at the top of a scoreboard and impress the likes of absolutely nobody, since this is a fucking home computer we’re talking about and not the world’s worst imaginable arcade cabinet.

You know, I really do try to be fair to every title that lands on my proverbial desk, and to search for the positives wherever I’m able? But HKM served to seriously test my patience and genuinely stress me out, to such a degree that it probably wasn’t healthy for me. I think about the fact that this product was sold for money, and I can’t help but feel righteously angry on behalf of all the poor fools that Tiertex and US Gold swindled in their time. If you can’t tell by now where my feelings towards Human Killing Machine tend to lean, I’ll go and spare you any further suspense: This is probably the new low for the site — the worst thing I’ve been made to play [thus far] for the purposes of writing about video games. And I want to make sure that this doesn’t come across as me acting performatively, or exaggerating for any sort of authorial intent; so I’m trying to be very clear with my words here, and resist the urge to claim that this is “the worst game of all time.” I will only contend that HKM should certainly be part of the argument for that dubious distinction.

Oh, but I’m not quite finished yet, am I? Unfortunately, I made a promise that I would cover every conversion of the game, which still leaves me with four more playthroughs of this game to look forward to! By which I mean, I’m writing this article after obviously having already played said conversions, and so all this faffing about is really just poetic license on my account. What I should really be saying instead is: I went and played all four other conversions of HKM, and so I’m going to list them all now in order from least-to-most objectionable. And so, we begin with the lesser of our six total evils.

Commodore 64

The C64 conversion of Human Killing Machine actually comes closest to being a functional fighting game — or at least the most fair towards its players, and the easiest to complete. As far as I can gather, no enemy is capable of pulling out a one-hit knockout on you, which should immediately indicate a better difficulty balance here. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t still stack the decks high against you; where all the other unfair gameplay systems are in place (recharging health, the minimum required winning rounds), and where your attacks still deal a pittance of damage in comparison to your opponents’ standard blows. But on the other hand: I wasn’t having to save state after every move in my battles against Franz, and the whole three round match ended up running a brisk seventy seconds! Credit this to less precise positioning being required, more time between Franz tossing his bottles, and generally snappier control compared to the likes of the more “technologically advanced” source materials.

Don’t get it twisted: We’re still talking about a notably bad video game, here. Difference this time around is, criticisms er more towards “laughable” than “downright despicable.” The first thing you’ll likely notice is how absolutely tiny all the characters are depicted as, followed shortly thereafter by the realization that they still share the same limited frames of animation as their Atari ST / Amiga counterparts. Despite having to switch to an entirely new graphical style / draw new sets of character sprites from scratch, Tiertex still felt compelled to enforce some degree of parity between versions, and thus deliberately held back the C64 version of HKM from improving on the small range of attack and animation frames. Either that, or nobody felt particularly eager or interested in doing anything other than phoning in this version of the game as quickly and efficiently as possible.

It’s worth noting that the larger characters in the original game (Helga and Merkeva) are scaled down to the same height and width as Kwon in this version, as some clear manner of technical concession. I’d also like to point out that the monochrome character portraits [seen next to health bars] look particularly unflattering, to the point of being comical. Finally, I can confirm that beating Merkeva in this version won’t immediately end the game, and instead loop you back to the beginning where you can continue to build on your high score. There’s the possibility that the game might attempt to escalate the difficulty on subsequent playthroughs, but I confess to quitting out before discovering that answer for myself. Feel free to prove me wrong, should you so dare!

DOS

The DOS-compatible conversion of Human Killing Machine serves as a laughably garish but otherwise functional recreation of its loathsome source material. After solving for a momentary concern where I struggled to deal damage to Shepski (this version of the game seems to be very particular about how close you need to be for the crouch kick to connect), I found the computer opponents to be stripped again of their one-hit kill potential, and generally susceptible to my previously established strategies in their fights: The fact that Miguel still stands completely still whenever I crouched tells me that this conversion probably doesn’t stray too far from the original code. I also get the impression that game moves faster and responds quicker than some of its contemporary conversions (running most optimally between 1,500 and 2,000 cycles in DOSBox), and may be altogether more playable for it.

I did ultimately end up succumbing to Franz; where the increased game speed seemed to demand a degree of precision timing that I wasn’t capable of, and a lack of save state functionality dissuaded me from making any further attempts. I did notice that some of his tossed bottles seemed to phase right through me without doing damage, but that didn’t end up being quite reliable enough a factor to do me any good. I’m just going to assume that Sagan and Merkeva are present and accounted for, and rule the release as likely being “feature complete” at the very least.

All things considered, the defining feature of this conversion is most certainly the color palette utilized for it — where the EGA graphics elect to paint each human character in a Simpsons-esque tone of yellow, with vibrant reds and blues typically used to complement. In example; where Kwon could have just as easily carried over his white pants as seen in the primary versions of the game, he sports a new blue pair here (with the text spelling ‘KOREA’ written in yellow instead of black), as well as seeing his black belt downgraded to a beginner’s white. This is as compared to the game’s title screen, where Kwon sports a distinctly dark tan and uncharacteristic green karate gi. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the supported four-color CGA graphics mode working for graphical comparison.** As such, we can only speculate as to the game looking something like this in limited color configuration?

** Attempting to emulate a designated CGA machine resulted simply in the game loading black screens, whereas opting for CGA from inside an EGA-capable machine environment just resulted in the full range of EGA colors being displayed. I am admittedly no expert when it comes to configuring DOSBox, so it’s well possible I did something wrong in my process of trying to get the game to spit out the classic pink and cyan?

ZX Spectrum

For better or for worse (more likely worse), the ZX Spectrum conversion does its damndest to match the ST and Amiga versions in terms of underlying game logic. The result, as such, is a version which plays quite similarly to its source material – even running at close to the same speeds and lagging input – albeit at a dramatically reduced color count. As a matter of fact, the gameplay is conveyed entirely through one-bit black and white character sprites and backgrounds, where sparse colors only appear in some of the HUD elements. Naturally, this is fairly typical for the platform at hand, though there’s just as much precedent for games using color in some limited capacities within the primary game screens. I understand that it was a technically tricky thing to implement, and I suppose it was determined at some point that HKM simply wasn’t worth the bother — just as the ZX Spectrum conversion of Street Fighter before it wasn’t.

The resulting two-color game world may be difficult for some to visually parse, or lead to headaches and epileptic triggers in the worst of scenarios. If you examine the backgrounds closely, there is some relatively clever use of dithering used to help better detail the elaborate surroundings, but it all sort of goes to waste when you’re straining your eyes to keep track of the characters in the foreground. Perhaps I should give Speccy users of the era a bit more credit in how well they could tolerate the likes of this sort of presentation, but I’m obviously not made up of quite as tough stuff. I was again able to trudge through to Franz in my ZX Spectrum playthrough, and threw in the towel after just a handful of failed rounds.

Amstrad CPC

Finally, we reach the bottom of the bottommost barrel of this whole sorry lot. Human Killing Machine’s Amstrad CPC conversion is nothing short of utterly unplayable: Demonstrating the worst input lag and most sluggish game speed encountered thus far, to the point where I couldn’t so much as score a single round against the game’s first computer opponent. Granted, I did not give it all that much of a try — roughly ten minutes, I’d estimate. At that point, I’d had more than enough, and declared this sad experiment a complete failure. If anyone would like to try and best my high score of 310 points (scored entirely across losing rounds against Igor), you’re more than welcome to try!

At the very least, the conversion utilizes the hardware’s ‘Mode 1’ display format (320×200 pixel resolution with a range of four colors) to decent presentational effect, as can be seen across the collected sprite sheets dumped from the game’s ROM. But as for the part where you actually have to sit and play the thing? I’m calling it now: It’s just not possible to play through [without the aide of cheats]. This is Tiertex and US Gold putting their seal of approval on a product that simply does not function to any satisfactory degree or standard — at a level far below any of the other decidedly busted variants of the game. When I’m left to wonder in the wake of playing it whether or not the Amstrad CPC was even truly capable of playing games at any semblance of speed (it was), I reckon that should be a fairly damning condemnation of the impressions made by this cassette.

“Kwon is Weak.”

“DA… I’m all for GLASTNOST…
I’m gonna open up your SKULL!”
Sinclair User, Issue 84. March, 1989.
Art credited to Jerry ‘Mr Amiable’ Paris.

Woody had her work cut out for her in trying to run damage control for Human Killing Machine. Surely, anybody caught giving HKM anything less than a critical thrashing would have their credibility forever tarnished, and selling the usual suspects on the prospect was going to be a tough sell. Ultimately, US Gold would settle on a more “tactical” approach in attempting to pass their latest fighter off as critically accepted: Focusing on swaying just two of the big-name British game magazines, and seemingly leaving all the rest largely to their own independent determinations. To this end, the game was the subject of the cover art for ‘Sinclair User’s 84th issue, as well as recipient to a particularly positive review in issue 62 of ‘Crash’ magazine — both printed March 1989. You may note that both magazines centered specifically around ZX Spectrum software, meaning that the version of the game featured would be the Speccy port in both instances. Arguably, we’re looking at what was intended as the flagship version of the game with its lowest-spec format — the release which would be available to the widest audience, at the lowest price point. I maybe should’ve spent more than two paragraphs on it during the rundown of all the other conversions… Oh well, too late for that now!

Beginning with the Sinclair User cover issue: You’ll note that the comic book-styled art featured (credited to Jerry ‘Mr Amiable’ Paris) doesn’t really do much to represent the game, other than depicting the basic premise of fighting. I can’t tell if the muscled-up man with “GLASTNOST” tattooed across his chest is meant to represent Kwon, Igor, or some other party altogether — let alone guess at who the dime-store Captain America with the polearm is supposed to stand in for. What I can tell you is that there’s a particularly lame gag in the table of contents where an editor writes in mock cockney (?) to promote the review, typing “Rite its a grate game and we like it lots and so does our mates and yoo should turn to page 34 right now and read all about it or I’ll give you a duffin’.”^[4b] Things only get better when it comes to the review itself; which opens by contending that “The follow up to Streetfighter is just as violent as you’d expect and just as entertaining,” later attempts to make some sort of joke comparing Helga to “one of the more female members of the [all-male] SU editorial team,” and concludes by stating “[Human Killing Machine] looks like being one of the few worthwhile games we’re likely to see for some while” — all before awarding the game an above-average 78 out of 100.

As generous a score as I’d argue that may be, it’s nothing when compared to one of the two reviews written for an issue of Crash magazine. See, the primary / longer-form review penned for the magazine by Philip King rates the game as a 69% (nice); commending the game’s visuals (“The scenery’s really beautiful and the large characters are well drawn and animated”), before determining that “beating seven bells out of the natives does become a mite tiresome and repetitive. […] It’s a fair old beat-’em-up but nothing spectacularly new.”^[5] So far, so fair. However, it’s a shorter review written in the side column that catches the eye: With credit given to a ‘Danielle’ (who does not appear as a credited member of Crash’s editorial team), her review opens with the confession that “I never normally play computer games, but in US Gold’s case I ALWAYS make an exception.” She further goes on to extol the virtues of the publisher – crediting them for their “technically well-programmed and SUPERBLY-MARKETED products” – before going on to explain that “HKM (as we call it in the trade) is one of those products that jumps out of the screen at you, kicks you to the ground, and says ‘Play this, or I’ll smash your face in!’”

This review concludes with a sales pitch advising readers to “Forget Roger the Renegade and Bob the Barbarian; Kwon is THE lean, mean fighting machine. Go out and buy Human Killing Machine now! I won’t regret it!”^[5b] And at the end of this enthusiastic display? Nothing short of a 99.9% rating awarded to the game, before Danielle continues in post-score attempt to list off a series of other US Gold releases  (“PS: Don’t forget Thunder Blade, LED Storm, Last Duel … [that’s enough — Ed.]”). In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the “Danielle” in question here is none other than US Gold’s own Danielle Woodyatt. Yes, Woody and Gold somehow convinced Crash to publish the full text of their own self-written glowing review, complete with shout-outs to entirely unrelated games from the publisher catalogue. The only indication by the editors as to the inauthenticity / source of this review came some pages earlier in the issue; wherein Woody was given mock crown as the magazine’s pick for ‘PR Girl of the Year,’ and rewarded by having her “unbiased opinion” on the game published next to its proper review. For whatever it’s worth, at least one member of the Tiertex team recognized how farcical this review score was — even as they seemed blissfully unaware of the full circumstances behind it:

“I remember getting 10/10 for Human Killing Machine in Crash and feeling very chuffed. I had to draw St Basil’s Cathedral in two colours for the Spectrum as one of the backgrounds – I think it was my greatest retro graphical achievement. The game sucked and contained some very questionable racial stereotypes like a hooker in Amsterdam and a bullfighter in Spain – you even had to fight the bull and a Russian dog called Shepski. Somehow we managed to get away with it! My excuse was youthful ignorance.” ~ Leigh Christian, artist for Tiertex^[2f]

Outside of their work in swaying these two notable Spectrum-centric publications, US Gold seemed plenty content to let the rest of the proverbial chips fall where they may when it came to reviews for the game’s other conversions. In a round-up conducted by ‘The Games Machine’ covering the Amiga, Atari, Amstrad and C64 releases of the game; the consensus reached was that “across all versions the characters suffer from a chronic lack of animation.”^[6] The review waffles a bit in describing how the Amstrad version has a “better defined level of playability than in the C64 and 16-bit version” (?), and ultimately awards said conversion a 63% (?!?), but does rate every other version as scoring between damning lows of 26 and 31%. This is all downright generous compared to a 22-point [out of 100] scoring review contained in Germany’s ‘Power Play’ magazine, who claim on behalf of their audience that “none of you bought an Amiga to endure such primitive brawls […] in a game you’ll get tired of after ten minutes.”^[7] Worse yet: The same issue records a 16 point rating for the Commodore 64 conversion, quipping that “The ‘Human Killing Machine’ turns out to be an ‘Inhuman Sleeping Pill.’”

For as rightfully low as these scores may register, and for as many folk as they hopefully dissuaded from blindly buying Human Killing Machine, we can only take so much satisfaction from them. The sad truth is, it didn’t much matter to US Gold whether HKM was a flop or not — critically or financially. At the end of the day – without that originally planned ‘Street Fighter’ prefix – US Gold had already slotted HKM as warranting a finite allocation of resources, both in terms of its development and marketing budgets. The two magazines they chose to manipulate represented a bare minimum effort in enacting their standard operating procedure — the least amount of work they could put into bolstering sales on the most ubiquitous microcomputer of the times. And with the obligation of the game’s release done and dusted, it was quickly back to business for the publisher: With so many more games to publish in the coming months, there was clearly more urgent business to be attended to. US Gold had effectively sent HKM out to die from the very start, with the knowledge that they had at least 25 more games slated for release in 1989.

The bitterness of the HKM pill must’ve barely registered to US Gold; who were busy enough juggling a packed release schedule, staffing shake-ups within the company, and the prospect of having to report a net loss for the year for the first time in the company’s history (somewhere in the neighborhood of negative £300K).^[2g] They had to set some fairly high sales expectations for some of their other properly licensed titles, including heavily-promoted game adaptations of Indiana Jones and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker (preceding the likes of Sega’s arcade / console efforts), and conversions of popular arcades Crack Down and Vigilante. But their most successful releases over the course of this business year would end up being their home computer conversions of Turbo Out Run; serving not only as sales successes, but also in establishing a relationship between US Gold and Sega that would bear further fruits in the future. Come 1990, US Gold would be granted an invitation direct from Sega to become the first non-Japanese publisher for software on their Master System console — transitioning those rights into publishing for the Game Gear and Genesis as those platforms emerged.

This isn’t to say that US Gold had left their partners at Capcom hanging, however. Having handled computer conversions for Ghouls ‘N Ghosts, Strider, and Tiger Road over the course of 1989; their contract continued into 1990 to include the likes of Forgotten Worlds and U.N. Squadron. However, one title in particular borne of this arrangement stands out, as it demonstrates the trust placed in the UK computer publisher by the Japanese arcade distributor: Capcom allowed the UK-based publisher to produce their own original concept for Strider II — where Tiertex were made to develop the game with an eye for the computer market first and foremost. Even as the game eventually made its way to consoles (Sega’s consoles, specifically), it would still be Tiertex at the helm, ensuring that their vision for the title / series remained uncompromised. Finally, US Gold had achieved the sequel-scheme dream, and caught up to their Renegade-touting rivals at Ocean!

Unfortunately, when all was said and done, Gold’s homegrown Strider didn’t quite reach the heights set by “Roger the Renegade.” By admission of Donald Campbell: “[Geoff Brown] managed to convince Capcom to allow US Gold / Tiertex to do Strider II, but in truth it didn’t perform very well.”^[2h] Between a mixed critical reception and apparently low sales performance, all parties involved soon came to regret their respective roles in the experiment; with Capcom ultimately scrubbing the entry from the franchise’s timeline entirely, before developing their own Strider Hiryū 2 for arcades in 1999. Still, the two publishers involved did continue in their conversion arrangement in the wake of their Strider debacle; bringing Chiki Chiki Boys (localized as ‘Mega Twins’ on Amiga / ST) and Mercs to computers in 1991, before their ten-game agreement had finally capped out. Gold were also given range to re-package their Capcom conversions in various compilation formats; between their ‘Coin-Op Hits’ collections [alongside titles originating from other license-holders], and in several explicitly Capcom-branded collections (including the ‘Capcom Collection’ eight game mega-bundle).

You may have realized that US Gold’s Strider II is one end of a thread I’ve left dangling for a while now in this article: It’s one of the two games I deliberately didn’t name earlier in my list of “officially-sanctioned sequels to arcade games by computer publishers.” And as it would just so happen, US Gold have claim to the second title in this pair as well. The 1991 release of Out Run Europa would debut first across European-market computers; marking the fourth entry in the franchise, and also representing the first not originally conceptualized by a studio within Sega. It fell on the UK’s Probe Software to envision and ultimately develop the game, bringing with them the experience having converted both Out Run and Turbo Out Run prior (as well as Super Monaco GP). Their design saw the likes of drivable motorcycles and watercrafts added to the repertoire alongside the standard sports car, as well as options for weapons with which to blow other vehicles off of the road / sea. The end result is a racing game which – while feeling slightly out of sorts with the larger franchise – seemed to generally please players across the various home computer standards (and eventually on Game Gear / Master System).

Oh, but I can already hear the British retro enthusiasts fervently frothing at the mouth: “You have to talk about the Your Sinclair review!” Fair enough! So, US Gold got up to some trickery in providing impossibly impressive screenshots to Your Sinclair magazine, supposedly meant to showcase the ZX Spectrum version of the game. With the publication deciding to print these obvious mock-up shots, and posting a review alongside it including claims that “The graphics are big and dead colorful as well”;^[8] you can understand how eager players may have been a tad bit miffed to discover that the actual game displayed its viewport in black and white monochrome, with only some limited colors appearing in the surrounding HUD. US Gold only went a step further in printing one of those same full-color screenshots on the back of the box for the game itself, as if to confirm their knowing complicity in this deceit. Needless to say, this was bamboozlement of a most egregious degree — a complete and utter betrayal of consumer trust.** As an added bit of bonus shadiness: The game’s ending screen is lifted directly from Ocean Software’s earlier Speccy conversion of Chase H.Q.

Naturally, I’ve veered far off-topic here, and I reckon it’s time to rein myself back in. The questions remaining at this stage should be as to the futures of the companies involved in Human Killing Machine’s production — save for the continued operations of Capcom, obviously. And so we begin with US Gold: With operations continuing well into 1996, their focus had continued to remain primarily on the home computer market, with heavier emphasis being placed on DOS / Windows as those operating systems emerged as dominant. And during this transition, they actually continued to do fairly well for themselves — establishing fruitful publishing relationships with the likes of LucasArts and Bethesda Softworks. What eventually began to erode at their market share were the emergence of 32-bit consoles; where their backing Sega in the console space proved a bet on the wrong horse, and their slowness in pivoting to other platforms came to bite them. While this didn’t necessarily spell doom for the company on its own – as they could still well afford the time to course correct – what it contributed to was a growing disillusionment / disinterest in the industry on the part of founder Geoff Brown. In his own words describing his growing detachment: “I don’t know, but I sort of lost the motivation, took my eye off the ball. And then we started to suffer really. […] I just lost the impetus.”^[2i]

What ultimately did US Gold in wasn’t any marked decline in business or failure to find a place in the changing market: Simply put, the man at the top got tired of running it, and sought a quick [and lucrative] way out. And so opened the door for a purchase of parent company CentreGold by Eidos Interactive — representing one of several companies Eidos had moved to acquire at the time in an effort to bolster their distribution efforts. In the process of this acquisition, Eidos didn’t demonstrate an interest in continuing operations for US Gold, and thus operations were quickly and quietly ceased. With but a whimper, what was once a titan in the games industry had fallen. For historical note: The final game released under the US Gold label would be Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996, in fulfilling a license agreement with the ‘Atlanta Committee for the Games of the XXVI Olympiad.’ And while there’s so much more history to be explored on the subject of US Gold, that’s just about all we have the space here to cover. I can only highly recommend Chris Wilkins’ The Story of US Gold to those interested in the further history of the company, as it provides a deep dive into the operations and practices of the company at large.

As for developer Tiertex, their operations continued until as late as 2003. In parting with US Gold, they staged a transition largely toward developing handheld titles — particularly of the licensed variety. This most notably encompasses multiple entries in the FIFA, Madden, and NBA video game franchises; as well as adaptations for a number of Disney properties including Hercules, Mulan, and Toy Story. By claim of Donald Campbell, some of these titles even went on to become million-sellers, proving the direction to be financially viable. I’ll highlight one Disney•Pixar Toy Story Racer here, as it represents one of a small handful of Game Boy Color games which attempted a sort of pseudo-3D on the platform by means of pre-rendered FMV backgrounds (not sure if that’s actually technically correct in this case). But as quickly as the company had begun development operations for the then-new Game Boy Advance, they would just as quickly close up shop. Again by Donald’s testimony: “In around 2003 Tiertex withdrew silently from the games development world. There was a major stall in the handheld market and mobile games was still hit and miss.”^[2j] This would, of course, contradict claims by one Stuart Ashen in 2007; who claimed that the company still existed at that point in time, being made to suffer the “fitting punishment” of producing mobile phone games.

Yes, if you were already familiar with Human Killing Machine prior to reading this article, it is most likely as result of that very same 2007 video review by Ashens, made to highlight the Atari ST release of the game. It’s either on account of that, or you’ve been around long enough to have been burned by US Gold yourself back in the day. In either case, Ashens’ video helped shine a spotlight on what had become a largely forgotten game by that point, and entered the title into the consciousness of a whole new generation of viewers / players. Naturally, the nine minute episode demonstrates its share of misconceptions as to the nature of the game, and hardly serves a “thorough” look into the mechanics of its gameplay or the circumstances behind its development; but it was obviously produced with the intent to entertain first and foremost, and helped pave the way for Stuart to eventually pen some excellent books on the subject of Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.

Of course, it was watching the video in question which forever etched Human Killing Machine into my own subconscious, where it has remained unscrubbed and unexorcised for something like the past thirteen years now. In that sense, this article has been a long time coming — my way of motivating myself to actually explore the game in full, and to share my own findings on the subject matter. Having now done so, I genuinely feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It feels like ticking a check mark next to an entry on a weathered to-do list, after having put that task off for nearly a decade and a half. Sure, the part where I finally had to play the game was painful; but that’s over and done with now, and so the healing can begin at last. Now, would I suggest to anyone else to play HKM for themselves, in order to sate their own similarly long-held curiosity? NO. Dear god, no. I should wish and hope that for whatever door Ashens may have opened, that this article should serve to close said door for good — or at the very least, put something like a child safety lock ’round the knob.

… Still, you can’t help but think about what the future for Street Fighter might’ve looked like had this game somehow been canonized, right? Like, try and imagine a timeline where Kwon somehow plays the Akuma role in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, returning to enact vengeance against Ryu for his tournament exploits having overshadowed Kwon’s own anti-terrorism crusade or something. More likely though (in this entirely unlikely scenario), Kwon would probably better slot into the Dan Hibiki role, wouldn’t he? Picture him trying and failing to toss a Hadouken — not even coming as close as a Gadouken in the process. That’s the Kwon I’m going to try and picture in my head from this point forward. “Human Killing Machine” my ass: Kwon is, and will forever be, WEAK.

** It would only be discovered decades later that disabled code did exist in the retail game for enabling a full-color mode — requiring a sequence of system-level ‘Pokes’ / code injections to re-enable. As would be later confirmed by original programmer Darren White: The game was originally developed with a full-color mode in mind, and the offending promotional screenshots were effectively target renders produced by a program Darren had designed to convert graphics from the Master System version of the game (to be further optimized before appearing on the computers). Ultimately though, there were issues in getting these graphics up to a presentable state in time for the Spectrum version’s project deadline, and the last minute decision was made to switch the whole presentation over to a safer / simpler monochrome. As such: The color graphics hidden within the game are still a long ways away from matching those seen in the promotional images — if such a feat were even possible.

[1] Leone, Matt. “Street Fighter 2: An Oral History.” Polygon. February 3, 2014. Web.
[2] b c d e f g h i j Wilkins, Chris, and Roger M. Kean. The Story of US Gold. Fusion Retro Books, 2015. eBook.
[3] “Preview.” Crash, Issue 57. October, 1988. Print. (Scan available)
[4] b Taylor, Graham ‘Jim’. “Human Killing Machine.” Sinclair User, Issue 84. March, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[5] b King, Philip. “The Human Killing Machine.” Crash, Issue 62. March, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[6] “Version Updates.” The Games Machine, Issue 18. May, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[7] Lenhardt, Heinrich. “Power Computerspiele.” Power Play. May, 1989. Print. (Scans available: 1 / 2)
[8] Lenach, James. “Reviews: OutRun Europa.” Your Sinclair, Issue 71. November, 1991. Print. (Scan available)