Sword of Sodan

“Revenge is Best Written in Blood.”

“With sword, answer battle’s call,
in the fading light of day.”
North American Amiga release, front cover.

A funny thing happens sometimes when I observe the past bethrough a modern lens: I happen upon leads on apparently legendary games – be they good or bad – which seem seminal in the histories of their respective consoles. Maybe I’ll find message board discussions or comments on YouTube videos; where enthusiastic posters reminisce on the games that apparently symbolize their childhood, taught them valuable lessons in how not to spend their money, or which they even claim as “proof” that a given console was either a cut above the rest or emblematic of its inability to stack up against the competition. Reading these testimonials, I start to build an expectation in my head about the game in question — a mental image of some platform-defining piece of software, to where everyone who owned the system is likely to have some story to share about it. But the deeper I dig in search of precious context, the closer I come to a realization: The cartridge or disc I’ve sunk so much time into researching doesn’t quite match that expectation I’ve built for it. Whether its place in the historical record is perhaps overstated, or the attestations to its quality just don’t seem to match up; I’m now left to look upon a game whose status as a “legend” seems questionable at best, leaving me in the unenviable position of having to correct some long-standing record. It’s a dirty, thankless job — a role requiring far too much in the way of written word, when compared to how much of an impact those reported findings might actually have. But it’s as they say: “Someone’s gotta do it.”

Say, on a completely unrelated note: Y’all ever heard of Sword of Sodan? If you haven’t, you’re clearly not an Amiga enthusiast. By all indications, Sword of Sodan was one of the defining titles for the long-running computer line — a proper powerhouse piece of software, which demonstrated the system’s ability to produce games on par with what you’d find at the arcade. Its impressive presentation would be matched by similarly impressive sales numbers, where it stood as a top-seller throughout the Amiga’s lifespan; impressing all who were lucky enough to own it, and serving as the envy of all those who hadn’t pledged themselves to the cult of Commodore. But all hope was not yet lost for the non-Amigans: Two years following its initial 1988 release, the game made its way to Sega’s Genesis, giving home console owners the chance to see what all the hype was about. Only, there was a slight problem, in that the conversion was determined to be a steaming pile. All the magic of those original floppy disks was gone in this new cartridge-based form, as critics and consumers came to a cold consensus on it. In crossing the pond and landing in Japan, the country would go so far as to declare Sword of Sodan’s Mega Drive release as one of “Four Heavenly Kings of Kusogē” [within the scope of the console] — mockingly electing it as “帝王ソダン (Emperor Sodan),” and enshrining it at the bottom of ‘BEEP! Mega Drive’ magazine’s library-encompassing ‘Reader Race’ rankings. So, there you have it: Another clear-cut case of an excellent computer game failing to translate to home consoles, thereby demonstrating the utter brilliance of the Amiga and all its developers. All hail Commodore, and Tramiel be with you.

… Y’know, it occurs to me that I’ve been taking this story at face value for several years, without actually playing either version of the game for myself. Maybe – just maybe – there’s more to the legend of Sword of Sodan than what the common conjecture has let on? Perhaps it’s finally time for me to strap on the chainmail, brace my buckler, and see what the fuss is all about. Y’all know what to expect from one of these articles by now: We’re gonna unfurl the scroll on developers Discovery Software and Innerprise Incorporated, venture into the depths of the supposed classic on Amiga, and compare and contrast it against its apparently nefarious Genesis conversion. Along the way, we’ll get to the bottom of Sword of Sodan‘s appeal to Amiga owners, whether or not its 16-bit cartridge incarnation is truly worthy of so much ire, and why the world never got its hands on a much-anticipated sword-swinging sequel. And hell, just to be thorough; we’ll also cover attempts to bring the game to Apple computers, between a canceled IIGS port and a Bethesda Softworks-published Macintosh release. It’s high time we cover another high fantasy game on the Bad Game Hall of Fame (it’s been a minute since we wrote about Arthur’s Quest: Battle for the Kingdom), and I reckon Sword of Sodan is as fine a selection as any to pull from the stone. Have at thee!

“Where the Chill, Dank Air Gnaws on Bones, and the Silence Is Like a Tomb.”

“Fight till final breath the magician Zoras in his lair. On to victory, or to death.”
Sword of Sodan magazine advertisement.

Søren Grønbech – better known to some by his alias ‘Sodan’ (a portmanteau of the name of his name and home country, “Søren” and “Danmark”) – emerged on the Commodore 64 cracker scene in 1984, aged just fourteen years old.^[1] On getting hold of a C64 as his first personal computer, and after having sampled some of the available interactive software of the era; he quickly determined that he wanted to produce games himself, and to learn how to program them for his newly-acquired machine. But the road to becoming a developer in the 80s wasn’t a clearly-established one — certainly not one that was immediately apparent or even open to the likes of a teenage Dane. And so, Søren got his start as so many other prolific programmers of the era did: By figuring out how to crack copy protection on published games, and learning the intricacies of coding for himself in the process. His contributions as a part of the ‘Ace’ cracking crew [and later as an independent entity] were numerous; busting open the likes of Monty on the Run, Silent Service, and Underwurlde, just to name a few. It was also during this period when he would lay claim to innovating a particularly novel hack for the hardware: The ability to draw sprites in the border area of the system’s screen — space not typically intended to be occupied by any manner of program graphics. Søren would utilize this technique while crafting his cracktros (screens inserted by cracking crews in order to claim credit for their works) and show off his technical wizardry, though a rival cracking crew by the name of ‘1001 Crew’ would later claim their own credit for pioneering the hack; resulting in a brief back-and-forth between the two factions, as argued across a series of “diss demos” released for the sole purpose of contending who figured the hack out first.** You’ve gotta love demoscene drama.

Between his cracking, Søren remained committed to the idea of producing his own game, and would release his debut title on October 30th, 1985: The aptly-titled Crackers Revenge, in which Søren would plaster his Sodan alias on every screen of the game, as well as providing a brief manifesto on the game’s title screen: “This program was created, constructed, designed and programmed by Sodan to prove, that crackers also can make programs instead of crack them. Thanks to The Wizard for a bit of help. This is my first real game, and it have taken me about 100 hours to make.” The game itself then is a rather crude collectathon platformer along the lines of Manic Miner or Monty on the Run (the latter of which sees its famous Rob Hubbard score lifted in order to serve as Crackers Revenge’s background music), where the goal is to collect seven keys scattered across the game’s world, in order to free a group of crackers who have been imprisoned by the “cruel software-firms.” Along your way, you’ll have to deal with all manner of moving and disappearing platforms, hop over inescapable pits, as well as avoid collisions with deadly flowers; all of which threaten to either kill you or force you to reset from a checkpoint. While Crackers Revenge might not look like much now, and wasn’t especially unique for its time either (it is very directly modeled after the 1985 title Son of Blagger); there are actually a handful of impressive technical tricks on display, and Sodan’s effort is certainly commendable. The fact that it was released directly into the public domain and intended to be distributed as freeware should also count for something, too.

In effectively giving Crackers Revenge away, it evidently got shared around a lot. At a point, other cracking crews even started developing unofficial “sequels” to the title, making sure to shout out Sodan in the process [despite a lack of any direct affiliation with / endorsement from him].*** This success and popularity perhaps emboldened Søren to take the next step in his development career — to seek a proper publisher for his next game, and hopefully make some money this time around. But Søren’s first attempt at producing a commercial game didn’t quite go according to plan: Having next developed Cyborg for the C64 in late 1985 (this time with his real name attached), he attempted to sell the game to publisher Mastertronic, who would wind up rejecting the submission. Being a relatively simple top-down ship shooter (though unique in its incorporating a Defender-style minimap system), Mastertronic were probably fair in their assessment of the title as not being worth their time and money, as the bulk of their catalogue consisted of more substantive / impressive diskettes. (That being said, they were also responsible for publishing Bionic Granny, so make what you will of their supposed quality control.) It’s from there that something somewhat ironic would happen to Søren, as he would later recount on his personal webpage: “I tried to sell it to MasterTronic, but they rejected it. Later somebody at MasterTronic must have given a copy to somebody, and it was published (to my suprise) in 1986 by another company.”^[2] The rather unscrupulous publisher in question would be Creative Sparks; who rechristened the game as Cyber 1, attributed its development to their sub-label Quick Soft, and sold it under their ‘Sparklers’ sub-label for budget titles. Needless to say, Søren would not see any of the profits from this underhanded release of his work. (Though his name does at least remain on the title screen, for whatever that’s worth.)

Having had his latest game stolen out from under him, Søren resolved not to be taken advantage of as a freelance programmer again: His next title would be developed in-house for whichever company would take the chance on hiring him, in order to ensure that no further publisher screwjobs could possibly befall him. (Foreshadowing.) Only being sixteen years old at this point though, he was still gonna have a tough time finding a studio willing to put him on payroll. That is, until he discovered a company which had just recently been established by yet another teenaged Dane: Denmark’s ‘Kele Line A/S,’ as founded by the entrepreneurial Keld Jensen. Having already made a number of industry connections by previously running his company as a computer import business – flipping home computers shipped from the UK to Denmark – Keld pivoted Kele Line toward software development in 1986, after taking out a 300,000 kroner loan provided by his own mother.^[3] The goal set was to become Denmark’s first commercial game studio — to propel the country into the spotlight of software development, and provide a stage for their homegrown talent to shine on. In the words of Keld Jensen: “I had looked a lot at the UK, which was far ahead of us, and thought that we can damn well do that in Denmark as well. When you are 19 years old, common sense is not so common, so we started doing it without knowing anything about the industry.” And so – despite the inevitable disastrous conclusion we’re building to here – it’s worth exploring the brief history of Kele Line’s history as a development house, and Søren’s involvement therein.

“Sodan’s singlehanded oddysey [sic] sent the final spirit back to the underworld.”
Photo of Søren Grønbech featured in
ZZap!64 magazine.

We’ll leave it to Jensen to do a succinct job in describing the composition of Kele Line’s staff: “We were teams of 2-3 men — or boys really — who spent 4-6 months developing each game. We were between 16-19-years-old, all about the same age as me, and we just had fun doing it. No one had a formal education and many still went to school at the same time. But the programmers were brilliant.”^[3b] Obviously, Søren Grønbech was one of those hires, assigned to work on a game that would come to be known as 1987’s The Vikings. The project in question was put into production as the result of a prior failed business arrangement with publisher Durell Software, who had contracted Kele Line to produce conversions of their title Chain Reaction, which Jensen’s studio failed to deliver. In an attempt to salvage / at least make something from the deal, Durell’s founder Robert White suggested that Kele Line could instead produce a simpler game — a “straightforward Rambo style game” (referring to Platinum Productions’ adaptation of Rambo: First Blood Part II for the C64 / CPC / Speccy), with the gimmick of a viking theme in order to reflect the studio’s Danish roots.^[4] Søren would accept the challenge – aided by graphic designer Torben Bakager Larsen, composer Ben Danglish, as well as an uncredited Johannes Bjerregaard providing the game’s intro music – and create a relatively ambitious top-down action-adventure title, written in “pure machinecode” in a period of just three months [by Søren’s own recollection].^[2b] Though the game reviewed rather middlingly, it would ultimately prove a success for Kele Line, serving as their “lead product” in Denmark and the UK.^[4b] It would also prove a hit among the cracking crowd, taking third place in the rankings of the most-pirated Danish C64 games.

Kele Line’s other big hit would’ve been Tiger Mission on the C64: A top-down shmup which sees players pilot a helicopter through five levels, shooting down ground forces and naval armadas. (Incidentally, Tiger Mission takes the top spot on that list of most-pirated Danish C64 games.) Proving to be another hit for the studio, it seemed as though Jensen and company were poised to compete on the global computer software scene… until their distribution partner collapsed in on themselves, losing Kele Line both a small fortune in owed royalties and their ability to publish games outside of Denmark. As it turns out, that partner in question was none other than Creative Sparks — the same publisher which had stolen Søren’s Cyborg a year earlier! Faced with their distributor’s bankruptcy, Jensen desperately attempted to find a way for Kele Line company to self-publish and export games outside of Denmark, but was met with a rejection from the country’s Export Credit Council: “They said; you can’t export software — it has to be machines or something physical. I still find it funny today, that at the time people did not think that software was something that could be exported. But if they had said yes to it, it could have meant that we had one of the world’s largest software houses in Denmark today.”^[3c] In effect, Creative Sparks’ closure had taken Kele Line down in flames with it; which consequently led Jensen to go into hiding, as he was unable to provide his employees their final paychecks. Where his disgruntled ex-staff and the media were left to assume Keld had “taken the money and ran” – filing lawsuits against him in the wake of Kele Line’s closure – the truth of the matter seems to be that Jensen was simply unequipped to deal with the emotional / financial burden that had been placed on him. The stress of these events evidently forced him to quit the games industry entirely, move back in with his mother for a time, and to start plying his trade in the IT business (before becoming a somewhat renowned negotiation consultant later in life).

As a result of all this, Søren was obviously now out of a job, and likely feeling pretty burnt out on the whole scene. Some would’ve probably called it quits as a developer right then and there, the same as Keld did. But Søren wasn’t finished quite yet: Instead, he signed up for a role as manager at the new studio Starvision Software, which attempted to continue Kele Line’s mission statement in promoting Dane developers. Torben Bakager would join Søren at this new employer, and continue in his role as a graphic designer. Unfortunately, the company fizzled out after producing only one game: 1987’s M.A.C.H. – Maneuverable Armed Computer Humans for the C64, which released to underwhelming reviews and seemed to discourage Starvision from pursuing further releases (leaving a planned follow-up ‘Twin Ranger’ unfinished / unreleased). Now, at this point, you’d imagine that Søren finally got fed up with this shit and left this whole rotten industry behind. But nope: The game development dream still wasn’t dead just yet! On the other hand, having determined that the Commodore 64 itself was dead (or at least on its way to dying); Søren took the opportunity to shift his focus to Commodore’s Amiga – which had just launched its consumer-grade ‘500’ model – where he returned to his Sodan alias and began producing demos again. It’s during this period where Søren would produce the Amiga’s first “megademo” (a long-form demo made up of multiple scenes and which relies on multiloading), in the form of 1987’s TechTech. Collaborating with a ‘Magician 42’ – the alias of one Julian Lefay – TechTech demonstrated a range of hardware hacks and impressive visual tricks; including a “multi scrapper screen scroller,” real-time vector graphics, and even a topless lady for good measure. According to Søren, their ambitious release would go on to inspire “hundreds of MegaDemos by other groups later,” and immediately establish the duo as legends of the Amiga demoscene.^[2c]

“Jump onto blocks.”
Discovery Software magazine advertisement.

… Of course, being a “demoscene legend” doesn’t pay the bills. Søren and Torben would pick up a bit of work as freelance programmers and graphic designers, contributing together to development on Swiss Computer Arts’ Giganoid on the Amiga. At the same time, Torben was laying the foundation for his own studio, ‘Cope-com’ (a reference to Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen), along with fellow former Kele Line staffer Martin B. Pedersen — the programmer responsible for converting The Vikings to the Amstrad CPC. You’ll find that despite the short-lived and turbulent natures of Kele Line and Starvision, the talent it brought together would continue to work with one another; such as Kele Line’s composer Johannes Bjerregaard contributing sound design to Starvision’s M.A.C.H., and in turn, Starvision’s lead programmer Thomas Zelikman returning to work at Cope-com. And then there’s the matter of Julian Lefay, who Søren would introduce to Torben and help line up work for as a composer. At the same time as that, Julian had also committed himself to another game development startup — a small studio by the name of Bethesda Softworks, established in 1986. Though, I don’t reckon anything of note would wind up coming out from them? (I’ll double-check on that later, just to be sure.) Anyway, the whole point I’m trying to make with this exceedingly messy paragraph is that dudes from Denmark stick together: The lines you can connect between this small group of young Danes all wind up overlapping and getting tangled together, as they kept finding opportunities to employ each other within the industry over the next several years. At the same time though, none of them were having much success in establishing any long-lasting companies or producing any true killer apps. Past a certain point, it was as if their country itself was holding them back — keeping them from breaking out into the wider, global market. Realizing this, the way forward for Søren appeared clear: He’d move to the United States with Julian and Torben in tow, and join a recently-established company in Maryland’s own Discovery Software International.

Prior to the trio of Danes joining their ranks, Discovery had spent their first year of operation in 1986 producing utility software for the Amiga; the likes of Demon for programming keyboard macros, GRABBiT for capturing / printing the screen, and Marauder which promised to archive “copy-protected disks.”^[5] In this early era for Commodore’s platform, the target demographic for these sorts of applications would’ve been much the same as the audience for the computers themselves: Business-minded folk in either the corporate or creative sectors, who could afford the steep price tags that came with such high-end hardware. Where the likes of the VIC-20 and C64 before it were fit to be sold in toy stores and hobby shops, Commodore were attempting to distance themselves from a brand image that had been established while Jack Tramiel was still in charge of the company, and determined to sell their Amiga models of ‘1000’ and ‘2000’ exclusively at dedicated computer stores; positioning it as a productivity machine, and targeting the particular clientele that came with it.**** But when the 500 line was rolled out in order to appeal to a wider market [and to capitalize on cheapening components], it quickly proved to be the more lucrative venture for Commodore, and opened the door for game developers to profit along with them. Naturally, this led Discovery Software to reconsider their own niche, and to turn their attention toward producing entertainment software. This led to their developing an Amiga conversion of Taito’s arcade Arkanoid, which impressed in 1987 with its smooth gameplay and nearly arcade-perfect visuals (simple as Arkanoid’s presentation may well have been).

From there, Discovery contracted with Torben’s studio Cope-com, in order to produce titles Hybris and Zoom! for the Amiga as well; where Zoom! seemed to catch on well enough to warrant subsequent conversions to the C64, DOS, and Sega Genesis. It’s at around this time when Søren and Julian got involved in Discovery’s operations, with Søren having been brought on to assist development of Hybris [by producing map editing tools for the team]. But Søren likely wasn’t content to just provide technical support and accept his credits as a bit player: He was committed to developing his own game idea for the Amiga – to realizing a concept from scratch and writing all the code himself – where he could get the top billing and admiration he felt he was long overdue and entitled to. Only this time, Søren wasn’t gonna let the opportunity slip past him to make his mark on the industry: Not only would he develop a game that pushed the system to its limits, but he would go so far as to put his established cracker alias in the game’s title — to finally fill in the gap between Søren and Sodan, and stake his entire reputation on this upcoming release. And so, the title Sword of Sodan was decided upon, as the eponymous developer assembled his Danish dream team in order to ensure it got done right: Putting himself in charge of “Movement and Magic” (lead programming duties), Torben Bakager Larsen on “Illustrations and Illusions” (graphic design), and Julian Lefay with “Conjury and Compositions” (sound design). With the talented trio working in tandem, there would be no doubt that their resulting title would soon become the talk of the Amiga scene.

But Discovery were no longer content to simply support a single platform: At the same time that Søren and his team were developing the Amiga version of Sword of Sodan, a separate studio was commissioned to bring the game to Apple’s IIGS platform. That company would be Visionware, whose focus as a newly-established developer had been to target Apple’s latest hardware; with original titles such as Gnarly Golf and Great Western Shootout, as well as conversions of Amiga titles the likes of Pipe Mania. Technically speaking, the IIGS was less powerful than its contemporary in the Amiga 500 line – at least in terms of stock memory and processor – but was still nonetheless capable of replicating its games software if tasked to the right people. (Just ask Rebecca Ann Heineman about porting Another World from the Amiga to the IIGS.) And to be clear, Visionware had competent hands on deck, and was keeping in pace to get their version of Sword of Sodan out the door on time… until lead programmer Scott L. Patterson was apparently “fired [from the company] for misconduct,” according to speculation originating from an unsourced Wikipedia edit. Only one small issue with the phrasing of that claim: Scott Patterson was no less than a founder of the company, would continue to program games on their behalf through the 1990s and 2000s, and remains in place as its CEO to this very day; as his company is now known as Visual Concepts. (Perhaps you know them for their work on the NBA 2K and WWE 2K franchises?) From what I can gather might’ve actually happened here (based on further unsourced speculation), Scott likely voluntarily removed himself from the project after getting into some arguments with the team at Discovery Software, and handed the conversion off to another programmer Jimmy Huey. However, for reasons we’ll get into later, this IIGS version of Sword of Sodan was never released — left in an unfinished state, even as the game later made its way to other platforms.

Which brings us back to the Amiga version of Sword of Sodan, and Discovery Software’s marketing of it. Naturally, standard full-page print ads would make their way to games and computer-focused magazines of the era;***** where the game was promoted as “the new arcade action standard for Amiga and Apple IIGS,” as well as indicating that it’d be “Coming soon for IBM and Tandy.” (Nothing ever came of those latter two.) Preview copies of the game were sent to those same magazines to cover / review in or around October of 1988, preceding the title’s launch in December of that year. Almost unanimously across the board, critics were all wowed by the game, and amazed at what Søren and his team had managed to accomplish on the hardware. (More on the contents of those reviews later.) But perhaps the most novel bit of promotion for Sword of Sodan was the release of another commercial demo release — a ‘Discovery Software Demo Disk,’ which contained a slideshow of some of their other titles; as well as an automated playthrough of Sword of Sodan‘s third stage, demonstrating just how visually impressive the game was by allowing consumers to see it running on their own computers. With Discovery Software’s niche having been established as bringing “arcade-quality experiences” to the home computer (at a time where arcades still represented the cutting-edge of gaming tech), Sword of Sodan‘s place in the company’s portfolio was clear: To demonstrate their ability to reproduce the presentation of an arcade beat ’em up, with every bell and whistle that consumers had come to expect from a proper coin-op title. Of course, if there’s one other thing that arcade beat ’em ups of the era were known for, it was their brutal difficulty — their ability to separate stubborn fools from their quarters. Would Sword of Sodan faithfully capture this aspect of the experience as well?

** For whatever it’s worth: I’d lean toward Søren / Sodan as the man first responsible for figuring out border-sprites, if only for the fact that he was far more classy in his diss demos. While 1001 Crew were busy issuing threats along the lines of “Sodan shut your big mouth about Dutch having problems with border sprites and do not steal this for your next game”; Sodan took the [comparative] high road, by claiming that he didn’t want to make a fellow cracker ‘TSI’ “unhappy” by contesting the credit, and providing instructions / a program to anyone reading his message on “how to make side-sprites” for themselves. Also, Sodan would choose to write his messages using proper letter casing, while 1001 Crew wrote theirs in a custom font with all uppercase letters; which makes it look like they were angrily shouting the entire time they were typing, and just makes me wanna side with Sodan even more. I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.

*** Funnily enough, if you attempt to download the original Crackers Revenge from Søren’s / Sodan’s own website, you’ll be in for quite the surprise: On the page where he’s meant to link to his own game, he accidentally provides a download for Crackers Revenge II, which he had no hand in developing! It’s clear that rather than packaging one of his own personal copies of his program in order to put together a .ZIP file for the site, he simply relied on downloading existing game rips from the Internet, and accidentally downloaded the wrong version of Crackers Revenge in the process — failing to double-check and see that he hadn’t actually downloaded his own game. Incidentally – if you’re looking for a copy of the original Crackers Revenge – you can download it from the CSDb (C64 Scene Database) on this page.

**** This isn’t to say that the Amiga 1000 / 2000 software catalogue was completely devoid of games: 1986 saw publishers the likes of Activision, Electronic Arts, and Infocom (among plenty others) all initially supporting the platform; largely with conversions of titles the likes of The Bard’s Tale, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Little Computer People. At the same time, this is also when Cinemaware first emerged on the scene, who targeted the Amiga first and foremost when producing titles including Defender of the Crown, The King of Chicago, and S.D.I. (‘Strategic Defense Initiative’). Of course, these games would all be designed with support for the upcoming models of Amiga 500 and beyond in mind; with publishers knowing full well that Commodore would eventually produce consumer-grade models of computer, and that already having a day-one retail presence for their games would prove a strategic advantage for them.

***** It should be noted that the key art used for these adverts [and eventually for the game’s cover] was painted by one Dorian Vallejo — son of prolific science-fiction and fantasy illustrator Boris Vallejo. You may be familiar with the latter’s work from the posters of motion pictures the likes of Barbarian Queen and National Lampoon’s Vacation, or for his contributions to paperback book covers; where he rendered the likes of Conan the Barbarian, Doc Savage, and Tarzan. Needless to say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree here, and Dorian can be seen emulating his dad’s style when it came time to produce art for Sword of Sodan.

“Enter Now This Death’s Door, and Thus Begin the Quest.”

“But for one great warrior, Sodan,
he would have ruled.”
North American Amiga release, back cover.

Once upon a time, in “an age of dreams and a time of miracles” (as per the instruction manual); the Northern Kingdoms were at peace, and the good King Lordan lorded over his land as a benevolent ruler. Prior to his reign, the kingdom had known only turmoil, having only recently recovered from a bout of “Cold Death” that saw evil spirits plague the land and slaughter all those who challenged it. That had been until a hero emerged with a magic blade in hand – the final work of a legendary blacksmith – and struck down each and every last apparition over the course of several years. On completing his mission, the brave swordsman disappeared into the night and took his weapon with him, leaving those he had saved without guidance or leadership until Lordan eventually made his appearance. But just when folk had started to believe that things were finally looking up for them, a new era of horror would begin: From the East, the necromancer Zoras put a diabolical plan into action, casting darkness over the land and summoning a new wave of foul creatures and malevolent spirits to invade the North. After slaying the good King and Queen with his demonic magic, he moved from his previous abode in a “tower made of human bones” to the far more scenic Castle Craggamoore, and assumed the throne as an evil emperor. Unbeknownst to Zoras, however, King Lordan had enacted a final decree shortly before the invasion of his city and his death: His twin children – his son Brodan and daughter Shardan – would be smuggled out of the Kingdom and taken across the Cthol Mountains, to “the farthest corner of the land.” For it was in this territory that a certain swordsman of legend was said to reside, who might be able to protect the King’s progeny. Apparently, not even Lordan realized that this reclusive warrior was none other than the man who had first rid the land of evil spirits so many years ago — none other than his own father, Sodan.

On the arrival of his grandchildren, and after hearing their tragic story [and the grim tidings of his son’s death], the old swordsman made a vow: To instruct Brodan and Shardan in the ways of the blade, in the hopes that they may one day be able to return to the Castle Craggamoore and slay the vile Zoras. As their training concludes, Sodan reveals to the twins his enchanted blade from long ago, and presents them with an important decision that must be made: “You have both learned your lessons well, but there is only one sword that can slay the necromancer. Which of you will take up the blade in vengeance and show it the light of day?” It is here where either brother or sister takes up the titular Sword of Sodan, treks back to the Northern Kingdom, and eventually finds themselves in front of the gate to the capital city. And it is here where the game begins; as you guide your chosen warrior through a gauntlet of deadly foes and devious traps, and toward the Castle Craggamoore which they once called home. Only the most skilled virtual swordsman can hope to ascend to the top of the stone structure, and confront the kingslayer Zoras — to battle to the death with the necromancer responsible for so much despair and destruction. Neither Brodan nor Shardan have tears left to shed: All that remains in their hearts is righteous fury and vengeance. And in order to help them succeed in their quest, you’re gonna have to meet them at their level, and embrace that same sort of fiery fury. Blades will bleed, shields will shatter, and perhaps a couple of Amiga joysticks might get thrown across the room in fits of frustration. Do you dare to take up the digital sword? For the purposes of this review, let’s assume that you do!

The first thing a player sees on loading Sword of Sodan is an example of Søren and Julian’s so-called “multi scrapper screen scroller” technique in action, as previously seen in the TechTech megademo. In this case, it’s utilized to render the game’s title screen with a mystical effect, making it appear as though the image is materializing into view as if cast by a magic spell. While perhaps an impressive bit of eye candy for the time, an unintentional result of its implementation here is the fact that the Discovery Software logo is partially cut off by the edge of the screen — an issue which could’ve easily been remedied by simply moving the graphic just slightly to the left within the bitmap composition. While obviously a very minor oversight, I reckon it establishes something like a recurring theme for the rest of the game: The pursuit of impressive visual effects coming at the detriment of Sword of Sodan’s actual content. Case in point: If you stick around for a while here without hitting the ‘Fire’ button – through the credits, and past a couple of instruction screens – you’ll beat witness to the absolute worst high score table ever implemented in a video game — a torturous two-minute animation where a swarm of creatures fly across the screen, to slowly spell out every individual character of the ‘Hall of Fame’ scoreboard. This is the sort of design idea that sounds cute on paper, gets prototyped during development, and gets rightfully scrapped when someone points out how miserable it would be for a player to have to actually sit through. But Søren and his team must’ve been really proud of some mundane technical element of it — some “ingenious hack” they figured out that makes it work. And so, to the detriment of consumers, this wretched waste of time made the cut.

On beginning the game, you’re given your choice of “Hero or Heroine” — to play as either the brother Brodan or the sister Shardan. By all my measurements, they play identically to one another; in terms of speed, strength, and stamina. The only difference between them is aesthetic, where Brodan is depicted as a standard Conan-esque bare-chested barbarian sort, while Shardan sports a steel bra and skirt. (Neither one of them seems particularly committed to effective protection in battle.) Whichever one you choose will wield the sword of Sodan and carry a shield in their off-hand, the latter piece of equipment being purely decorative: You’ll quickly find that there is no means of defending against attacks in combat, other than to avoid being hit by them in the first place. Truly, the best defense in Sword of Sodan is a good offense — to kill your enemies as quickly as you can, before they get a chance to kill you. And believe you me: Every enemy in the game is quite capable of killing you, and none should be underestimated. From the lowly grunts first appearing in level one, to the projectile-spewing monstrosities seen deep within Craggamoore Castle; you must treat every encounter as equally life-threatening, and suss out the tactic that results in you taking the least damage possible in a given fight. Because it’s not so much a matter of avoiding taking damage, as much as it is about minimizing how much you suffer per scrap. And by the end of the game, it’s not even a matter of how much health you lose, but of how many lives you have left to burn through.

It’s difficult to overstate just how brutally difficult Sword of Sodan is. Whether the severity of its challenge is by design or by oversight is a matter we’ll have to interrogate later. Either way, it’s not the sort of game you’ll manage to beat on your first, second, or probably even thirtieth try: Not when completion is contingent on a combination of reflexes, mastery, memorization, and dumb luck. If there’s one saving grace to it, it’s the fact that you have such limited input — such a small number of choices you can trial and error to determine what works in a given situation. You can credit that to the design of the standard Amiga controller: A single button and a joystick, dictating a style of simple input that titles for the platform largely adhered to, unless they elected to utilize the computer’s keyboard. Actually, Sword of Sodan does rely on a combination of controller and keyboard, but in such a limited capacity that it’s hardly a complicating factor. For the bulk of the game, your hands will be firmly grasped on your joystick, as you swing your impressive sword at anyone who dares stand in your way. You’re provided four possible attacks; comprising an overhead chop, a slash toward the chest, a thrust into the torso, and a crouching jab that’ll bust some kneecaps. Each attack seems to do equal damage to one another, though some animations are quicker than others (the kneeling thrust being the quickest). On top of that, you can also jump and crouch, in order to avoid some small number of attacks and engage in some occasional platforming. That’s your whole lot in terms of controller input, save for walking forward and backstepping. (No vertical / multi-plane movement here, folks.)

Now, I used the term “backstepping” very deliberately there, as one thing you cannot do is actually turn around to face / walk in the opposite direction. In other words, your character is made to face toward screen right at all times, without the option to attack anything behind you. Of course, that would only be an issue if there were enemies or hazards who would approach you from behind, which mercifully there are not. What this clearly intends to provide is a sense of constant forward momentum — the idea that your warrior is on an unstoppable berserker charge. Naturally, if you attempt to actually play the game without so much as stepping backward or standing in place from time to time, you’ll quickly find yourself depleting your full reserves of health and lives. And so, combat is as much about maintaining a safe distance and keeping from getting hit as it is about getting your own hits in. Maybe this all sounds fairly standard so far for the beat ’em up genre (save for the single direction you face)? But in actual practice… Well, we’ll get to it sooner than later. Just know that whatever experience you might have with traditional beat ’em ups isn’t going to help you out here: Sword of Sodan‘s combat is so unlike any other entry in the genre, you’ll be left to seriously wonder if the developers had played any other brawlers for reference before committing to creating their own.

Starting the game and acclimating yourself during the first stage, you’ll notice some curious elements of the HUD: The needlessly elaborate bar on the left-hand side of the screen (the one with the two gems and the ‘S’ scribbled on it) is your health meter, believe it or not. As you take damage, chunks of it become transparent, until it depletes and you forfeit a life. You’ll note that it doesn’t replenish between levels, and that there’s no way to regain lost health — that damage taken isn’t recoverable, until you die and the bar starts anew. We’ll discuss the ramifications of that decision in due time. For now though, I’ll draw your attention to the ‘Hit Strength’ indicator at the top of the screen, nestled between your score and lives count. This illustrates how much damage you inflict on an enemy per hit, where gaining a higher number should theoretically mean you’re hurting enemies more (for a value equivalent to the indicated number). You can increase this value from one to a maximum of six over the course of the game, but this is a highly unlikely scenario requiring near-perfect play, owing to the fact that you lose a digit of strength every time you lose a life. Getting rolled back down to a strength of one can be potentially devastating in the late game, as enemies generally tend to be harder to hit and require more hits to fell. But truth be told, even the first enemies you’ll encounter seem to take an inordinate amount of punishment before going down, so the damage scaling over the course of the game will generally leave you feeling inadequate through its entirety.

Those first enemies you’ll be facing, by the way, consist of pikemen: A class of soldier equipped with long spears, who take either three or eight hits to kill (depending on how much health they’re individually assigned as an attribute). In the first stage, you’ll have to fight four of them more or less simultaneously, as they seem to backstep whenever you land a hit on them; until all of them are bunched up together, and hiding off-screen behind a foreground object representing a city gate. This makes for just about one of the most frustrating first levels I can recall in a beat ’em up, if not in all of gaming in general: A stage where you should theoretically be able to get acclimated to the game’s controls and flow of combat invariably devolves into a desperate attempt to hit enemies you’re not able to see, as they work together to establish positioning that sees you take damage every time you attempt to take initiative. Never mind the fact that the range on their spears outclasses yours, making it seem like it’s impossible to inflict damage without immediately taking it in turn: The fact that you have to fight four of them at once means that even if you discover the sweet spot for hitting one of them, there’s still three more behind them ready to poke you to death. It’s a cruel indication of what Sword of Sodan has in store for you — an early sign that the developers were either deliberately malicious in their intent, or too incompetent to realize just how unfair the scenarios they created are. At this point, it’s still hard to determine which of the two potentialities is more likely.

There’s only one solution to this particular combat puzzle: Playing so slowly and patiently that the enemies will return after retreating off-screen, and so that you can attempt to take them on two at a time. (There’s no isolating them to just one at a time, until you’ve already whittled down their numbers some.) And in order to land your attacks, you’ll have to risk jumping forward into their immediate proximity — finding a range where the hurtbox on their attacks extends past you, and where your overhead attack is the only one that is able to connect at that close range. It’s not a perfect strategy, as you’ll undoubtedly take some damage either landing on top of their attacks or on knocking them back to a distance where they can follow up with a counter blow. But given your limited options and what will no doubt develop into an impatience to get this stage over with as quickly as you can (especially on subsequent replays), it’s the only tactic that I have found to reliably work. These are the sorts of compromises you’ll have to accept when it comes to making progress in Sodan, if you’re looking to endure it past the second or third stage. And if you happened to be an Amiga owner back in the late 80s, you were definitely going to want to: From the word go, this game really is a visual tour de force — a testament to the power of the hardware, and to the abilities of the team responsible for producing the game’s presentation. It’s on the strength of that selling point that players would have ostensibly been compelled to complete the quest. (That, and the prospect of getting your money’s worth from the $39.95 / £24.99 you would’ve spent on it.)

It cannot be understated just how uncommon a computer game of Sword of Sodan‘s presentational caliber was for the era; between its large and detailed character sprites, the luscious multi-layered backgrounds you battle against, and even seemingly simple feats such as how smoothly the screen manages to scroll. Add to that the presence of sampled voices – including battle cries from your enemies, your character’s own grunts and screams, and an omniscient narrator who announces some of the on-screen text – and you’ve got yourself a game that would feel right at home in a proper arcade. Obviously, when contrasted against the likes of a contemporary Nintendo Entertainment System title, the difference in potential power here is incomparable. But even compared to some of the other most impressive titles on the Amiga, the technical wizardry on display here makes Sodan stand out from the rest. Take Cinemaware’s Defender of the Crown, for example: A truly gorgeous title in its own right, and often highlighted as an early masterpiece of the computer line. But in accomplishing its presentational feats, it has to utilize static bitmap backgrounds and comparatively tiny character sprites, as matters of technical concession. The fact that Sodan can achieve comparable levels of fidelity on a much more dynamic and zoomed-in perspective is what sets it apart from the pack — what makes it so distinctive, and puts it on the same level as top-tier arcade titles of the time. Hell, there were still cabinet games that would’ve aspired to look as good as Sodan does; the likes of Altered Beast, Double Dragon II, and Ninja Gaiden springing to mind as ‘88 brawlers that were made to look lacking in comparison. Of course, they all still held a major edge over Sword of Sodan, for the fact that they were realized by game designers with a far better understanding of what constitutes entertaining gameplay.

Getting back to Sword of Sodan, and moving into level two. It’s here where the game introduces the concept of traps and stage hazards, as spears will emerge from under the bridge you’re meant to cross. Ultimately, this doesn’t amount to much of a danger on its own, as the pattern / timing is straightforward and the damage can be easily mitigated… until you encounter the stage’s sole enemy (a lone pikeman), who risks knocking you backward into the spears and incurring a double-whammy of damage. While it should theoretically be much easier to deal with a single pikeman, the way he positions himself puts you at a disadvantage, and ensures that you’re always in danger of eating a spear from below as you attempt to get your eight hits in. You’ll notice that while the hazards don’t damage your adversaries, they do appear to have a programmed understanding of where they emerge from, and that they’ll avoid walking over them in order to force you to move forward into them. It’s a truly devious bit of artificial intelligence, and one that could’ve only been designed deliberately. Perhaps less intentional though is the fact that if you should happen to lose a life, your respawn point will almost invariably see you getting immediately stabbed by a spear and locked into a portion of the screen where you can’t easily step out of the danger zone. The fact that you’re not given any brief period of invulnerability on returning to life is a massive oversight — an issue that makes it so that even when you’re granted a precious full bar of health, you’re quickly taken back down a few notches in any given stage.

There is an alternate solution to this dilemma of the pesky pikeman: Back in the first stage, one of the enemies you killed will have dropped a ‘Magic Zapper’ potion — a one-time use elixir that causes massive damage to the nearest enemy on the screen. It’s at this point you’ll notice the slots marked ‘F1’ through ‘F4’ next to your health bar, corresponding to the function keys on your keyboard used to instantaneously quaff them. As you pick up potions throughout the game, you’ll be able to use these slots to hold two varieties in reserve; those being the Magic Zapper, and a ‘Power Shield’ potion granting temporary invincibility. The game’s other two potential potions will either increase your hit strength or grant an extra life immediately on pick-up, and as such can’t be held for use later. Sword of Sodan’s potion system is an interesting twist on the genre formula, but one which is sadly not fully realized in its implementation here: The fact that a potion of health restoration isn’t among the possible drops is surely the most glaring omission here, and the conceit that you can’t hold potions of strength in reserve to stock up for later in the game is quite cruel. But where I personally think the system really fails is in the fact that the limited number of potion drops across the game are preordained — consistent across every playthrough, and deliberate in their placement. This would be fine if they were potentially more plentiful, but the fact of the matter is that they are woefully scarce throughout, leading to a mindset where you’ll likely be scared to actually use any of your reserve prior to the game’s final stretch. All that being said, you can [and probably should] use your first Magic Zapper to quickly deal with the enemy on the bridge stage, and avoid taking any damage going into level three.

The third level sees you making your way down a stretch of city street, as the pikemen are replaced by a new enemy variety appearing exclusively in this stage: Soldiers equipped with axes, whose range is more limited than their spear-carrying comrades. As such; the new strategy is to keep your distance, utilize your poke attacks, and hope that they decide to walk right into your blade. Only one factor complicates this tactic: As you’re fighting, barrels will roll from the right side of the screen to the left, necessitating your jumping over them in order to avoid getting damaged. This means being wary of when the next barrel is due to roll out, and preemptively backing off from the axemen so that you can time your jumps without getting immediately cleaved on touching back down. Luckily, there are only two soldiers here for you to deal with, and they go down relatively quickly. This may lead you to discover a different hazard within the game: Out-pacing the camera’s scrolling, to where you can reach the edge of the screen and render yourself blind to incoming danger. The barrels here serve as an effective deterrent from trying to outrun the scroll, as your brain will likely tell you that it’s unwise to stand so close to the side of the screen where you’re liable to get tripped by the rolling casks. Still, between the leisurely pace your character seems to stroll and how the camera scrolls even slower, you’ll find yourself having to constantly back away from the edge as you traverse more sparsely-populated stages. Needless to say, this can become a bit of an annoyance.

Near the end of the third stage, you’ll be confronted by a giant soldier — a rather imposing figure who doles out massive damage with a large club, and who seems utterly unaffected by your longer-range attacks. Perhaps you can see the solution here already: Take a risk jumping into his immediate vicinity, strike him with your shorter-range overheads, and keep pace with him if he attempts to step backwards — all while jumping over any remaining barrels that might be due to roll into you. There is an additional wrinkle to the confrontation here though, as the giant will briefly kneel once you’ve depleted his initial health bar. This gives you a roughly three-second window to reposition yourself a step or two away, continue to strike him, and ultimately decapitate him for a gruesome end to the encounter. (If you don’t manage to get the requisite damage dealt in time, the giant will stand back up and require depleting his health one more time.) This particularly violent death is in keeping in line with a recurring bit that Sword of Sodan will have already established by this point: Visible blood on inflicting damage and killing your foes, contributing to a sense that you’re a proper barbarian on a violent path of death and destruction. In turn, certain hazards will see your character meeting similarly macabre ends; such as impalement by spike, death by drowning, and incineration by pool of lava. Curiously, being struck down by a standard enemy is a comparatively bloodless affair, as Brodan / Shardan will simply lay down and die without a wound to show for it. While all of the simulated violence in the game is honestly fairly tame (by today’s standards, at least), the bloodier depictions of death were deemed dangerous enough to warrant Sword of Sodan being placed on Germany’s BPjM (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien / ‘Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons’) software index, which saw sales of the game banned in the country for fear of desensitizing / traumatizing minors.

I have a different complaint to lodge here however, unrelated to the subject of violence: The fact that the game introduces enemies that appear within single stages, before disappearing from the rotation entirely. Sure, it’s a good idea to have a variety of different baddies to toss at the player, in order to keep them from feeling like they’re striking down endless clones of the same two or three foes. But I’d argue that failing to find further contexts / situations to reuse these enemies is a sign of wasteful design — a giveaway that substantial effort was put towards aspects of the game that don’t pay off in the long term, and which reveal an unfocused creative process. As a player begins to realize the time that must’ve been spent producing content that appears for such comparatively brief playtime, they’ll begin to ask questions along the lines of “Why did the developers put so much effort into this one-off feature, when they should’ve spent that time fixing fundamental issues with the gameplay?” Perhaps it’s not the most fair argument to make, as there’s no telling how easy it might’ve been for the devs to implement an additional enemy variety versus how difficult it would’ve been to alter some underlying component of the game’s design. Still, it’s one of those thoughts you can’t help but kick around in your head, as you ponder how Søren and company could’ve gotten their priorities so seemingly mixed up? I speculate that the answer comes down to the same old design philosophy: Style over substance, and impressive visuals at the cost of compelling content. Clearly, there was more concern with showing off how many different sprites Torben could cram into the game than in producing a game that actually puts said sprites to effective / economic use.

This trend continues into Sword of Sodan’s fourth stage, where you must cut a path through a forest by slaying a duo of hopping club-wielding ogres (?) and a further pair of tail-whipping dragon-scorpions. (??) Look, I’m gonna be frank here: Neither of these two enemy varieties look particularly frightening or intimidating. In fact, they both happen to look downright goofy, and so they suit each other well in this shared level that they exclusively appear in. The ogres with their puffy fur vests and green mohawks are possibly the easiest enemies in the game to take down, as they’ll jump right onto your blade if you stand in place swinging. The weird scaly monsters are only slightly more dangerous, as getting poked by their stingers can inflict severe damage on you, and as they are programmed to be smarter about backing away from your own swipes. But if you measure your distance and strike at them with crouching thrusts, you’ll eventually slay them, and pick up your first ‘Hitstrength’ potion for your troubles before finishing the stage. Of course, it wouldn’t be Sword of Sodan if there wasn’t one more factor to take into consideration during this level: As you scroll the screen, trees will appear in the foreground to completely block your visibility, and make determining where your character is compared to your enemies unnecessarily difficult. Again, it’s a case where the developers wanted to show off some visual trick – this time, the ability to render layers of parallax scrolling – but do so at the cost of a player’s ability to effectively parse the contents of the screen. It’s another instance where whatever novelty the effect here might’ve provided is so obviously outweighed by the hindrance it places on gameplay, you’re left wishing they had either reconsidered or hadn’t bothered in the first place.

Next up is quite possibly the game’s most punishingly difficult stage: A graveyard populated by infinitely respawning zombies, which requires a constant push forward on your end to see it through. I should probably note at this point that every level actually does have an “official” name, which is told to you via loading screens where your character reads informative scrolls pertinent to the upcoming stage. In this case, we are apparently “In the Land of the Dead,” and granted a bit of a supposed hint in rhyming format (a recurring theme across all the game’s scrolls): “There winds the hero’s path, where ghouls and spectres form to scream and howl their wrath above the rising storm.” This clues you in to the fact that the level will be populated by enemies, and that you should prepare yourself accordingly! But what you really need to look out for are the unspecified manner of rolling objects you have to jump over — what appear to be very stern-faced disembodied heads? They’re effectively just a sprite-swap on the barrels from stage three, except their timing feels even more sporadic and inopportune here. In any case, it’s a further incentive to not stick around too long killing too many zombies, as you will eventually succumb to the sustained two-prong attacks coming your way. Here’s the problem with this implementation, though: You have thus far been trained by the game to kill everything in your path, as you can’t actually complete levels while enemies remain on-screen. So, now you have to temporarily throw that notion out the window, and try to endure the gauntlet with a minimum on kills. On the other hand, it’s not as if you can avoid encounters by jumping over enemies or otherwise side-stepping them: If you attempt to just walk through a zombie, they’ll completely halt your movement, all while continuing to sap your health as they slowly pass through you. So, it’s quite the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario we have going here.

Mercifully, there is an effective solution to this stage: Pop a power shield potion, walk right through the rolling hazards, and slowly advance with a step or two forward every time you take down a zombie. The elixir will grant you thirty seconds total of invulnerability, and that probably won’t be enough to get you through the whole of the stage, but it should hopefully get you close enough to the exit that you can pass without losing a precious life. If need be (and if you’ve been playing conservatively with your potions up to this point), you may have a second shield you can enable, which will actually carry over into the next stage if you have any time remaining on it; so that’s another option you have on hand, if you’re particularly worried about forfeiting lives and losing strength. (The fact that a second hit strength potion is waiting for you at the end of the graveyard is a good incentive to stay alive, so that you can march into Craggamoore with three points of strength.) But here’s my problem with this strategy: You shouldn’t be required to utilize potions in order to progress through a given stage, and this is very clearly an instance where there is no other viable choice, save for burning through a number of your spare lives. I experimented with this stage over the course of a half-hour – utilizing emulator save states and rewind – and determined that it is absolutely impossible to pass it unscathed unless you have the necessary potion(s) on hand for it. (Ignore this longplay by ‘Ironclaw’ where they somehow accomplish the feat with ease.) This means that the deliberate placement of potion drops in the game is also paired with intended instances where they’re meant to be used, and that the ability to use them outside of these specific scenarios is effectively a beginner’s trap — the illusion of player choice being leveraged to punish you for using tools out of sequence.

Luckily, the next level in the game affords you a rare opportunity to get one over on the developers. Titled “The Foyer of the Castle Craggamoor,” this actually marks the half-way point of Sword of Sodan, if you can believe it. It’s also at this point that the game’s environments start to look a little samey as you explore the castle, ending a trend of each previous level looking distinctive and unique from one another. It’s also also at this point that you’ll recognize that despite ‘Craggamoore’ being spelt with an “E” in the instruction manual, it is spelled as “Craggamoor” in the game itself — across the map screens and pre-level scrolls. (I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder, et cetera.) But enough of the nitpicking, and let’s get on with the level: On beginning the stage, the game’s omniscient narrator will chime in to warn to you “beware of traps;” foretelling the existence of nearly impossible to discern pitfalls, which fall out from under you as you walk over them. The only tell they display is a barely visible line of solid pixels at the very bottom of the screen, which slightly stands out from the stone floor texture. I mean, good luck seeing that on a model of era-appropriate CRT monitor, between the color bleed and general fuzzy nature of the image. If you should happen to fall down a hole, you’ll appear to land dead at the bottom in a cutaway cutscene, before being helpfully informed that you’ve “fell into a hole and lost strength.” You’ll then re-emerge back in the stage with a little less health to your name, but having not forfeited a life, unless your health was already low to begin with.

This brings us to the exploit that you can (and really should) perform here: If you happen to be low on health heading into the level, you should actually go ahead and kill yourself by falling into a pitfall as many times as necessary — until you respawn with full health. The reason for this intentional death being that because of the cut-away that’s scripted to occur here, the game evidently skips a step where it’s meant to deplete your hit strength by a digit, meaning you can actually maintain your current power level while also replenishing your health! Yeah, this assumes that you still have additional points of hit strength left to preserve, and it may well be fleeting retention (as further deaths by conventional means will still take away your power); but it’s an opportunity for those who have managed to stay alive thus far to trade in a spare life for the [temporary] prospect of full health and higher damage. This is also another stage where you only have a single enemy to worry about: An apprentice wizard, who casts a magic shield in front of himself which also serves as a melee weapon, and who must lower his defense in order to cast projectiles at you. The combat tactic here is to wait for the shield to drop, crouch down to avoid the projectile, and get a couple hits in while you’re down there. Of course, this is all easier said than done, as the enemy will walk back and forth in set spots in order to bait you into stepping on the pitfalls — keeping you at range, and leaving you to figure out some sort of sweet spot where you can jump to clear the hole and get in striking distance. All told, you’ll probably wind up taking some damage here… unless you have a Magic Zapper left in reserve, and can turn the tables on this damnable wizard with your own spellcraft. So, do what you have to do to take care of him, throw yourself down a hole until you have full health, and proceed to “Descend the Stairs” into the next stage.

If you’re still counting along, this marks level seven out of a total of eleven. Having already descended a staircase to the left side of the screen, you’ll have to dispatch a pair of oversized flies, who should take only a couple of hits to kill. Of course, the gimmick here is that they’re up in the air and changing up their elevation, so you’ll have to figure out whether an overhead or standing thrust will be the attack that actually connects in a given moment. All said and done though, they represent one of the easier enemies to contend with, and don’t really pose much of a threat. More irksome is the next enemy to follow: A second variety of wizard, clad in a leather get-up with a single sleeve. Unlike his previous peer however, his magic attack isn’t duckable, and it’s very easy to get hit by it as you attempt to get within striking distance. As a matter of fact, he’s rather relentless in his attacks, and the only chance you have to strike at him is if you manage to jump over his lingering fireball and get in close before he conjures it again / pushes you backward with his casting animation. The trade-off is that he only has three points of health; so if you’ve managed to retain a hit strength of three up to this point, you can kill him with a single blow. That, or you can use the Magic Zapper that the previous wizard dropped, and basically trivialize this whole encounter by slaying him from a distance. He’ll even drop another Magic Zapper on death, which means this is effectively a free opportunity to use a potion. What I’m trying to say here is, use the damn potion, and definitely don’t waste any of your precious shields past this point. You do have at least one shield potion still sitting in your inventory at this point, right?

Now that you’re done with the seventh level, it’s on to the eighth — “A Passage Deep.” As the title implies, you’ll be venturing deeper into the underbelly of the castle, which conveniently recycles the same tileset as the previous stage. Only this time, we’re looking at the longest stage in the game (in terms of pure screen length), and there’s nary an enemy in sight. Instead, this level will test your ability to dodge a series of crushing ceilings, insta-kill spikes emerging from the floor, and flames running along the ground that you’ll have to jump over. And that’s just the first half of the stage: Once you’ve cleared that gauntlet, you’ll have to engage the game in its platforming across a pool of lava – jumping on stones that float back and forth – before further dodging droplets of apparently painful water from the ceiling, and finally disabling the contraption responsible for firing the previous flames in order to reveal the exit. Needless to say, this whole level feels very much out of place with the rest of the game, and requires a handle on the controls completely removed from the combat mechanics. Taking it in order, the series of traps in the first half are all telegraphed fairly well in advance, where the spikes poke out in a harmless state for a full second before risking impalement. The crushers are slightly harder to discern, given that they share the same tile as / blend into the background, but are still a measure easier to recognize than the pitfalls from earlier. And so long as you’re not pressed against the edge of the screen, you should have ample time to jump over the incoming flames. The only danger here is the fact that slipping up and succumbing to one hazard will likely set you up to be immediately struck by another, so slow and steady is the order of the day here.

It’s in the second half that you’re liable to run into real trouble. To put it bluntly, Sword of Sodan‘s attempt here at “platforming” is very poorly realized, owing to how the game registers where and when you land after jumping. This is an issue when you have to hop across a series of small platforms situated atop a pool of instantly-killing lava, where you must wait for the moments in which the platforms are as close to each other as possible. If you attempt to gauge distance based on your familiarity with the jump’s arc in the rest of the game – to take leaps that you should feasibly be able to make – you’ll fall to your doom every time: The platforms are magnetized in such a way as to change the physics of your vertical leap, and ensure that you either overshoot or undershoot your jump in frustrating ways. In the worst part, the jump between the second and third platform teases you with a cruel bit of timing where you’ll think the distance is ideal, only to discover that you have to wait until the next cycle in order to complete the jump as intended. It’s one of those instances of bad control that is difficult to articulate, but which your brain will immediately recognize as “feeling wrong” if you should attempt to engage with it for yourself. Clearing this section will take you to the droplet-dodging trial, where you’ll have to position yourself between the falling fluids and wait to walk (not jump) into the next clear spot — all while jumping over the incoming flames, mind you. Mercifully, the fire-spewing contraption at the end is easy enough to disarm; simply requiring you to realize that the gem in the mouth of a statue is your target, before striking it several times in order to reveal the staircase exit.

In looking back on this prolonged gauntlet, I believe it’s nothing short of a miracle that Søren and his compatriots didn’t incorporate this sort of platforming into any other levels. If they had wanted to, they could’ve gone and made two or three other gimmick stages consisting entirely of precarious jumping puzzles and tediously timed traps, and convinced themselves that they were cleverly mixing up the gameplay in the adventure they were crafting — doing what other beat ‘em up developers seemed “afraid” to do. The failure in this [entirely speculative] line of thinking is the fact that beat ‘em ups and platformers are two distinct genres requiring completely different methods of control, and that the “heavier” nature of a brawler’s movement rarely works within the framework of a platformer requiring more immediate responsiveness. It’s here where I first realized the developers really didn’t know or understand what kind of game they were setting out to make here, and that the overarching design philosophy must’ve amounted to “make it up as we go along”: Whatever ideas they had during the creative process of level design, they threw against the wall to see if it stuck. Only, they went ahead and incorporated the parts that clearly didn’t stick, resulting in stages and scenarios that test players in ways that the game simply isn’t equipped to provide them effective tools for. Sure, Discovery Software would’ve insisted on making the game “difficult” to an extent, in order to extend the playtime of their product through failed runs and replays. But the difficulty in Sword of Sodan rarely stems from required mastery over the game’s controls and mechanics: It’s often based on a player’s ability to predict the seemingly random behaviors of artificial intelligence, to parse barely visible elements on the screen, and to read the minds of the creators in order to figure out the specific way in which a given level was envisioned as being approached.

Of course, not every bad idea necessarily results in making a player’s life more difficult: Some bad ideas just result in stupid gimmicks which instead serve to waste their time! Which brings us to Sword of Sodan’s ninth stage, “In the Catacombs.” Continuing down another bland corridor of grey stone, you’ll kill a couple of flies, before encountering a weird floating centipede-like creature. Try as you might, you won’t be able to damage this monster, and you’ll eventually realize that you can move past it (though one segment of it will hurt you on collision). Just a few steps away from the enemy is a potion, which instantaneously summons a large bird that your character mounts like a steed, as an on-screen notification provides you a subtle clue: “HINT: THE ANIMAL IS HUNGRY!” When you pair this hint with another equally cryptic message written in the pre-level scroll (“Encounter now the beast, to harness, mount and ride. First let the monster feast, to survive the rising tide.”), you may be able to figure out that the bird can eat the creature you just walked past, and that you should probably let it do so. So, step backward and let your beast feast, as it slowly eats the individual segments comprising the centipede. On finishing its meal, the game will further inform you that “the animal now has strength to jump,” which you can confirm for yourself by moving the joystick upward. As you move forward – unbothered by any further enemies at this point – you’ll eventually be stopped in place by two stone pillars immediately materializing to box you in, as a pool of water slowwwlyyy rises to reach above your head. If you don’t repeatedly jump in place as the trap reaches full volume, your character will eventually drown (along with your steed, presumably), and cost you a life. If you can wait it out though, the water will eventually start to slowwwlyyy drain, and ultimately remove the pillars from your path as well.

If we’re being generous, this oddly over-explained portion of the level is ostensibly meant to give you a chance to acclimate yourself to the mounted controls, prior to fighting a wall that fires flames at you. Actually, it’s not so much of a “fight” as it is standing your ground / avoiding damage until the wall eventually disappears without any real rhyme or reason, and allows you to complete the level. You’ll have to bat away fireballs that shoot at you from two different heights, necessitating different sword strikes (either straight ahead or low) in order to hit them before they hit you; but the hit detection here is especially busted, and there are instances where you will see your weapon make contact to absolutely no avail before you take damage. At the same time, you have to watch out for fires that will spark beneath your feet, requiring you to move back and forth in order to avoid getting scorched. At the same time as all of that, the wall will also shoot a series of three stone heads above you, which don’t actually risk harming you at all. But if you’re lucky enough to have a chance at knocking them out of the air, you’ll be rewarded with extra points of hit strength for each one you successfully strike; giving you the chance to either achieve the maximum value of six, or to make up for whatever points you may have lost across the previous levels. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the purpose of this whole ordeal is to give you a chance at building up some “bonus” strength, in a sort of test where you have to successfully balance self-preservation against keeping your sword ready to bust those flying heads. All of this is trickier than it sounds, due to how frequently / rapidly the wall fires its payload at you. The fact you’re riding atop a beast barely factors into this whole scenario, as it doesn’t grant you any additional sort of actions / abilities, or do much of anything else to participate in the encounter.

What makes this stage all the more odd is the fact that the bird will disappear between the end of this level and the beginning of the next, without any explanation given as to where it’s gone or why it appeared to you in the first place. It makes you wonder why the developers even bothered to incorporate the beast in the first place, if they clearly didn’t have any good ideas as to what to actually do with it? Is it possible that they originally planned to have you ride it across some other stages, but either didn’t have the time to implement them or realized that it didn’t really add much to the game? Maybe it just comes down to Søren and company implementing every idea that came to their minds, without any real thought as to how it’d all blend together? Or perhaps there’s a simpler explanation behind all this: They wanted to put the bird in because its sprite appears so large on the screen, and they figured that aspect of it alone would be enough to distract players from the fact that it’s functionally useless. The more weird one-off gimmicks Sword of Sodan tosses at you, the more you realize that the developers weren’t approaching it like they were designing a game: They were setting out to make an interactive megademo, with every presentational bell and whistle they could feasibly cram in. It’s all just a collection of impressive visual tricks, while cohesive gameplay and mechanics take a back seat. And as we draw ever closer to the game’s conclusion, it becomes ever more apparent that the team were running out of steam towards the end.

Level ten is maybe the most curious stage in the whole collection: It’s literally just a carbon copy of the sixth stage, down to sharing the same title and pre-level scroll text. You avoid the same pits while killing the same wizard as before, where the only discernible difference is the fact that instead of exiting at the side of the screen, you ascend a spiral staircase placed in roughly the same spot. The good news is that the pit death trick still works here, and that you can enter into the game’s final stage with a replenished health bar and your full strength. Still, you have to wonder why the developers bothered to include this penultimate level in the first place, when it so clearly exposes the fact that they had long-since run out of ideas? It’s not like including it significantly pads out the game’s length or anything, since it still takes all of ten or fifteen seconds to effectively clear it (assuming you use a Magic Zapper against the enemy). On a practiced playthrough, you’re probably hitting this stage at around the eighteenth or nineteenth minute mark, which goes to show just how little content the game really has on offer for you. The only explanation I can come up with for why this stage – of all the levels in the game – was chosen as the one to be repeated twice, is that the developers were actually fully aware of the exploit related to falling into the pits, and were consciously giving players in the know the ability to enter the last level in peak condition. But if that was the intention, why not just create a potion they could pick up to restore their health back to full, and place it right before the exit? Or maybe just restore a player’s health between levels, as a pittance to those who are able to survive by the skin of their teeth? Of course, you’ve already spent more time reading about this level than it actually takes to complete, and I’ve probably spent more time writing about it than the developers actually spent deciding to copy and paste it here. Onward and upward.

We are now officially “At the Wizard’s Tower,” which is an odd title for the level considering the fact that Zoras is supposed to be a necromancer, and technically practices a different school of magic than wizardry. That, and the fact that this isn’t really his tower, since he’s only gone and stolen it from our dear departed dad. But none of that really matters now, does it? You’re here to slay the bastard, and put an end to his reign of terror once and for all. But before you do, you’ll have to dispatch one or two of his most monstrous minions, in the form of nearly screen-tall creatures that manage to crawl around despite lacking any visible legs. They’re capable of spitting flies at you from their large stomachs, as well as launching projectile waves at you that you’ll have to jump over. But if you’ve managed to retain your hit strength up until now (I recommend coming in with at least three points saved up), they go down surprisingly quickly, dissolving into a spectacular mess of particles and explosion effects. Whether or not you have to kill a second one of them depends on how quickly you advance across the screen, which will eventually trigger a brief pause / hitch-up as the game loads in the final boss. It is here where Zoras finally appears, looking like a discount Count Dracula with his slicked-back haircut and hands-forward stance. And it’s at this point that you’ll want to double check that you still have at least one power shield potion on hand (preferably two), unless you want to have an absolutely miserable time in just about a minute from now.

Zoras effectively has two phases to contend with: The first consists of him approaching you while casting a magic missile, which you’re able to jump over despite the fact that your character clearly intersects with it. You’re meant to get a swipe in every time you land on the other side of your jump, which will push him backward and put him out of range for follow-up strikes before he decides to charge you again. All told, this part of the fight is fairly easy, though it can drag on for a while if you’re going into it with lower hit strength. And then comes phase two, where Zoras will start additionally casting a second type of magic attack that fills the whole screen and lasts for several seconds — an attack which is literally impossible to dodge, and guaranteed to kill you once you’ve been locked into getting hit by it. There is no other option here other than to have power shields at the ready, and to not have at least one in reserve means that you won’t be able to get your hits in and finish the game. It’s non-negotiable. That being said, you’ll still have to keep an eye out for Zoras’ first attack type, since failing to jump over those projectiles in the middle of the second attack’s barrage will manage to bypass your shield and do damage to you. So, even when you’re meant to be “invincible” here, the developers still managed to find a way to be cruel to you. Now, if you’ve managed to maintain a hit strength higher than three, you’re likely to be able to kill Zoras within the thirty second window that a single potion grants you. But if you’re going into the fight with two points or less, you simply won’t have enough time to get your hits in: You’ll need to have a second potion in reserve, or suffer the consequences at this last possible moment.

I’ll again reiterate my belief here that games shouldn’t bar you from completion based on whether or not you’ve held onto an item / resource that is freely usable at any prior point in the game. In doing so, it’s like mocking a player for believing that they’re being given the freedom to use their available tools as they see fit — for expecting that the game’s final challenge will be a test of skill, rather than a pop quiz on resource management. It’s also a design that leaves your final victory feeling hollow, as all you have to do is pop a potion in order to negate getting damaged by Zoras’ ultimate attack, leaving him mostly helpless as you wail on him. It cheapens the accomplishment of beating what has been a genuinely difficult game up to this point, and undercuts the narrative of the chosen warrior’s “strength of steel and edge of sword” overcoming the big bad’s powerful magic. I just can’t get over how sour of a note it is for Sword of Sodan to end on, and the fact that the developers couldn’t come up with anything more inventive in constructing their climactic final battle. At least you’re treated to a fun little light show as Zoras disintegrates into nothingness, as well as a deafeningly loud cry of anguish as he succumbs to your sword. (Seriously: It’s a louder sound than any other in the game, and you should probably lower your volume before you deal your final blow.) And from there, all you’re left to do is exit screen right, and accept your reward in the form of the game’s ending cutscene.

The general gist of the one page of epilogue text is that you’ve fulfilled an unspecified “prophesy” [sic], Zoras is burning in Hell, and that the people of the Northern Kingdom unanimously declare you as your new leader (despite your assumed complete lack of political prowess). A brief animation plays out in profile view, where it is made to look like Brodan and Shardan are about to make out with each other — staring longingly into each other’s eyes as they stand in front of a red brick wall. Luckily, the scene cuts away here to a series of thumbnail-sized images, showing the twins sharing hold of Sodan’s sword and being cheered on by their people. In this way, the developers didn’t have to draw unique images [or write unique text] for Brodan’s and Shardan’s respective endings — having them share the glory as if it wasn’t just one of them doing all the work here. And with that, the ‘Game Over’ screen appears, before you’re taken to the high score table to enter your name into the ‘Hall of Fame.’ That’s a wrap on Sword of Sodan, folks: Clocking in somewhere under the twenty-five minute mark on a complete playthrough — obviously not accounting for the potential hours of trial and error it’ll take you to get here. Having seen everything the game has to offer, I doubt that most players will feel so compelled as to take up the sword again on this particular virtual adventure, unless they’re maybe aiming to “impress” their friends with their ability to beat it in front of them. (Statistically, someone out there has done this.)

I speculated earlier that Sword of Sodan was developed with the same sort of mentality that one would put toward producing an impressive tech demo, rather than setting out to design a proper video game that consumers were meant to actually enjoy playing. And with all said and done now, I stand by that statement: Nothing about Sodan‘s sparse contents suggests that so much as a single iota of consideration was paid to matters such as intuitive combat, cohesive construction, or anything else related to actually making the game fun to play. The game seems to exist solely as a demonstration of how well Søren understood the Amiga hardware, to show off Torben’s graphical chops, and to allow Julian to make the system sing. And in those senses, it no doubt excels: In an era before expansion cards and system revisions, no one else at the time could begin to approach what Discovery Software’s crew of Danes had accomplished here in terms of presentation. But by god, at what cost did it all come at? The fact that Sword of Sodan is theoretically completable is just about the only standard of gameplay that the team seemed bothered to rise to; and even then, it just barely meets that low bar. I don’t care if y’all can show me someone capable of mastering the game to the point where they can clear it without taking a tick of damage or forfeiting a single life: The simple fact of the matter is that Sodan is so poorly constructed with regards to the player experience, that most folk who would’ve played it at the time would’ve given up on it long before managing to score a single winning playthrough. Even folk who were committed enough to attempt to write guides and walkthroughs for the game were often forced to concede that they themselves couldn’t actually beat the game — left to throw up their shoulders in a shrug as they failed to provide any useful tips on how to defeat Zoras in the final stage. When you manage to stump and frustrate the sorts of nerds who dedicate themselves to learning video games inside and out, you’ve gotta know you’ve created a monster.

To answer my own question from earlier: I contend that most of the game’s difficulty stems from the fact that Søren and company were simply careless in their design, rather than consciously malicious. They were just too preoccupied in the technical end of things and in putting together a visual showcase, while the gameplay was the aspect left to receive the least love and care. It’s probably one of those cases where they imagined that so long as they could beat their own game with ease, that consumers would be able to figure it out for themselves as well — oblivious to the fact that players would not have the same benefits of intimately understanding every aspect and exploit of the game’s design. Sword of Sodan reeks of a title that was never properly passed through playtesting, or so much as put into the hands of anyone other than the folk actively developing it: There are just too many obvious changes and fixes that outside perspectives would have suggested, if not outright demanded if they were in a position of authority. But the scenario I imagine is one where the only feedback the Danes may have gotten came from other Discovery Software staff — a workforce largely consisting of system software developers rather than fellow game designers, whose notes likely just amounted to “You know I don’t play video games, but this sure looks impressive!” What I’m trying to say here is that if you’re a game developer, it’s important to keep folk around who are willing to challenge you and provide feedback on your game — who have an understanding of what makes a successful title (in terms of execution), and who can articulate where your own product may be lacking. That’s not to say that you need to compromise your artistic vision at every turn and to kowtow to a committee of conventional thinking: That feedback is just there to make sure you don’t forget the fact that other people are going to be playing your game, and that you can’t just assume that all of them going to approach it in the same way that you do. It just seems fairly obvious to me that Søren and his team never really considered that perspective.

Of course, there’s a far more tragic aspect to the fact that Søren and his team prioritized presentation above all else: The fact that within just a year or two’s time, Sword of Sodan would no longer be considered as being on “the cutting edge” of graphics or sound, and therefore have absolutely nothing else to offer to consumers. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket… or maybe this is more a case of “here for a good time, not a long time?” That’s the big question here: Whether Discovery Software were somehow convinced that Sodan was so far ahead of the pack, that they had nothing to fear from the rest of the industry catching up to them in standardizing this level of presentation; or if they knew full well how short the shelf life on “graphical showcase” software was gonna be, and just wanted to drive as many sales as they could in the brief window of time where the product would still be relevant? Either way, the end result is the same: The rest of the market eventually caught up to Sodan – passed ahead of it, past a certain point – and the consumers moved on to games that were not only flashier, but also more fully fleshed-out in terms of gameplay. There’s probably a lesson here that some modern-day studios could learn from — the sort who chase visual fidelity above all else, and market themselves solely based on the number of polygons they’re able to push. (Of course, there are certainly instances where that prioritizing is performed at producer / publisher insistence.) In an industry where technology has remained in a constant and rapid state of advancement for the last forty years running, being the “best-looking game” can only ever be a temporary achievement, and rarely one that carves out a place for you in history.

Now, if we really wanna hold Sword of Sodan to task here, we can talk about how its presentation was honestly somewhat lacking even in its own time. Yes, the large sprites and visual effects on display were unlike what any of Discovery’s peers were putting out — upstaging companies like the aforementioned Cinemaware, in terms of pure technical chops. But there’s a reason why folk still fondly remember the likes of Defender of the Crown ahead of Sword of Sodan, and consider the former to be the more visually distinctive title despite its comparatively primitive rendering techniques: Cinemaware’s games actually had cohesive theming and style to them, as they paid respect and homage to the visual language of filmmaking. Sword of Sodan, by comparison, doesn’t aspire to much more than its flat, profile view of straightforward sword and sorcery. For as big as the game’s sprites are, few of them are particularly appealing to look at; between animations lacking in frames and fluidity, crudely-realized creature designs, and a rigidity / stiffness that applies to every character in the game. While great effort was clearly made to incorporate layers of parallax scrolling, there was none left to spare for effects such as lighting or shadows (even so much as baking them directly onto backgrounds), which would’ve honestly gone a much longer way in serving Sodan’s atmosphere and ambience. And for as novel as it is to hear your Amiga tell you to “Jump over barrels” the first time around, the rest of the game’s soundscape is honestly somewhat lacking; where only two stages benefit from having proper background music, while all the rest get short ambience loops. Sword of Sodan’s barbarian action begs for the digital approximation of an epic orchestral score, and is instead left to settle for the chirping of birds and windy breezes — tranquil ambience layered underneath some occasionally grating sound effects.

But nitpicking the presentation is missing the most major issue here with Sword of Sodan: For a game ostensibly centered around getting into sword fights, the part where you actually fight with your sword sucks. And considering that’s what roughly 90% of the game consists of, that’s a bit of a problem! It comes down to a combination of how particular your positioning is required to be, and how much damage even the most basic of enemies is able to sponge up; contributing to a sense that your barbarian is way out of their league, and only able to skate by with the benefit of trickery on their side. It makes survival feel less like a matter of superior swordsmanship, and more like you’re having to exploit blind spots and cheese your way through every encounter. Typical titles in the beat ’em up genre tend to rely on maintaining a rhythm in combat, where you get as many hits in as you can before backing away to dodge the receipts — establishing a sort of “dance” where you figure out which of your moves are most effective, before giving the AI its turn to come back with their own [and gracefully avoid them]. But in Sword of Sodan, the second you’ve allowed yourself to get within their striking distance is the moment you’ve spelled disaster for yourself. This would be fine if enemies went down as quickly as you do, but the fact that you have to get as many as eight hits in on some of the very first enemies you face speaks to an imbalance here that can only leave you feeling inadequate — like you’re somehow doing something wrong, or not grasping some mechanic that would make the combat make some sort of sense. It’s a feeling that persists through the whole of the game, and the fact that hit strength potions are so few and far between (and only introduced after you’ve already seen the last of the starting enemies) ensures that you never get a sense of come-uppance against the mobs that trouble you at the start of the game.

By my estimation, the humanoid varieties of enemies should all have their healths halved across the board. You can still go ahead and reserve the higher health values for the various creatures and impromptu minibosses that you face: This is just a matter of allowing players to more quickly mow down the generic foot soldiers, and necessitate less in the way of drawn-out encounters in the early game. Alternatively (or in addition) to all of this, adding the ability to actually use your shield – incorporating an input as simple as holding down your fire button and/or backward on the joystick – would make combat feel immeasurably more depthful, and provide so many more ways for a player to approach encounters. (It really is strange that the shield is rendered in the first place, considering its not being usable.) If for some reason that just wasn’t possible, then maybe they could’ve incorporated a parrying system where you could deflect incoming strikes with your sword? Barring all this, at least have the common decency to make hit strength potions more abundant, and maybe toss some health restoration potions into the mix to give players a bit of reprieve. There are roughly a hundred different ways the developers could’ve chosen to remedy just how stacked the game feels against you, while still retaining a healthy sense of challenge and difficulty that the genre calls for. These band-aid fixes might not address some of the fundamental issues with how the game plays and operates, but it’d at least staunch enough of the bleeding so that a player could more reasonably make it across the finish line and maybe feel like they had a fun time doing so.

I guess that’s really the core issue we’re dealing with here, innit? Sword of Sodan just isn’t a fun game. While that obviously sounds like a very subjective opinion, and where I certainly don’t mean to discount the feelings of whatever select few folk Sodan may have managed to click for; the point I’m trying to make is that the game doesn’t seem concerned with entertaining players, or providing them any previous moments of satisfaction or triumph. It seems to undercut itself at every turn, by ensuring that no victory feels earned and that there are no rewards to be cherished. The pursuit of an impressive presentation overrides and replaces every other conventional hook that a video game would typically use to engage players or motivate them to see an adventure through to the end. If you took Sodan‘s graphics away from it, and put it on the same level of fidelity as its contemporaries, there’d be absolutely nothing left for it to entice consumers with — no element of its gameplay to point to as unique or even so much as competently realized. All that’d remain are the naked facts of Discovery Software’s fundamental misunderstandings as to what draws consumers to video games, as they seemed to believe that punishing difficulty is in itself a point of appeal — failing to grasp the concept that you still have to provide a player with effective tools, so that they’re able to learn to use them and overcome those odds. It’s not that I’m accusing Søren and his team of “not caring,” or consciously attempting to polish a turd with pretty graphics in place of what they knew to be a lacklustre game: On the contrary, I do believe they put a lot of effort into realizing their creative vision here, and poured every piece of themselves into producing Sword of Sodan. It’s simply a case of focusing all that effort toward the wrong priorities, and dedicating themselves to a vision that most consumers didn’t particularly care to see.

Sword of Sodan’s third disk includes a “secret” message from Søren, in which he briefly details the development of the game and gives his thanks to all those involved in it. It includes a handful of cute personal details, such as how one Chris Chirogene (a programmer with credit on Discovery’s Arkanoid) taught him “how to eat a hamburger the American way,” and how Andreas Hommel (a resident programmer / producer) would “play Prince on the stereo” during office hours. After those special thanks, Søren goes into great detail about aspects of the game’s engineering; boasting how the code was written completely in the “68000 assembler,” and describing how “an average compression rate was approximately calculated to 37%.” Clearly, these technical triumphs and tricks are what excited Søren most in approaching the game’s production, and where his true passion lied when it came to the creative process. His roots as a cracker shine through here, as the whole document reads like a scroll straight out of a demoscene release — a message intended for others “in the know,” who would appreciate the particulars of the technobabble which Søren goes on to gleefully recount. At the same time though, he uses one of the last lines of the message to deliver a somewhat incongruous plea: “Keep developers developing, spread the word and NOT the disk.” Certainly an ironic message coming from a former software pirate, but also a somewhat telling one: Having poured a claimed thirteen months of work into his game, Søren could see things from the other side now — come to understand that game development is a labor of love. Sword of Sodan represents the fruit of that labor, for as sour as the taste of it may be.

“Creatures Most Foul Are Sent to Corrupt and Plague the Land.”

“Where trees are twisted, gnarled and bent by the wizard’s wicker hand.”
Cover of Amiga User International,
Volume 2, Issue 10.

For all we’ve said about Sword of Sodan’s shortcomings as a piece of interactive software, we have to remember the era it existed within: Commodore in 1988 needed titles it could point to as showcases of their hardware’s power, and dedicated Amiga magazines understood their role in helping the system to succeed in the market. With this in mind, critics would largely concur in claiming Sword of Sodan as a stand-out release in the fledgling platform’s library, and sell it to consumers as a must-have game. To be clear, this isn’t to claim some sort of overarching conspiracy or “paid reviews” scheme orchestrated by Commodore: I’ve no doubt that a fair share of critics were genuinely impressed by Sodan‘s showing. At the same time though, these were publications whose business was contingent on the Amiga becoming a winner in the market, and perhaps they felt naturally inclined to overlook some of the game’s shortcomings in the pursuit of convincing consumers to part with their hard-earned dollars for it. That value proposition would be a central point in Amiga User International’s 9/10-scoring review of the game,** penned by one Tony Horgan: “The current going rate for Amiga games is not something I am very satisfied with at the moment, but Sword of Sodan is one game that I will not call over-priced. For twenty five pounds you get eleven levels of highly atmospheric fighting fantasy that must be the closest thing to a state of the art coin-op on the Amiga. […] However hard or easy you find it to master, Sword of Sodan will not be relegated to the back of the diskbox for a long time to come (it ever!). If you buy one Amiga action game this year, this has got to be it.”^[6]

Generally speaking, most reviewers would spend the bulk of their writing on Sword of Sodan praising the graphics, and putting over just how impressive it was to see an Amiga pumping them out. Chris Holmes for Amiga Computing would rate the game at an 85%, seemingly on the basis of its presentation alone: “The animation is impressive. Each image is at least four inches high and two inches wide. With all the processing power used for animating the characters, I expected the scrolling to be slow and jerky. But to my delight the parallax scrolling is super smooth. A programming marvel, no less. […] Throw in the odd special effect – the stunning thunder sequence in the graveyard is just one – and you have covered every area of graphical excellence that a game like Sword of Sodan could have.”^[7] Others still would attempt to posit that the only negative mark against the game was its lack of meaningful challenge (!?), such as Paul Glancey of ‘Computer + Video Games’ [in another 85%-scoring review]: “I was well pleased with Sword of Sodan. It’s not a complicated game, nor is it terribly difficult to play (things don’t get difficult until level eight). I doubt whether it’s worthy of the title, ‘best Amiga beat ’em up’ – IK+ is a more pure example of expertly-digitised violence – but it’s variety kept me at the joystick, and I’ll stick with it until the end is in sight. Real case-hardened warriors may find they finish it before they’ve had their £25 worth, but anyone in the market for a playable, visually and sonically impressive game would do well to check this out.”^[8]

Of course, there were at least a small handful of contemporary reviewers who seemed to see past the presentation in order to deliver more critical verdicts. Amiga Resource’s Troy Tucker was fairly scathing in evaluating the game as a 2.5 out of 5: “The game does not play well. There are too many petty problems that cannot be overlooked. For example, during most of the game you encounter barrels rolling out of nowhere, and you must jump over them. I can live with that if I have to — but the barrels pass right through the enemies standing in front of me. Not fair. The music and sound effects are good, and screen wipes between levels are impressive. But you can’t build a good videogame on these qualities alone.“^[9] PowerPlay’s Heinrich Lenhardt shared similar qualms about the game’s prioritizing style over substance, leading to his scoring Sodan as a 32 [out of 100] on their ‘Power-Wertung’ scale: “I am very suspicious of programs that sometimes take longer to load than to play a level. Unfortunately, Sword of Sodan belongs in this category of ‘a lot of hot air’ games: The sprites are big, the gameplay is far too small. Almost all duels are ridiculously easy. (Boy howdy, does reading this make me feel inadequate. — Cass) For most opponents, holding down the fire button and moving the joystick to the right at the same time is sufficient. The dumb fellows usually stomp into the sword blows without damaging your sprite a pixel. Of course, there are also more nasty places, but by using Smart Bombs and protective shields you can easily cheat here. Sword of Sodan looks quite interesting thanks to the unusually large characters. The primitive game principle, however, snatches the motivation faster than any well-aimed sword blow.”^[10]

But those dissenting voices felt few and far between, in the face of otherwise unanimous praise and accolades: Sword of Sodan would go on to win an ‘Oskar’ as Commodore Computing International’s pick for their ‘Arcade Game of the Year’ in 1988; beating out the likes of Barbarian II: The Dungeon of Drax (a similarly-themed tale of a bare-chested swordsman chasing down an evil wizard), Microprose Soccer (the predecessor to the legendary Sensible Soccer series), and Speedball (by way of The Bitmap Brothers).^[11] On the back of overwhelmingly positive reviews and hype regarding its apparently unbelievable presentation, Discovery Software would soon have a hit on their hands; as Søren would go on to recount the title as residing “on the top 10 selling charts for more than 6 months,” ultimately moving somewhere in the neighborhood of “55,000 copies.”^[2d] (Søren doesn’t clarify whether or not this figure accounts for later re-releases of the game as a budget title.) While that may not sound like an especially big number to us nowadays – already paling in comparison to millions-selling cartridges on the NES – you have to consider that statistic within the context of the Amiga, and compare it to one of the platform’s all-time top sellers: By best estimate, 1992’s Sensible Soccer: European Champions would be the title to dominate the system’s sales charts, by already managing 130,000 units sold prior to the end of 1993.^[12] It might well be only one of maybe three or four games to sell more than a hundred thousand copies for Amiga, where the average release was lucky to break the ten-thousand mark. By these metrics, Sword of Sodan really was quite successful, and its price point meant that Discovery Software likely made a healthy profit from it. But these good times for Discovery Software would not last for long.

See, when one of Discovery’s higher-ups (either company president Rick Ross or producer Paul Lombardi) first scouted Søren and Torben during a computer meet-up in Switzerland – where the duo were already demoing the first level of what would eventually become Sword of Sodan – they splashed money on flying the two between Germany and the USA, as they attempted to court them to join their company. At some point during negotiations, the Danes had been promised a percentage of the game’s profits following its release; which likely would’ve wound up amounting to a pretty decent chunk of cash, given the game’s aforementioned success.^[13] But for whatever reason, they never received that promised compensation: Whether Discovery simply got greedy, or were in some state of financial turmoil that led to their trying to hold on to every dollar they could; they ultimately wound up burning their bridges with Søren and his team, who left the company as a result of this breach of contract. (Søren would later claim that he had “no regrets” and held no grudges over how the situation went down, because the time he spent working for Discovery was still a “really fun time.”) This exodus must’ve occurred at some point prior to the end of 1989, and left Discovery in the unenviable position of having lost the key players in their games development division, ultimately prompting them to completely bow out of the sector and cancel any planned upcoming releases. In the process of doing so, this meant that Sword of Sodan’s Apple IIGS conversion would’ve been scrapped at this point as well, despite the significant progress that had already been made on it.*** Not too long afterward, Discovery Software would be forced to close its doors completely. Their Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in December of 1991 would list them as holding a grand total of $1,500 in remaining assets, against nearly $225,000 in liabilities.^[14]

Of course, covering the downfall of Discovery has us skipping ahead in the timeline a bit; so we’re gonna have to go ahead and rewind back to 1989 here, and pick up where Søren and his team split from the studio. Julian Lefay would shift his focus full-time toward Bethesda Softworks at this point – doing only god knows what within that dead end of a company – and escape the purview of our story [for the time being]. Søren, for his part, would join with Canadian studio Visionary Design Technologies (at one point known as ‘Binary Design Technologies’); in order to produce his 1989 title Datastorm, released exclusively on Amiga. By some folks’ measure – including my own – this represents the best video game he ever contributed to: A totally competent Defender-style shooter, wherein you control a ship in horizontal space in order to shoot down enemies and rescue defenseless ‘pods’ occupying the bottom of the screen. While it obviously wasn’t gonna win any awards for originality, it accomplished its mission in bringing that style of arcade game to the Amiga, and went on to review quite well in the pages of games magazines. If there was one issue that critics took umbrage with, it was the fact that its original release [in July of 1989] only saw it stocked in North America,^[15] leaving Europe to wait until nearly the end of the year in order to play it for themselves — the issue here being that the Amiga was far more successful within European countries than it ever was in the States (or Canada, for that matter).^[16] It was brilliant business decisions such as this which lead to VDT folding within the next two years, and again leaving Søren without a steady gig. The dude just could not catch a break where it came to these studios.

Which leaves us with Torben Bakager, and his continuing career after Discovery Software. If you’ll recall, he had previously established the studio Cope-com in developing his first pair of Amiga titles, which Discovery had taken care of publishing for them. But after the way things went down with that former employer (and remembering his past experience with Kele Line as well), it seemed as though Torben had developed an understandable distaste for working with publishers. So, he went ahead and established yet another company: Innerprise Software, emanating from Hunt Valley, Maryland. Bringing in Paul Lombardi from Discovery as a co-founder, the label was formed in order to publish and distribute games across various different platforms — taking up titles developed by outside studios, as well as allowing Torben to continue Cope-com’s operations unperturbed by executive interference. Of their four initial software offerings in 1989, three specifically targeted the Amiga market; including Persian Gulf Inferno‘s take on Elevator Action-esque anti-terrorism simulation by way of Parsec Software, North American distribution for Magic Bytes’ top-down shooter Nightdawn, and Cope-com’s own Battle Squadron serving as a graphically impressive shmup — boasting large sprites in a fashion similar to Sword of Sodan. The fourth title – Magnetic Images’ Lost Dutchman Mine – released simultaneously across the Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS; demonstrating that Innerprise would not make the mistake of just putting all their eggs in the Commodore basket. All four titles seemed to rate decently well among critics and consumers, where Battle Squadron evidently emerged as the stand-out title and positioned itself as one of the Amiga’s top shmups — cementing Torben’s reputation as a graphical wizard, and giving programmer Martin Pedersen (who had stuck with Torben through the Kele Line and Discovery days) a chance to stand out in his own right.****

1990 would prove Innerprise’s most productive year in the industry, with their managing to launch another eight titles within that period of time. Five of these would be further Amiga releases, comprising publishing for Cyberblast, Globulus, and The Plague; as well as North American distribution for Turrican and U.S.S. John Young. They’d also take up publishing Aftershock Entertainment’s Final Orbit on DOS, contributing another entry to the platform that would ultimately come to dominate the computer market moving into the early 90s. Of course, I’ve saved the two most interesting titles here for last: A pair of conversions of existing Amiga games to the Sega Genesis, both developed in-house by Innerprise. For these titles, Innerprise reached an arrangement with Electronic Arts to handle publishing and cartridge pressing; where the company had been able to circumvent several of the restrictions of Sega’s licensing agreements, by reverse-engineering the process of the manufacturer’s cartridge production process.^[17] This in turn lead to EA securing a more favorable royalty rate on the Genesis games they were able to produce (as per their own arrangement with Sega), and is also the reason their cartridges appear so physically distinct from Sega’s own authorized pressings. The point here is, EA were able to offer attractive deals / percentages to companies who were willing to sign with them as publishers for their Genesis titles, which is likely what convinced Innerprise to contract with them rather than self-publishing in this particular market. And for their debut title on Sega’s 16-bit machine, Torben would go ahead with a conversion of Battle Squadron, which translates largely faithfully from its Amiga counterpart. About the biggest difference between the two is the fact that you no longer need to rotate a joystick to fire off your smart bomb on Genesis, since the console’s controller has the benefit of more than one button.

Which brings us to Innerprise’s second Genesis title, and the one we’re gonna cover in much further depth: Sword of Sodan, which Discovery Software was evidently willing to sell the rights for back to Torben. After all, it wasn’t as if Discovery were in a position to develop their own sequel, or to turn down whatever money Innerprise was willing to offer them for it. What’s curious here is the fact that Søren wasn’t brought back on to contribute to this reimagining of the game bearing his own cracker namesake — that Torben took it upon himself to take control of the IP, and assign his new team to the project. In fairness, I imagine that Torben probably did offer Søren the gig, which the latter would’ve likely declined for the fact that he wouldn’t have been familiar enough with the Genesis hardware. After all: If you can’t push a system to its limits with impressive hacks and graphics, what’s even the point of developing video games? As such, the lead programmer duty on this 16-bit conversion would be assigned to one Anselm Hook — a Canadian coder who had hung around the periphery of Søren and Torben’s crew for some time already; programming Zoom!’s C64 conversion for Discovery Software, contributing to Cope-com’s Hybris, receiving special thanks in the credits of Datastorm, and developing his own game Vortex on behalf of Visionary Design Technologies. Clearly, Anselm had demonstrated some degree of aptitude in all of this in order to impress the Danes, and find his way into their inner circle. The Genesis manual for Sword of Sodan would even go on to include a full-page bio for Anselm, putting him over as a programming wunderkind: “He didn’t like school — never got a degree. Didn’t like money — left the oil business. He did like programming and aren’t you lucky. […] Keep your eye on Andy and Innerprise software — if the past is any indication of the future, we suggest buying stock…”

Of course, no article on the Bad Game Hall of Fame would be complete without a lingering mystery still waiting to be solved. And in this case, it’s the matter of an odd credit assigned to Anselm in that same instruction manual biography. In listing some of his previous games, the bio reads as follows: “Andy gave his magic touch to such games as DragonSlayer 2, Battle Squadron, and Vortex.” We can easily account for two of those titles – Battle Squadron and Vortex – as we’ve mentioned them already. But try as we might, we couldn’t find any evidence of a ‘DragonSlayer 2’ existing? But even more curious than that, it turns out that the original DragonSlayer also didn’t appear to actually exist — not until as late as the year 2020, when it was unearthed as a previously unfinished / unreleased Amiga game!^[18] Apparently, one of the original programmers (one Christian Haller) had been sitting on a prototype build of the title for some time, until resolving to finish developing it well over thirty years after the fact. Which begs the question: What the hell was Anselm doing claiming credit for a sequel to a game that never even saw a first release? Did whoever was writing the bio for the manual accidentally append a “2” to the end, when they really meant to refer to the first game? Was there potentially another series of so-called “DragonSlayer” games that just hasn’t been catalogued on games databases in the years since? Did Anselm actually work on a sequel developed preemptively before the first game even launched, which wound up getting stuck in limbo due to DragonSlayer never actually materializing? Or perhaps Anselm was just straight-up lying here — inventing a game with a name that he didn’t think actually existed? I, for one, am absolutely baffled by this completely innocuous off-hand mention. And now you too must share my burden.

Getting back on track: Sword of Sodan on Genesis would be slated for North American release in December of 1990, with a European release to follow in January of 1991. Japan would be made to wait until October 11th of 1991 to experience the adventure for themselves, where Sega themselves took up publishing the game and putting their name to it in that region. Little did anyone know at the time, but Sword of Sodan’s conversion to Sega’s system would go on to become something of a legend — to establish itself as one of the cumulatively lowest-rated titles in the console’s catalogue, and as a “Heavenly King of Kusogē” within Japan. Which begs the question: Did the game lose something in the translation to cartridge; or did critics and consumers simply wise up to the sorts of tricks that the source material had tried to pull two years earlier, and not let it pass this time around? The only way to find out is to play the game for ourselves, and write up a rare second review for this article — treating the Genesis conversion as something like its own individual title! Because as it turns out, there may be more to it than meets the eye…

** Actually, I’m inferring here what I believe Amiga User International’s score for Sword of Sodan was meant to rate as: The magazine utilizes a four-category rating system, where games are evaluated on ‘Graphics, Sound, Playability and Value’ — completely lacking in a final “Total” or indicated average score. Luckily, Tony Horgan saw fit to award the game a 9 out of 10 in all four of those indicated categories, so I feel comfortable in assuming that his final score for the game would’ve likely amounted to much the same. Perhaps AUI would’ve preferred to see it written out as a 36 out of 40, but they missed their chance.

*** Alternatively, it’s possible that work on Sword of Sodan’s IIGS conversion could’ve persisted up until the moment where Discovery Software ultimately closed their doors: As they still held the rights to the title, it was theirs to do what they would with it, even after Søren and company would’ve departed. Add that up with the money they had already invested into the conversion’s development, and it’s likely that they might’ve been holding out hope it could be finished before they ran out of money to pay for it — that it might turn a profit that’d help them climb out of their financial hole. But alas, it was not meant to be.

**** Naturally, I’m more inclined to point to Persian Gulf Inferno as the game I enjoyed most from this lot, since I’m a sucker for anything that hits up those Elevator Action vibes. (Well, maybe not just anything.)

“There to Challenge Zoras’ Powers and Send Him Back to Hell.”

“Among shadows cast by vaulted towers, where nameless horrors dwell.”
North American Genesis release, front cover.

The first thing that should be addressed with regards to the Genesis release of Sword of Sodan is its instruction manual, and the changes it makes to the game’s backstory. For whatever reason, this version of events is highly condensed, to the point where King Lordan is written out of the story entirely. In his place, there’s King Pallas, whose children Brodan and Shardan are handed off to Sodan without any real explanation or familial ties. Furthermore, Sodan isn’t established here as having saved the Northern Kingdoms in the past, and doesn’t even get hold of his legendary sword until after he’s begun to train the King’s progeny. From that point, he begins on his demon-slaying quest; abandoning the twins to a peasant family (in the same way he originally gave away Lordan), succeeding in ridding the land of monsters, and succumbing to old age while cursing his inability to reunite with his adopted children. Inexplicably, this dying wish somehow summons Brodan and Shardan to appear (“as if by a miracle”) just before he draws his final breath, so that he can bestow the blade upon them and charge them with avenging his death… by putting an end to Zoras’ invasion, which the manual just said that Sodan had already squashed? No, seriously: It clearly says that Sodan was already able to “send the last cowering spirit back to the pit that spawned it,” and that “light and warmth returned to the north” by this point; before Sodan launches into this dying monologue about how Brodan and Shardan are going to have to face off against “mysterious creatures of the underworld,” in order to “free the cities of the southern kingdom from the tyranny of Zoras.” Oh, wait a minute, I see what they’re saying here: Sodan was successful in saving the Northern Kingdoms, but never got around to liberating the Southern Kingdoms and killing Zoras! So, the adventure isn’t about reclaiming the throne in the North anymore, and Craggamoore is now retconned as being Zoras’ castle in the South. I guess that makes a sort of sense. But why make these changes in the first place, though? More important question: Why am I even bothering to bring this insignificant detail up, when absolutely no one else in the world is going to care about it?

As it turns out, Sword of Sodan‘s Genesis conversion doesn’t stop making its changes there: We’re actually looking at a total reimagining of the game, in terms of trimming the original’s fat and restructuring the gameplay in ways which seek to streamline the experience. Sure, you’ll be trekking across much the same succession of levels from the original as either one of the same two playable characters; but nothing can be called a carbon copy, between completely redrawn graphics and substantive tweaks made to the familiar stages. Of course, whether each of these individual changes can be rated as for better or for worse has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, which we’ll attempt to cover here as thoroughly as we can. But first, we should start by highlighting an aspect which has remained curiously intact: That damned high score table is back again, in all its needlessly drawn-out glory. Only this time, the animation of every individual character and digit being dragged onto the screen has been extended out to an unbearable three minutes and thirty seconds, in what must surely constitute some act of criminal contempt against consumers. Moving past that unfortunate inclusion, you’ll find a familiar title screen that attempts to emulate the same wave effect as the Amiga original, as well as a credits roll which has been updated to reflect the new Innerprise assigned. This is all set against a newly arranged title screen track by John Medek, whose name is curiously absent on the screen that accompanies his score. (His credit is reserved for the game’s manual.)

Where Genesis Sword of Sodan begins to set itself apart from its source material comes with the moment you first press a button on your controller, as you’re taken to a small range of options for the game. Prior to starting your adventure, you’re given the choice to set your starting number of lives (either three, five, or seven), as well as select between either a ‘Normal’ and ‘Easy’ difficulty. What this latter choice seems to affect is the amount of base damage you inflict on enemies, as well as how much damage you receive from them in turn. At the risk of giving away the fact that this conversion retains (if not exceeds) the original release’s cruel challenge, I’m gonna make a suggestion here to any prospective players: Choose the Easy mode. Doing so won’t lock you out of the game’s ending, or deprive you of any other content. Instead, it’ll provide you with what I reckon is the ideal Sodan experience; by providing a far more sensible degree of balance to damage, and giving you an opportunity to actually appreciate elements of the game’s design. Rest assured that the Easy mode will still provide a healthy challenge, and know going in that it won’t fix all the game’s issues (of which there are still plenty). But if you’re committed to experiencing Sword of Sodan for yourself, this is absolutely the best way to do so. Honestly, this difficulty should’ve been labeled as “Normal” and selected by default, while the alternative should be denoted as “Hard” and left to the true masochists to endure. Naturally, this means that I spent most of my own time playing on the so-called Normal difficulty, and regretting every second of it.

There’s one more consideration you’re going to have to account for here: Brodan and Shardan now have differences in their attack strength, which the game doesn’t disclose or indicate to you in any way. On average, Shardan can be expected to take two or three more hits to kill an enemy than Brodan, in accordance with the idea on the developers’ part that the female swordsman has obviously gotta be weaker than their male counterpart — despite being twins, ostensibly enduring the same training for the same length of time, and carrying the same exact sword into battle. Now, you may be asking: What’s the trade-off here that might make a player wanna select Shardan in spite of her significantly weaker damage? What can she do that Brodan can’t? And the simple answer to that question is, nothing. In all other aspects – between attack speed, movement speed, and the range of their attacks – there are no other discernible differences between the two, or anything that would serve to give a player any semblance of advantage in selecting Shardan. Honestly, I’m surprised that the Innerprise team were able to demonstrate the restraint in not giving her less health too, but my testing indicates that they are – in fact – still identical in that regard. Look, if you’re gonna go the stereotypical route of “man strong, woman fast;” you have to actually remember to include the part where the woman is measurably faster, or find some other sort of way to balance them in their differentiation. As it stands, Shardan is just an objectively less capable character, and it leaves the designers looking like they didn’t believe that a woman could theoretically compete against a man. Bearing all this in mind: Of course I still wound up playing as Shardan, and regretting every second of it.

On starting the game, the first thing you may notice is the graphical “downgrade.” Which is to say, character sprites appear smaller here than they were on the Amiga, though they’re actually still quite large by Genesis game standards. If you can look past the fact that characters no longer fill out a fifth of the screen apiece, you may be able to appreciate that Torben took the effort here to redraw and redesign everything here from scratch; utilizing a darker / higher contrast color palette, and better realizing a more cohesive style between the characters and environment. You’ll also notice that our heroes no longer carry their non-usable shields, which helps clarify your capabilities in combat to a first-time player. Not only that, but smaller sprites do allow you to actually manage distance in combat more effectively, and be less caught off-guard by elements emerging from the edges of the screen. The more you think about it, the more you begin to realize that maybe making character sprites absolutely massive isn’t actually such a great idea in the first place? On the other hand, Shardan is now wearing a less revealing outfit in this version of the game, so please make sure to alert the censorship watchdogs that a great travesty has occurred here. But seriously: It’s my opinion that while the Genesis version of Sword of Sodan may not display some of the same technical trickery that was accomplished in the Amiga version, it still looks totally fine in its own right — less ambitious as it may well be. And hey, if you’re the sort who demands guts and gore in your games, you’ll be pleased to know that the Genesis version features bloodier deaths all around; including your own character getting disemboweled on death, as their corpse can be seen spurting blood from the chest and torso. Get used to seeing that visual a lot. As a matter of fact, you’ll probably wind up seeing it more than a couple times in the course of the first stage alone, if you’re not yet practiced in the ways of the 16-bit sword.

True to its source material, Sword of Sodan on Genesis doesn’t pull its punches in the early goings, as it immediately sets about siccing three to four enemies at a time on you; beginning with the familiar pikemen, in a facsimile of the familiar first stage. Not only that, but as quickly as you manage to put them down, new pikemen will step in to replace them, until you’ve killed a total of eighteen or so. This indicates one of the major changes in this conversion of Sodan: Stages are extended by means of throwing way more enemies at you, which you’re still required to clear before you’re able to exit. In levels where you’d expect to face five enemies total, expect at least dozen. In stages that were populated by just one or two baddies, expect at least six. And unless you’re playing on Easy mode, expect each of them to take anywhere between six and eleven hits to kill; assuming you’re going for standing swipes and thrusts, and not attempting crouching attacks. Because that’s another big change here: The game’s damage model has been completely reworked, where your different attack angles inflict different degrees of damage — each affected by a reinterpreted ‘Hit’ indicator (representing hit strength), which can be increased from a minimum of 25 to a maximum of 99. There’s so much to cover here; between the different difficulties, characters, and angles of attack — and how each of those individual variables are further affected by your hit strength. It took me a full hour of testing [using cheats to force different hit strength values] – across the Easy and Normal difficulties, and playing as both characters – in order to determine exactly what effect that number actually has on your damage output. The results were honestly shocking. They’re also difficult to try and convey through writing here, so please bear with me as I devote a very messy paragraph to the subject.

Playing as Brodan on Normal, and exclusively using the forward thrust attack; the difference between 25 and 99 hit strength amounts to a grand total of one less hit required in order to fell a pikeman (seven hits with 25 strength, six with 99), which feels absolutely insignificant in light of how difficult it is to actually max out your hit strength to that level. Using cheats to set that value to a theoretical strength of 255 (the maximum value allowed within 8-bit integers) brings that number of attacks down to just four strikes needed, which goes to show just how minimal this scaling is. For comparison: Shardan on Normal will need to get in a grueling eleven hits to kill a pikeman with a hit strength anywhere between 25 and 37. Between 52 and 67, you can expect to have to deal nine blows; where having between 82 and 99 strength will only ask you to land eight strikes. Up it to 255 using cheats, and you’re looking at a total of five hits to down the sorry soldier. Of course, that’s all playing on Normal difficulty, which I absolutely cannot recommend. Playing as either Brodan or Shardan on Easy means that a hit strength of 25 will only require five hits to fell an enemy, demonstrating how much more sensible the damage feels in this mode. Upping your hit strength to anywhere between 37 and 99 will bring your needed attack count down to just four, where an impossible value of 255 would mean only three hits needed on your end. What all this indicates to me is that the hit strength in Genesis Sword of Sodan is meant to act as some form of multiplier on the base damage of your given attacks, but that the math here is so fuzzy / the boosts are so negligible that maxing the value out hardly seems to matter (outside of Shardan on Normal mode).

There’s still more to cover on the subject of hit strength – including the mechanics of how you actually go about increasing it – but we’ll get to it soon enough. (I didn’t feel like stacking two or three paragraphs of pure number-crunching in a row.) For now, let’s focus in on the actual mechanics of combat, which appears at a first glance to be pretty similar to the source material; between your four attacks, the scenarios you’re presented with, and the strategies you’ll use against enemies. The pikemen are still susceptible to getting in close and wailing on their heads, for example. Only, there are a couple wrinkles to the classic strategy here: For one, enemies can now appear on either side of you, as well as walk through you in order to attack from behind. This means that you can’t just press forward against a stack of baddies lined up in single-file, as you’ll now have to turn to face enemies approaching from the rear. That’s another big change right there — being able to face the opposite direction. It’s not as simple as pressing left [or right] on the D-pad, though: You have to tap either the B or C button while holding the direction you want to turn toward, or alternatively hold B/C while tapping on the D-pad. Either way, it’s a slightly cumbersome input, but an absolutely necessary one given the sheer number of enemies you’re made to face simultaneously from both sides of the screen. Ideally, you never want to have enemies running a pincer maneuver on you and locking you into hits from both sides, as it’s often impossible to escape from once you’re trapped in it. Your best bet is to try jumping over enemies completely in order to consolidate them to a single side of the screen, which is now possible given your higher vertical leap.

But perhaps the conversion’s most major change comes with killing enemies, and the rewards you’ll earn for doing so: A new range of four potions, which baddies will drop one of on death more often than not. According to the manual, these elixirs were commissioned by King Pallas in order to aid adventurers, before Zoras’ soldiers stormed the castle and took them for themselves. Not sure why that necessitated an explanation, but there you go. You’ll find that they randomly drop in one of four flavors; including red (‘Vitalum’), blue (‘Hydrolum’), orange (‘Solarium’), and grey (‘Etherium’). Each has their own effect when used individually; where red will increase your hit strength by twelve points, blue will restore roughly a fifth of your total health, orange will work as the zapper did in the original game, and grey will have “No Effect.” That last potion is a clue that potions can actually be mixed and used together to produce a new range of effects; where red and grey will grant you an extra life, blue and grey will give you thirty seconds of invincibility in the form of the ‘Shield’ effect (the equivalent to the original Power Shield), and a orange grey [or red and orange] combo will give you a flaming sword for a temporary buff to damage. But that’s not all: Combining four grey potions will actually let you skip any one of the first six stages in the game, if there’s one in particular you struggle with (or just straight-up hate playing through). Other combinations will either have no effect, only impart the value of a single potion (such as mixing multiple reds or multiple blues), or poison you for a hit’s worth of damage. And god help you if you try and mix one of each of the four potions together: It’ll just cause you to instantly die, with an associated warning via text that “Winners Don’t Use Drugs” — a reference to the infamous AAMA campaign that was made to run on arcade game attract modes in North America.

To actually use potions, you’ll have to pause the game in order to select them, where you can mix and match them as needed. When you unpause, you’ll have to press the A button to actually stand and consume the concoction, and see its result go into action a half-second later. In this way, it’s possible to get hit while in your potion-drinking animation, which means that you’ll probably wanna establish some distance between yourself and your enemies first. It should also be noted that you can still only carry four potions at a time; and that if you’re full to capacity, enemies will actually stop dropping them until you free up a slot — forcing you to have to actively consume them and leave at least one space open. Needless to say, the conversion’s elixir system is markedly different from its source material, in terms of both functionality and sheer abundance of drops. And in my humble opinion, I believe this to be the far superior implementation of the mechanic — a much more interesting and practical conceptualization of the core idea. It immediately solves a number of problems I had with the original game; by providing more opportunities to power up, giving you the option to heal yourself, and establishing a tangible reward for defeating enemies. Not only that, but the number of options it opens up to a player in how they might choose to manage their inventory / see fit to utilize them as tools in combat is much appreciated — a big step toward giving the game a depth and complexity that was sorely lacking in the Amiga iteration. If I were to nitpick here, I think calling the red potions Vitalum and the blues Hydrolum is maybe a bit confusing; since I generally associate “vitality” with health [rather than a measure of attack strength], and probably would’ve given that name to the restorative potion instead. (Maybe call the red potions “Brawnium” or something?) But clearly, that’s a very minor critique, and I’m a fan of the system as a whole.

With these tools in your kit and an understanding of the game’s mechanics, you can properly begin your adventure and challenge the army of pikemen on the first screen. And with the power of that knowledge on your side, you’ll find that combat in this version of the game… is still just as unforgiving as it ever was, if not even more brutal. The sheer number of enemies you have to deal with before you can clear a level is ridiculous, and it’s clear that their behavior is more aggressive here on the Genesis — that you can’t expect to back them into corners, or bait them into attacking you one at a time. All you can do is try to make sure you don’t get flanked from both sides at once, attack as rapidly as possible in the hopes of hitting enemies before they hit you, and pray for blue potions to drop so that you can restore health / put up shields. On Easy difficulty, the feat is at least somewhat manageable; since standard enemies all go down with a reasonable number of hits, and only impart two or three ticks of damage on you per attack (where you’re given a maximum of thirty-two health points). But playing on Normal feels downright unfair, given just how many attacks you need to land to dispatch a single one of your dozen and-a-half enemies — especially when playing as Shardan, and needing a full 99 points of strength in order to be as effective as Brodan at his lowest strength. On top of that, enemy attacks on Normal seem to deal five or six points of damage, which means you’re liable to go down twice as quickly. All you can do on the harder difficulty is to hope for orange potions to drop that you can use to quickly dispatch foes, since it’s nearly impossible to kill them with your sword alone without taking at least one or two hits yourself. But given the randomness of potion drops, you obviously can’t expect to rely on them entirely. At some point, it comes down to equal parts luck and skill.

Clearing this first screen without forfeiting a single life [on Normal] may well be attainable via practice, I’m sure: But I certainly couldn’t manage the feat in my hours spent with the game — not without the benefit of liberal emulator rewinding. And so, we face the same problem as seen in the original Amiga game: This first level – which should serve as a training ground / warm-up for the battles ahead – proves to be just as difficult as every one of the stages to follow. The step up in difficulty between Easy and Normal seems sensible on paper, to where experience beating the game on Easy should mean having a clearer idea in your head on how to approach the game on Normal. But in actual execution, the gap between the two modes is far too wide, to the point where playing on Easy might actually teach you some bad habits that’ll make playing on Normal that much more challenging. I hate to make such a fine point of the game’s difficulty, and I know it’ll inevitably lead to a certain sect of folk who’ll just think the issue is that I suck at video games and just need to “get good” or whatever. But the point I’m trying to make here is that presenting this degree of challenge in a game from the word go doesn’t help players to learn the skills they’ll need to proceed: It only serves to crush their spirits, and make them wonder if they’re doing something wrong — even when they’re actually doing everything they’re supposed to be doing / playing the game as intended. And by Innerprise choosing to set Normal as the default difficulty, they set players up to face this frustration as what is likely to be their first experience with the game, and risk scaring off a large percentage of them right out the gate. Say what you will about “practice makes perfect,” but Sword of Sodan doesn’t make practicing particularly easy or enjoyable.

Assuming you manage to clear the first stage, you’ll move on to the second — the one where you cross a bridge with spears shooting out from underneath you. Structurally, this stage is largely identical to its Amiga counterpart, in terms of its size and the placement of hazards. Instead of having just the one pikeman to contend with though, you’ll have to take down eight of them, which makes the level that many times more hazardous (as well as extending how long it’ll take to clear). With enemies appearing from both sides, positioning between the spear traps becomes more imperative than ever, as you’ll have to carefully time your steps and jumps in order to avoid inadvertent impalement. Also, seeing as the Genesis version of the game runs at a higher frame rate (sixty frames per second with its NTSC release, versus twenty-five per second on Amiga), the spears seem to emerge and retract quicker as well, demanding that you be that much more nimble on your feet. Clearly, Torben had taken the handful of reviews which criticized the original title for being “too easy” to heart, and endeavored to increase the difficulty in as many different ways as his team could manage. The game does throw you a proverbial bone as you enter into new levels, though: Full replenishment of your health, and the addition of twelve points of hit strength to whatever total you had at the end of the previous stage. An appreciated reward for those who manage to clear levels by the skin of their teeth without losing lives. Of course, if you’re still at a point as a player where you’re losing multiple lives per stage and seeing your hit strength roll back down to 25 every couple of minutes, this mechanic won’t really do you much good. In any event, I still rate Sword of Sodan’s second level as being [slightly] easier than its first, if only for the fact you have fewer enemies to deal with within it. That’ll come to be the most significant factor in determining the difficulty of each of the game’s stages.

Let’s move right along to the third level, “In the City Streets.” You may remember it as the one with the rolling barrels you have to jump over? Well, those hazards are gone this time around, curiously enough. In their place, you get an even more curious cameo from one of Zoras’ pets — that screen-tall fly-spewing monster that was last seen in the last stage of the original Amiga release. They show up at the very beginning of this level to spawn a couple of flying bugs, before retreating the moment you land a single strike on them. It makes for one of the most bizarre enemy rearrangements I’ve seen in a video game remake, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what Innerprise were intending to do by having them show up here. Maybe it’s their attempt to get you excited for the possibility of facing them later in the game? Perhaps the spawning flies are a sort of make-good for Anselm not being able to implement the barrels, for whatever reason? Or it’s possible that their appearance here is simply meant to mix up players who were originally familiar with the Amiga version of the game — to try and catch them off-guard, and make them think that the Genesis conversion is going to start tossing more curveballs at them from here on out. We’ll probably never know for sure, unless Torben or Anselm decide to speak on the subject of Sodan some day. In any event, the rest of this level plays out pretty much the same as its source material; between the appearance of the axemen, and the confrontation against the giant at the end. Only now, there’s a second giant you have to deal with after killing the first, because the developers just couldn’t help themselves. Oh, and I guess I’m also obligated to note here that in another heinous act of censorship, there’s a statue of a nude woman in the original stage that’s missing here on Genesis. Do with that information what you will.

Next in the level line-up is where the forest stage is meant to appear (the aptly titled “In the Heart of the Forest”). Except, it’s missing in action here: You skip directly to “In the Land of the Dead,” to confront the zombie hordes. I reckon I probably know the reason for this decision: It’s home to too many unique sprites; between the hopping ogres, the poisonous scorpion-dragons, and the stage assets themselves. That’d have been a lot to have to redraw just so they could appear in a single stage, and not even a particularly memorable or impressive one at that. And with only 512 kilobytes of space allotted to their cartridges by Electronic Arts – the cheapest / minimum available for manufacture for the console – Innerprise had to be a bit more selective here in what made the cut. (You can’t exactly sell a Genesis game in a case containing three or four cartridges.) On top of all that, the original stage was lousy with obtrusive foreground elements, which the developers seemed to want to avoid including in this iteration of the game, likely realizing that the smaller character sprites were more liable to be completely obscured and screw over players. All in all, it’s hard to say that anything of significant value was lost here by omitting the forest stage, other than being able to claim that the game is a content-complete conversion of the original Amiga release. But I reckon we’re well past that point as it is already, and something tells me that folk who already played / owned Sword of Sodan on home computer weren’t going to be buying copies of the Genesis conversion to compare and contrast.

In moving directly into the graveyard level, we reach the equivalent of what I previously called the “most punishingly difficult stage” seen in the original game. It’s my duty to report that Innerprise kept the tradition alive here, even as they’ve made slight tweaks to how the level plays. Keeping with the removal of barrels from the third stage, you won’t see the rolling monsters appear here to trip you up, in a change which seems like it’d make the level much more manageable. Unfortunately, they compensate for this by adding a new hazard to contend with: On killing any one of the infinitely respawning zombies, you’ll have to jump over beams of light that release from their corpses — a physical manifestation of their souls leaving their bodies, I suppose. This means that you’re effectively punished for having to put down the enemies in your way, despite having no real choice in the matter. If you attempt to let the walking dead walk right past you, they’ll stop you dead in your tracks, and impart gradual damage to you as they slowly phase through you, rendering you completely helpless all the while. On top of all that, the zombies are the only enemy in the game who won’t drop potions on death; meaning that the only elixirs you’ll have at your disposal are whichever ones you brought with you from the last stage, assuming you even have any left. The only possible way to survive this stage without incurring any loss of lives is to have both a blue and a grey potion on hand, and to use them to put up a Shield which can protect you from damage. Of course, that’s only good for thirty seconds of invincibility, and getting slowed down for so much as a second by any of the zombies here means that you won’t be able to finish the level before your invincibility expires. So, in a perfect world, you’ll really wanna have two blue and two grey potions on hand, so that you can grant yourself an additional thirty seconds of damage negation. Just make sure you don’t try drinking all four of them at the same time, or you’ll find yourself sorely disappointed when it still expires at the thirty second mark.

Genesis Sodan’s fifth stage is the sixth from the Amiga release: “The Foyer of the Castle Craggamoor.” If you’ll recall, this is the one with the pit traps and the spellcaster to contend with in the original source material. Well, here on Genesis, the pits are still a factor. Except this time around, there are absolutely no visual indications as to where they’re hidden in the floor, and they now represent instant death if you happen to fall down them — regardless of how much health you have prior. Not only that, but the hit strength conservation trick is no longer in effect here, so that saving grace is taken away from you too. On top of all that, the solitary wizard is missing in action, and instead replaced by a gauntlet of eight giants you’ll have to put down. This is it, folks: The point in Sword of Sodan’s Genesis conversion where – regardless of what difficulty you’re playing on – you’re presented with one of the most absolute bullshit scenarios imaginable in a game of this nature. Tossing eight of the toughest enemies in the game at you in pairs of two is bad enough on its own, as you’ll rarely get the chance to properly decapitate them (while they’re downed and kneeling) while you still have a second one standing and aiming to bash in your skull. But littering the floor with hit traps on top of that, to where you have no room at all to reposition yourself or backstep out of the way of attacks? That’s just downright cruel. Factor in that you probably won’t have any potions at your disposal either after the last stage (not until you actually manage to kill a giant), and that dying a single time here means getting reset back to your lowest hit strength, meaning that the big baddies will take the maximum number of hits to stun and kill. It’s the sort of level design that begs the question of “who hurt the developers” — what motivated them to create such a malicious level in a video game?

We can’t blame this on ignorance or cluelessness anymore: Torben had two years to learn from the reception to the original Sword of Sodan, and had a more properly seasoned team of developers working under him this go-around. You don’t simultaneously subject players to your most lethal traps and difficult enemies without knowing full well what you’re doing. And so, I can only imagine that the deliberate motivation for this was to introduce a near-insurmountable roadblock — something that would inevitably force an end to first-time attempted playthroughs of the stage, and which has the potential to sabotage even the most practiced players through sheer force of unfairness and unluckiness. It can only be here as part of some ill-conceived attempt to extend how long it’d take a player to successfully complete the game, so that they might feel like they’re somehow “getting their money’s worth” out of a title that can theoretically be completed in just about thirty minutes’ time. It’s here to make sure that even the luckiest player – who has somehow managed to stumble through to this point in the game on their first playthrough – will inevitably fall victim to the indiscernible pitfalls and start forfeiting whatever lives they’ve managed to retain, until they can memorize where each of them are hidden in the floor. The giants play their role perfectly in positioning themselves right at the edges of the holes, so that you have no choice but to leap forward and hope that you just barely manage to avoid falling into them; just so that the giants can step backward into their striking distance, and knock you immediately backwards to where you’ll trigger the traps. If ever there were a stage you’d want to use four grey potions to skip, this would certainly be the one… Only, you’d have to skip having invincibility at your disposal in the graveyard stage before it, and manage to carry that combo of potions all the way through it. It just doesn’t seem feasible.

Let’s say – for the sake of example – that you commit to playing Sword of Sodan enough times to eventually overcome its fifth stage. First off: Congratulations and/or condolences for having the free time in a day to practice playing sub-par Genesis games! Know that I’m very envious and/or empathetic. In any case, you’ll be proceeding into the sixth stage now, “In a Passage Deep.” If you’re still keeping track of the original Amiga version’s progression, you’ll note that it looks like we’re skipping right past the stage known as “Descend the Stairs.” Actually, that level has been combined with this one — stitched onto the beginning of it in order to produce a singular, contiguous stage. And in order to make sense of your descent in terms of architectural / spatial logic, you actually end the foyer level by deliberately (or more likely unintentionally) falling down a final pit toward the end of it, which mercifully isn’t counted against you as a death. Which gives me a truly horrible idea: What if instead of dying when you fall down one of the pits in the previous stage, you had to play through this level in its entirety in order to return to the foyer — replay it every time you succumb to the traps? That’d certainly be one way to extend the game’s length! It’s also a page straight out of the classic Dark Castle’s playbook, which would be particularly fitting given that it was also granted an ill-fated Electronic Arts-published Genesis conversion. Really, these two titles pair almost perfectly with one another, with their both being conversions of “classic” computer games that are widely regarded as being inferior on Sega’s 16-bit console. (That being said, I still believe that Dark Castle’s Genesis conversion gets an undeserved bum rap.)

Getting back to the stage itself in Sword of Sodan: You’ll begin the level beset by a ridiculous swarm of forty-eight flies, who attack you in groups of six at a time over the course of what’ll probably amount to two or three minutes spent swatting them. This would be completely unfair if not for the fact that they go down quite easily (even at your lowest hit strength), don’t deal much in the way of damage, and can be easily clustered together by jumping to either side of the screen in order to make hitting several of them at a time easily manageable. In actuality, the appearance of this veritable colony here is one of the nicest things Innerprise does for players in the course of the entire game! How so, you may ask? Well, consider the fact that any one of those forty-eight flies has the potential to drop a potion for you; which you can use to up your hit strength back up to 99, coat your sword in flames, replenish any health lost during the prolonged encounter, and stock up on Shields for the trials ahead. (There’s also the fact that it just feels good to be able to kill so many enemies so quickly for a change.) I really wanna believe that was the developers’ intention here, and that this is their attempt at congratulating / rewarding you for managing to beat the previous level. Of course, after exterminating the pests here, you still have the rest of the level to contend with: First having to defeat the more difficult variation of the wizard enemy; before enduring the gauntlet of floor-riding fireballs, crushing ceilings, insta-kill spike traps, platforming over a bed of lava, and disabling the fire-spewing mechanism at the end. All this plays out much the same as on Amiga, where the key difference has to deal with the fact that the fireballs never stop once they start up (immediately after slaying the wizard).

What this means is that while you’re trying to step between the crushers from above and spikes from below, you’re also still having to listen in for the audio cue for incoming fireballs, and timing your jumps accordingly. This bit isn’t as difficult as it may sound. Neither is having to jump over fireballs while standing on the moving platforms across the pool of lava, since you magnetize horizontally to the floating sheets of rock. The only real challenge here is actually jumping onto the platforms in the first place and the alcoves between them, as your longer leap here makes you liable to overshoot your targets. You’ve also gotta make sure that you don’t outrun the screen’s scrolling during the previous section of ceiling and floor traps, and inadvertently step straight into the lava in the process. This is unfortunate, as one of the easiest ways to clear that segment of the level is to push up against the right side of the screen while continuously jumping: You’ll likely manage to avoid every hazard (save for maybe one or two fireballs) doing that, and bypass whatever challenge was intended there. I also feel like the platforming section is slightly easier to contend with than on the Amiga, where the timing here is more straightforward and you’re granted checkpoints in the form of the patches of stable stone floor. Just take care that you don’t miss jumping over the incoming fireballs, as they’ll knock you backwards and land you directly in the molten drink. And as for the final section of the stage where you disable the flame-shooting contraption, it’s as simple as hitting it with a couple of crouching attacks, before immediately fading into the level transition and finding yourself “At the Wizard’s Tower.”

That’s right, folks: The Genesis conversion actually goes ahead and skips two levels here, in order to immediately take you to the seventh and final stage. This means that you don’t get to ride your large bird and survive drowning together in the rising water, or repeat another duplicate of the castle foyer. While I think we can all agree that the game is better off for not making you fight another set of eight giants between perilous pitfalls, I suppose there’s something lost here in console players not being able to experience the absolutely inexplicable appearance of your avian steed. Sure, it might not have been a particularly exciting or purposeful segment in the original Amiga release; but it was certainly a memorable inclusion, and one that provided you with a last-minute opportunity to rack up extra points of hit strength before the final encounter. The reason the bird [and their associated stage] doesn’t make their appearance here is fairly obvious: Limitations in cartridge space, which likely meant there wasn’t room left on the board to accommodate the multiple chunks of sprite data that would’ve comprised your feathered friend (plus the unique enemies / hazards they face). Again, it’s hard to say that players are suffering a major loss here for this lack of a level, but it certainly eats into the total playtime you’d get out Sword of Sodan’s Genesis conversion. And yet, you’re likely to be entering into the game’s final stage at around the twenty minute mark on a successful run — just around the same time as you’d be starting it on the Amiga version. Despite the fact that this Genesis conversion only spans a total of seven stages versus eleven on the Amiga, it makes up for its shorter length by having thrown so many enemies at you up to this point; making each of its levels run that much longer, and artificially padding the time it takes to complete the game. It’d be an ingenious bit of design, if it didn’t make the gameplay feel like an absolute chore at times.

Which brings us to the final stage, and to our rematch with Zoras’ guard dog. But he won’t run away with his tail between his legs after just one hit this time, no siree bob: The truth is, I can’t even keep count of how many hits it takes to fell the foul beast, even with hit strength maxed out (for whatever good it’s even worth). Unlike in the original Amiga version of the game where you can poke the monster in the belly whenever you please, you have to wait for moments where they become briefly vulnerable here; indicated by their stomach turning red, and the fact they’ll start birthing flies for a bit. While they’re not vulnerable, they’re generally attempting to crawl toward you and back you into a corner on the left side of the screen that you can’t escape from, or firing waves of projectiles that you’ll have to jump over to avoid. If you can keep count of them, you’ll realize that the beast fires a series of eight projectiles at you before entering into a roughly six-second window where you can get your hits in on them, which you’ll likely have to back off from early if you don’t wanna get damaged by their insect progeny. It’s a delicate balancing act, where you’ll have to weigh how much damage you can hope to inflict within these brief opportunities, against how much damage you’ll take from his spawn or however quickly the beast might start attacking again. On my best run [on Normal difficulty], it took me a total of seven minutes to get in enough hits to scare the monster off again — not counting the copious amount of emulator rewinding I employed in the process. It’s a truly grueling test of endurance, which demands nothing short of consistently perfect timing in order to avoid taking damage or losing lives in the process. The only bright side is the fact that the flies will continue to drop potions for you, giving you one last chance to stock up before the true final boss.

Compared to his monster minion, Zoras is a total pushover. By which I mean, he’s largely similar here to his Amiga counterpart, save for the important distinction that he skips his first phase and comes right out the gate firing off his screen-spanning beams of magic. Only this time around, he’s no longer impossible to beat without the aid of the Shield potion combo, as it’s now possible to leap over his magic attacks! I mean, they still suck to actually try and dodge, as he fires them off unpredictably and deals massive damage to you in the process. So, bringing those potions into the fight is still very much highly recommended, unless you’re down for another needlessly drawn-out battle right after your previous fight. On the plus side, Zoras no longer has his shield-bypassing close-range attack that he uses to keep you from sticking too close to him, so you’re free to wallop on him as long as your invincibility holds up. That being said, you’re probably going to want to have two doses of Shield going in; as it’s very likely that your first thirty seconds won’t be enough to take him down, and you’ll be left in the unfortunate position of staring down a final boss nearly on the verge of death that you might not be able to land that crucial last strike on. Oh, and there’s one more factor you’ll have to consider during this climactic battle: The game’s audio becomes absolutely unlistenable during this encounter, as the “soundtrack” to the stage is meant to be a heartbeat sound effect tied to Zoras’ health — replacing an effectively ethereal bit of background music that scored this confrontation in the original Amiga release. The closer Zoras is to death here on Genesis, the faster the audio plays, to the point where it begins to resemble a deafening wall of noise. A truly horrendous execution on a novel concept, to the point where I reckon it might genuinely damage some folks’ ears. You can click here to watch [and listen] to the final battle (🔊), but only if you’re brave enough for it.

At this point, your long and arduous journey is complete: You’re whisked away to the familiar ending slideshow seen in the original game, sans the animation where Brodan and Shardan look like they’re about to get incestuous with one another. Also missing here is a sound effect of your new loyal subjects cheering and applauding for you to accompany the corresponding frame — another likely casualty of cartridge allocation. (Sampled sounds tend to consume a fair bit of space.) And so, you’re left to bask in the sweet sound of silence, which may well be a welcome reprieve after that final battle. Go ahead and enter your name on the high score screen, take a moment to congratulate yourself, and go ahead and power off your console before the game dares to return to the title screen and prompt you to play through it again. In total, you can expect a successful playthrough to run roughly thirty minutes of your precious time, not counting the hours / days of practice runs it’ll undoubtedly take you to achieve this goal. Will it have been time well spent? I suppose that’s up to you to decide for yourself after the fact. As for me, after having put my hours in (and still having to cheat my way through roughly half of it)? Well, I suppose my personal feelings on Sword of Sodan‘s Genesis conversion are still somewhat complicated, with all having been said and done.

Make no mistake: The difficulty on display here feels downright unforgivable at times — like the worst kind of bullshit schemed up just to stop consumers from clearing it over the course of a weekend rental. But Sword of Sodan certainly isn’t the only video game guilty of this crime. If it had demanded a pocket full of quarters at the arcade instead of valuable time spent at home, I’m sure there’d be some out there who’d hail it as a passable cabinet game. It’s the issue of the fact that Søren’s original design was meant to ape and imitate the beat ‘em ups he’d seen at the galleria, rather than taking the cues seen in the home conversions of those same titles. And when it came time for Torben and Anselm to remake it for the Genesis, they remained dedicated to that original concept, even as they rearranged the pieces of it to put their own superficial spin on it. Granted, the changes made to player movement and the revamped potion system are certainly changes for the better, but I’m just not sure they go far enough: At its core, it’s still a game which misunderstands the fundamentals of what makes a compelling beat ‘em up; between its tedious combat, ill-conceived stages, and array of gimmicks which fail to amuse or excite. It’s like it still has the heart of a glorified tech demo, despite the fact that it’s far less impressive for having come out two years later on a seemingly weaker piece of hardware. Loathe as I am to admit it, the original game’s outstanding presentation at least gave it some sort of edge, which I can see compelling some number of consumers to see it through.

I said earlier that Sword of Sodan’s Genesis conversion looked “totally fine in its own right,” which is a statement I stand by. But if it had managed to look exceptional by the standards of the Sega Genesis, I get the feeling it might’ve managed to pull the wool over a few more sets of eyes, and distracted folk from at least a couple of its more obvious flaws. Adding shadows to the environments and underneath characters could’ve gone a long way here, where we’re instead left with some particularly monotonous background and floor tile patterns, which can get genuinely tiresome to stare at after a while. Forgoing anything in the way of parallax scrolling effects here on Genesis (save for minimal applications in the second and sixth levels) really does make the stages appear that much flatter, and reinforces the sense that the kingdom you’re meant to save is a fairly dull one — devoid of life, without depth, and a little hard on the eyes at times if we’re being honest. I also have a complaint to lodge against the game’s last stage, specifically: In the original Amiga version, the windows in the background of Zoras’ arena demonstrated a decent little trick where you could see lightning flashing in the background, adding a bit of dramatic flair to your final battle. It’s almost enough to distract you from the fact that Torben forgot to actually animate a rainstorm which it appears they originally wanted to implement, judging from the fact you can still see the static raindrops suspended in mid-air. Naturally, that rain is still stuck in place here on Genesis — appearing as white lines drawn against a pitch-black sky, with no flashes of thunder to distract you from their lack of motion. What a shame: A final battle in the rain really does go a long way in selling the cinematic weight of your action climax.

I reckon what really kills Sword of Sodan’s presentational aspirations here on Genesis though is how dull the sound design is. Between the total lack of music outside of the title screen and the repetitive nature of the looping ambience, players really aren’t given much to pump them up for the excitement of battle. It’s less excusable than ever now that we’ve got the YM2612 going to waste, which could’ve been leveraged to orchestrate a proper soundtrack for your barbarian rage. Not to mention, the sounds of fantasy combat come across as particularly cold and mechanical here — completely unbefitting of the bloody and brutal sword battles taking place. It’s enough to make you want to put the whole game on mute, and crank up your power metal band of choice in order to give the game at least some semblance of energy. I guess that’s the point I’m driving at here with Sword of Sodan’s presentation on console: It all just feels so dull — so completely devoid of the enthusiasm that went into making the Amiga release feel like an arcade game come home. It’s as if Torben convinced himself that the Sega Genesis wasn’t capable of standing up to the home computer on a technical level, and didn’t even bother to test what it could potentially do. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can safely say that the system was capable of some truly impressive technical feats in its own right — of presenting games that absolutely stun with their visuals, and producing soundtracks that bounce around in the heads of players to this very day. Innerprise were fools not to realize the capabilities of the console, and to take full advantage of the power they had on hand. Or perhaps those cartridge constraints we’ve alluded to were the real killer here — keeping them from realizing a more lively vision they may well have initially had for the game, as they struggled to cram in and compress as much as they could manage for an unfamiliar console.

But as we’ve already discussed, a flashy presentation can only go so far in paving over the faults of a fundamentally busted gameplay loop. The central issue of Sword of Sodan is still its underwhelming and unsatisfying combat, which is the very core of the game itself. I reckon it took playing the Genesis conversion of the game to realize one of the major issues that’s been present since the original Amiga release: There’s just no accounting for when enemies are about to attack you, since they don’t demonstrate any obvious tells before striking or have clearly indicated periods of vulnerability (outside of the one miniboss). As such, you can’t prepare yourself to back away from attacks or stop going on the offensive, and have to work to find specific striking distances that you can exploit in order to gain momentary advantages. And given the number of enemies made to attack you simultaneously in this iteration of the game, you’re never made to feel safe while getting your attacks in — always having to watch out for enemies appearing from behind you, or who can attack / walk through their comrades in order to force you into defense. Add to that the fact that you can so easily be caught in inescapable situations where you’re forced to concede health or lives – between flanking enemies and floor hazards – and you’ve got a recipe for a beat ‘em up where you’re the one made to feel like a common goon. The inadequate damage scaling is just the icing on the cake here — the insult on top of the injury that leaves you struggling to take down the most basic of enemies. Playing on Easy mode alleviates some of these pains and gives you more chances to recover from slip-ups, but you’re still made to contend against the same overwhelming odds and treacherous traps.

If there’s one glimmer of hope in Sword of Sodan‘s Genesis conversion – one opportunity the developers had to amend their errors and even the odds in your favor – it’s the revamped potion system. It represents the most major step Innerprise took in a positive direction… and yet, it still falls just short of being fully practical — of giving you the edge you so desperately need in fights. If I could tweak and rework it into something that’d potentially remedy some of the game’s major issues, I’d do as follows: For one, combining multiple potions of the same type should reward you with bigger boosts to hit strength, health recovery, and Magic Zapper damage. If one blue potion recovers a fifth of your health; have two recover a full two-thirds, three completely heal you, and four additionally grant you some form of long-form damage reduction. By combining multiple orange potions, you should be able to unleash some sort of screen-clearing smart bomb, or conjure other forms of magic attacks that serve to target multiple enemies at once. What I would wanna see are more possible combinations in general, which can unlock a range of different effects and bonuses. Maybe one combo could allow you to hover slightly above the ground, in order to bypass pitfalls and spikes? Another could let you attack with your own projectiles, which emerge from your sword like Link with full health in the original Legend of Zelda. If we really wanna get wild here, why not give players the option to summon their mount, which they could use to deal increased damage and avoid certain attacks for a period of time? The possibilities here are endless, and each one could well prove a practical alternative to players in overcoming obstacles they’d otherwise struggle with. That’s the key to this, here: The potions should never be absolutely necessary in order to progress, but a player clever enough to conserve them should be rewarded for their foresight.

To that end, I still contend that having some form of defensive option available to your character at all times would be a major boon to the game. In removing the shields from Brodan’s and Shardan’s sprites, Torben can be seen effectively doubling down on the decision to give you no means of protecting yourself, and I struggle to fathom why the team would be so vehemently opposed to the idea. With the benefit of two additional buttons on the Genesis controller – which can each be used in conjunction with the D-pad in any variety of ways – it’s not as if a lack of possible inputs can be blamed for this. And even then, parrying would still make for a fine way of deflecting strikes and giving players an opportunity to riposte. I suppose what it all comes down to is Innerprise not realizing all the ways they could iterate and innovate on the source material — being too afraid to deviate too far from what they still held as “sacred” in the original Amiga release. And so, the opportunity to make more in the way of significant changes to the game is squandered, in favor of dutifully preserving all the flaws [and precious few of the positives]. I’m so curious to know the thinking behind all this — what decision-making went into determining what they felt needed changing versus what they thought was worth keeping intact? How many ideas for alterations were pitched, discussed, and ultimately decided against; and for what reasons, be they technical restrictions or philosophical disagreements? The ingredients were all available here to produce a competent beat ‘em up: They were just cooked and prepared in a way that isn’t harmonious, and which ultimately leaves a bitter aftertaste.

So, here’s the big question left to answer at the end of all this: Is Sword of Sodan a better game on Amiga or Genesis? While the original would certainly come out ahead in a beauty contest, and its more simple / straightforward gameplay has its appeal; it lacks in the options it presents to players, and wastes so much of its time on unnecessary novelties. The Genesis version, by comparison, has more complexity and depth of mechanics; but it can prove a legitimate eyesore in spots, has an obsession with throwing too many enemies at you, and is missing some features and stages from the original game. I believe the conversion to be the more unfairly difficult game of the two as well, which could be considered as a significant mark against it. But in spite of all that, I think I still might award the crown to this 16-bit rendition! And I reckon it owes its narrow win entirely to the reworked potion system, which empowers players and gives them more choices during combat than was possible on the Amiga. It goes to show how reworking a single aspect of a game can compensate for shortcomings in other aspects, and actually work to fix flaws without directly addressing / reimagining the systems that produce those issues in the first place. Granted, the fancy potion system here doesn’t do quite enough to fix up a game that’s still fundamentally busted — to help it rise to a level that I’d personally rate as “passable.” But it at least demonstrates some hope of an ambition on the part of Innerprise — some form of attempt made at improving on the original release. And perhaps I’m just keen to applaud that effort, and rate it higher than the misguided efforts of the Amiga version to produce a quickly-obsolescent visual tour de force. For all its faults, I’ve still gotta give the nod to the version of the game that prioritized gameplay first, for as flat as it may well land.

“And So the Cycle Ends.”

“And dark within our Mother Earth, there comes the rising flood.”
North American Genesis release, back cover.

With Sword of Sodan‘s launch on the Sega Genesis, it was submitted to critics for review across the various gaming magazines of the era. And where the original Amiga release had been treated somewhat preferably for its pretty graphics, few writers on the Genesis beat would be quite so kind to it. While some would acknowledge the presentation as still being quite good for the console, almost all of them concurred that it failed to provide compelling gameplay in equal measure. Of course, most magazines still relied on scoring scales that averaged together individual ratings for graphics, sound, gameplay, and other various factors; so their final ratings would still be bolstered by the high marks given to its presentation. This is to explain why certain reviews would be written to condemn games as not being worth a consumer’s money, while curiously awarding them the percentage equivalent of three out of five stars (anywhere between 40 and 60%). Case in point: Matthew Regan’s 59%-scoring review for Mean Machines UK, which is clear-cut in his recommendation that consumers steer clear of Sword of Sodan: “Whoops! Electronic Arts have a reputation for quality gear, and unfortunately Sword of Sodan doesn’t quite live up to expectations. The graphics are superb and the sound isn’t bad, but the gameplay is sadly lacking in any sort of variety whatsoever. It’s just a case of walk along and cut things up with your enormous sword. The potion mixing idea is quite novel, but otherwise Sword of Sodan is a tepid beat ’em up effort which should be avoided.”^[19]

The UK’s Sega Power magazine put an anonymous reviewer on the case, who seemed to take an almost personal level of umbrage with the fact that Sword of Sodan was being sold on looks alone [by their estimation]. In their 45%-scoring review (per their ‘Power-Factor’ rating metric), they take the time to assert that the original Amiga release “was poorly received, despite the good graphics, because of the poor gameplay”^[20] — a curious bit of revisionist history, based on the bulk of contemporary reviews I found. But aside from this somewhat contentious claim, the rest of their review is largely spot-on: “Well, it looks better than it plays. At first it seems like very simple fare, and it generally is. […] Sadly, this is just what you get on the Mega Drive — good graphics and sub standard gameplay with little or nothing to keep you playing. Save your money for something that doesn’t just rely on cosmetic appeal to sell the game.” But they don’t stop there: Included on the same page as the review is a self-contained manifesto of sorts, wherein the editor goes on to condemn the industry as a whole for its obsession with pushing presentation above all else, and calls on consumers to wise up to marketing tactics — to realize that graphics are not an indicator of the quality of gameplay, and to be more discerning in their purchases. Truly a forward-thinking call to action, only slightly marred by the fact that it’s transparently a tactic to convince readers that only Sega Power’s reviews are to be trusted. For a contrasting review, we go to C.T. Aslan on behalf of GamePro, who saw fit to award Sword of Sodan’s conversion a 22 out of 25: “Sword of Sodan is a seven-level, gory, horizontally-scrolling, fight-to-the-death cart designed for gamers who don’t like to read instruction manuals before getting down to business. This one-player cart imitates the best sword ‘n sorcery arcade games perfectly — including the realistic grunts and groans and the large, colorful characters that gush blood when they die. […] If it’s blood and guts you want, Sword of Sodan could be your cup of plasma.”^[21] You know, maybe that Sega Power writer was on to something after all?

What became apparent to me at this point is that despite how middlingly Sword of Sodan’s Genesis conversion may well have been received, what it truly lacked was staying power — a level of notoriety that would see it referred to as an all-time awful release in the history of the console. Between North America and Europe, most writers who saw fit to review the title promptly did their duty, and seemed to just as quickly forget it ever even existed. In this way, it mirrored the fleeting acclaim that the original Amiga release received; where it was applauded on launch as a technical marvel, before everyone immediately moved on from it and never saw fit to mention it again. In turn, it eventually faded from the memories of most consumers as well. There was really only one region in the world which would keep the torch lit for the maligned title, and continue to hold it as a cartridge of significant infamy in the years to follow: Japan. Thanks to the legendary ‘BEEP! Mega Drive’ magazine and their long-running “Reader Race” rankings, Sword of Sodan’s score would be updated and printed in every subsequent issue of the publication, until the day they discontinued their 16-bit coverage — taking up a near-permanent residence in the bottom-most slot of the charts from nearly the day it entered contention. It had to occasionally fight to take its throne back from the likes of Rastan Saga II, Wakusei Woodstock: Funky Horror Band, and XDR: X-Dazedly Ray; but ultimately, it would claim the magazine’s all-time record for the most appearances at the bottom of their rankings, having occupied the slot a whopping twenty-six times (concluding with a final score of 2.8954 and a ranking of 479th place). In commemorating this momentous achievement, an editor for the magazine dedicated a special declaration to their reigning king of kusogē: “The ultimate war of the emperor’s blood reaches its climax at last. At the end of the fierce battle, the last person standing on the mat was our emperor, Sodan. Their signature reads ‘S.O.S. (Sword of Sodan).’ […] It reigned as emperor 26 times. We will never forget this great record.”^[22]

But what makes this feat all the more impressive is the fact that BEEP!’s own panel of reviewers had initially rated the game as a largely unspectacular affair, with a cumulative score of 4.25 out of 10 — hardly the sort of scoring that typically inspires much attention from readers.^[23] None of the language of the brief review blurbs seems to indicate that any of the panel felt particularly strongly about Sword of Sodan one way or the other, either: Okada Mayumi would write that Sodan “might be worth the tuition fee if you’re interested in cross-cultural studies, but I would hesitate to buy it just for fun.” One ‘Superman Baromi (‘超人バロムー’)’ would contend as follows: “As you can see from the photos, the still pictures are impressive. However, even if it looks good, there is no background music and the progression is monotonous. There are other things I would want to fix, but all I can do is laugh.” The final word on the game came from writer ‘Uncle Jam (ジャムおじさん),’ who comes the closest to suggesting that there may be something strangely compelling about the cartridge: “It’s a game with a gritty atmosphere. The game balance is a mess, so I can’t recommend it much, but I was somehow glued to my screen nonetheless. The sound of screaming [in the game] still lingers in my ears.” The disparity between the critical and consumer response here should demonstrate that the audience’s love and/or hate for Sword of Sodan was completely organic — a sentiment they developed on their own, without the magazine having to instruct or rally them. Readers who closely followed the bottom of the charts clearly took their roles as bad game connoisseurs quite seriously, and chose titles to root for and elect as their “Heavenly Kings of Kusogē.” Some even recount instances where members of the community banded together to influence the polling, such as the self-proclaimed “Sodan’s Guard (ソダン親衛隊),” who would submit 10-point ratings for the game in an attempt to keep it out of the bottom spot.^[24]

Clearly, there was something about Sword of Sodan that inspired dedication to it among Japanese players, and which guaranteed it a dubious distinction in the annals of their gaming history. Some remained committed to the cause long-term, so that nearly three decades later, there were still a number of them who’d attempt to petition to have Sword of Sodan added to the selection of games on Sega’s official ‘Mega Drive Mini’ in Japan — contending that it was “historically significant” enough to warrant being preserved in this fashion. The outcry was evidently vocal enough that the subject of Sodan actually had to be addressed during promotional interviews for the device, fielded by the producers of the console representing Sega. In the course of a GAME Watch’s interview and write-up for the console (conducted by Katsuta Tetsuya), Executive Manager Miyazaki Hiroyuki was directly asked why “the legendary kusogē ‘Sword of Sodan’ wasn’t included,” prompting the following response / summation: “Sword of Sodan will be a game that will remain in your heart for Mega Drive fans. An action game set in a fantasy world born in North America, the operability is extremely poor, and the gameplay is monotonous with enemies attacking from the left and right. It’s a ‘legendary shit game’ where you just have to force your way forward. […] When developing the ‘Mega Drive Mini,’ the development team thought, ‘Isn’t ‘Sodan’ a game that can’t be ignored when talking about the era of the Mega Drive?’ So why wasn’t it recorded? It was an ethical issue. ‘Sword of Sodan’ has graphic gore, and even a CERO: Z (18+) content rating. The ‘Mega Drive Mini’ is rated CERO: B (12+), and it would be wrong to limit users to Z only for this software, so ‘Sword of Sodan’ was removed from the list of recording software candidates.”^[25] A believable enough excuse, and a fine way to avoid having to plainly state that Sega weren’t looking to fill out their system’s library with knowingly terrible games just to play along with a joke.

Somehow, I doubt that all this odd fervor for Sword of Sodan in Japan translated to anything significant in the way of sales within the region. I don’t have sales data available to me, but I reckon it probably wasn’t a smash hit in North America or Europe, either. By all accounts, Electronic Arts didn’t seem to promote the release at all, and neither did Sega within Japan (where they served as the publisher for the title in that territory). If Dark Castle’s Genesis conversion to come should serve as an indication of EA’s practices at the time, and how they likely treated Sword of Sodan; they had shoved it out the door as cheaply as they could, gambled on it somehow catching on through word of mouth / association with the prestige of its original computer version, and quickly sold the license off to the first bidder who was willing to take it off their hands in the resulting wake of its failure in the market. I suppose there’s something to be said for the fact that EA were willing to take up these sorts of titles in the first place and give them a chance on Sega’s console, but they clearly weren’t interested in supporting them beyond that bare minimum of initial effort. In the case of Sodan, it seems like Torben Bakager would buy the rights to the game back shortly after the cartridge release, assuming he hadn’t just held onto the IP during his company’s arrangement with EA. In either case, he’d continue to hold the property in his hands even after Innerprise Software wound down in 1992. Their business would slow significantly after Sword of Sodan’s release in 1990, to the point where they only released two more games in the following two years of operation: A commissioned conversion of Ms. Pac-Man to the Genesis in 1991 (on behalf of Tengen / Atari), and the release of an original title Cyberblast across the Amiga and Mac in 1992. Clearly, none of their titles had proven profitable enough to help sustain the studio, and Innerprise would become yet another statistic on the list of defunct companies that Søren and Torben left in their wake.

At this point, you may be asking yourself: “Is there any company or project that Søren and/or Torben had a hand in that didn’t implode catastrophically?” I can report that there is, in fact, one: The ‘Skærmtrolden Hugo’ franchise — better known to some by its English-language branding, ‘Hugo the Troll.’ If we have any Danes reading this article right now, I imagine that y’all are probably leaping out of your chairs and hollering at your screen. For those of you not in the know, Hugo is a cartoon troll who was originally developed as part of a children’s TV game show (TV2’s Skærmtrolden Hugo) produced by Denmark’s SilverRock Productions; wherein viewers could call in during the live program for the chance to take control of Hugo, guide him through a computer-animated virtual adventure using their phone’s keypad as a controller, and potentially score fabulous prizes to be delivered to their home address. The show became an instant hit, wound up spawning countless spin-off programs across the world (several of which are still on the air), and birthed a licensing bonanza; including toys, novelizations, and dozens of video games. Believe it or not, the console / handheld game adaptations aren’t even the part where Søren and Torben first got involved with the Hugo franchise (though Torben would later contribute as an artist on a couple of those): They actually got hired on to contribute to the original TV game show in 1992; where Torben was brought in as an artist / animator, and Søren had a hand in programming the gameplay segments [which originally ran on a pair of Amiga 3000 computers].^[13b] As a matter of fact, Søren had actually been involved with SilverRock since 1988, where he had contributed to development of a prior program by the name of OsWALD — another piece of phone-operated software intended for live broadcasting, which served as a predecessor to Skærmtrolden Hugo.

From what I can gather, Søren likely reached out to Torben at some point in 1990 or ‘91 – probably near the start of when Innerprise was beginning to collapse – and helped him land another graphic artist gig working with him at SilverRock, who at this point were primarily focused on developing product tie-in games for Danish brands. You can find a title that the pair worked on together during this time by the name of Guldkorn Expressen: An advergame for the ‘Guldkorn’ line of breakfast cereal produced by the company OTA A/S, wherein you control a train being conducted by the product’s cartoon bear mascot and pick loose boxes of the cereal along the way — avoiding crashing into hazards all the while. It’s certainly nothing spectacular, but it does have a particularly amusing screen that displays if you happen to crash the train, where the bear looks at you disapprovingly while sitting next to the crumpled wreckage of their locomotive. SilverRock would go on to develop a number of other advergames between 1990 and ‘92, until Hugo took off and changed the studio’s fortunes overnight; leading to their re-assigning Søren and Torben to production on Skærmtrolden Hugo, and the company eventually rebranding as ITE ApS (Interactive Television Entertainment). And that’s how a duo of Danes went from developing the Amiga’s bloodiest beat ‘em up to helping animate a cartoon troll for children’s television in the span of just four years! But the two still weren’t quite done with Sword of Sodan just yet: In early 1993, they were presented with an opportunity to take another stab at the IP, after an expression of interest from another one of their former co-workers. This is where Julian Lefay re-enters the story, still representing that scrappy little upstart Bethesda Softworks — by this point an established software developer and publisher, on the back of their successful Wayne Gretzky Hockey franchise and a series of first-person shooters based on the Terminator license.**

At this point in time, Bethesda were evidently looking to establish a foothold in the Scandinavian market, after having firmly entrenched themselves within North America and in other swathes of Europe.^[13c] Julian likely figured that a new Sword of Sodan title would probably be a good fit for that territory, as well as picking up sales based on a perceived value to its name recognition — believing the series’ reputation would work to attract consumers, rather than repel them at this point. Naturally, developing a Sword of Sodan sequel meant that Søren and Torben would have to be brought on-board; not only for the fact that Torben still held the rights to the license, but also because it’d lend the late follow-up game an air of legacy and legitimacy. (The fact that the three were all still friends with one another / sworn to help line up work for each other was probably another major contributing factor here, as well.) There was only one small problem: While Julian was still situated in the United States, Søren and Torben had since returned to Denmark by this point — disillusioned by their respective stints at Discovery and Innerprise, and probably content to stay put for a while now that they were back home. The solution then was simple, for a company that was already looking to expand: Bethesda would just go ahead and establish a new office / department for them in Brønshøj, Copenhagen. Branded as ‘Media Technology Scandinavia,’ the studio was formally incorporated in August of 1993, and allotted a team of six employees — three permanent staff (including Søren, Torben, and Julian — the latter of whom flew back to Denmark at this point), and three more employees described as “loosely affiliated.”^[26] Their mission was simple: To develop ‘Sword of Sodan 2’ in time for a November 1993 release date. In a rather curious move though, the team weren’t assigned a producer to oversee their deadlines or enforce quality control, as Bethesda’s founder Christopher Weaver would explain was a part of his personal philosophy: “We operate on a policy of hiring the best people. If you trust them, they won’t let you down.” Let’s see just how well that worked out for ‘em.

We actually have a fairly solid idea of what ‘Sword of Sodan 2’ was supposed to entail in terms of gameplay, despite the fact it ultimately never saw release: Across two Danish-language interviews conducted with the Media Technology Scandinavia team – promotional articles published in the pages of Ekstra Bladet and HiScore Professionel – Søren and Torben would lay out their visions for the sequel, as well as granting journalists access to their concept art and previews of their prototypes. Evidently, it would have acknowledged the Genesis’ version of the Sodan legend as canon; as the Northern Kingdom is referred to as “King Pallas’ land,” which you would obviously be tasked again with rescuing.^[26b] This time around, the threat would’ve come in the form of “two armies led by army commanders on sky chariots,” who must be forced out of their occupation of seventeen levels (“eleven cities and six castles”) comprising the game’s world. Apparently, you could choose to play the game in one of two ways: One mode which would take you through all the levels in a traditional linear fashion, and another which operated sort of like a strategy game; where any of the levels could be selected from a world map, to be contested and traded back-and-forth between you and the CPU over the course of the campaign. To divide and conquer in this mode, you’d command four different player characters who move across the map representing your own army; each with their own individual stats (including Strength, Speed, and Intelligence), as well as unique dispositions and phobias. In example: Shardan is described as suffering from a “fear of heights,” which would’ve factored into lowering her stats / making her less effective within the castle stages.^[13d] There was also intended to be a day and night cycle that’d additionally affect your combat ability, where battles in the dark would’ve negatively impacted your strength (either as result of limited visibility or character tiredness, I presume).

If all had gone according to plan, the game would’ve featured thirty different characters; between your party, the game’s enemies, and possibly some other small assortment of friendly NPCs. This certainly would’ve necessitated a lot of work put toward animating this cast of characters, which Torben saw as an opportunity to improve on his previous efforts: “Not all of the animations in the first Sodan game were equally good. But it’s also been more than five years, and this time we’re trying to set new boundaries.”^[26c] To this end, additional hires in the graphics department included Rene Bidstrup and Lars Mortensen, who Torben had poached from the Hugo team to assist him here. Another goal was to give “a bit of a Disney touch” to the visuals, in the form of brighter and more colorful palettes. Of course, this was somehow meant to pair with the same level of gratuitous gore that had been seen in its predecessors, as indicated by Søren’s describing the process of animating decapitations: “In the original Sodan, you could chop an enemy’s head off, sending it flying through the air. It looked pretty good. We’ll probably do something similar here, but we haven’t decided exactly how we’ll do it yet.”^[13e] Other technical considerations discussed within the interview included how many frames of animation they were allocating to particular moves (“For a figure to walk in a natural way requires ten images. A jump can be completed with four images. The advanced series of strikes with the sword requires more”), Torben’s process of scanning traditionally-drawn art into the computer so that they could be touched up in the ‘Brilliance’ graphic editor, and the fact that the game was being designed with releases across no less than six different consoles already in mind; including the Amiga 1200, CD-32, PC, Mac, 3DO and Atari Jaguar.^[26d] You certainly couldn’t fault the team for not being ambitious enough, here.

“More hits required for each enemy.”
Group photo of the team assigned to ‘Sword of Sodan 2’s development.

Of course, those lofty ambitions probably proved to be a bit too much for the team to manage, as ‘Sword of Sodan 2’ never actually materialized. No news or announcement of its cancellation was ever formally issued to the press, as far as I can tell: At some point past its originally slotted November release date, the game’s development was just quietly shut down, along with the whole of the Media Technology Scandinavia branch. I can only imagine that the team was failing to make any sort of significant progress on the title past a certain point, and that Bethesda ultimately came to realize that sinking any more money into the project wasn’t actually going to pay off in the long run. (Perhaps they should have remembered this lesson when they had to deal with the tortured development of Rogue Warrior?) To that point, they had actually been presented with a rather compelling piece of evidence in the course of 1993, which would’ve confirmed just how far the reputation of the Sodan branding had fallen: A budget re-release of the original game on Amiga, which was met with unanimous critical condemnation following its launch in April of that year, and which likely failed financially as well. By that point, the truth of the original title’s fluke success had become clearly evident, as reviewers had made it clear that presentation wasn’t the be-all end-all of what made a compelling video game; leaving Bethesda to question exactly what Søren’s team was actually capable of, and determining that they weren’t likely to meet the goals they had been setting for their ambitious sequel. For the sake of thoroughness, let’s go ahead and cover the reception to that budget release here as well, so we can see the difference that five years’ time made in how magazines saw fit to cover the original game.

Publishing for the re-release was handled by Global Software — a budget label operating out of Europe, who Bethesda likely licensed Sword of Sodan out to in order to generate some anticipation for the then still-upcoming sequel. Being entirely identical to the original Discovery Software release, however, critics and audiences had long since moved on from the five year-old game. Reviewers made their feelings known in the pages of their respective publications, which pulled no punches and granted no leniency to the antiquated beat ‘em up, even with its reduced £7.99 price point. For Amiga Format, writer James Leach saw fit to award the game a 52%, criticizing the game’s prioritizing of presentation over gameplay: “Into this mayhem walks you, a character with a large sword. Sorry, that should be a large character with a massive sword. […] It’s all a bit of a mess, really — it looks nice but plays poorly. Pity, but the graphics have overtaken the gameplay, and the speed has suffered.”^[27] David Upchurch on behalf of ‘The One Amiga’ shared similar sentiment in a 34%-scoring review, while seeming to delight in slamming the game as a contender for one of the worst Amiga titles of all time: “Sword of Sodan is one of the lamest excuses for a horizontally-scrolling slash-’em-up I’ve ever had the misfortune to endure. […] Okay, so the sprites are a bit crap. So what? Who cares as long as the game plays okay? Well, no-one, including me. However, the animation is just the icing on a cake made of appalling-bad gameplay. Your warrior has just three combat moves at his or her disposal and so the fighting gets very boring very quickly, as one can imagine. […] Don’t be swayed by the half-decent static screenshots because Sword of Sodan is crap, pure and simple.”^[28] Somewhat amusingly, Torben’s own Battle Squadron (also re-released by Global as a budget title at around the same time) would be reviewed on the very same page, and earn itself a far more complimentary 90% from the publication.

For a final take on Sodan’s return to Amiga, we turn to Mark Winstanley at Amiga Power, who’d award the game its lowest score yet in the form of a 29%. After bemoaning how much time he spends staring at a TV screen in order to review these games [compared to how little he’s tasked with actually writing about them], and moving past a protracted (and self-admittedly “misguided”) comparison to Street Fighter II and its large character sprites, Winstanley finally gets to the core of his issues with Sword of Sodan: “Although it’s masquerading as an arcade adventure, it’s really just a pretty looking beat-’em-up with even prettier scrolling backgrounds. The problem is that, with the characters taking up so much of the screen, there’s very little space left for them to (metaphorically speaking, of course) stretch their legs. Pretty much all you can do with your warrior (male or female) is walk around, swing the sword, kneel, or swing the sword while kneeling. […] Great big fat and juicy graphics do not a fun game make. And they can’t hide paper-thin gameplay either. This really is a big pile of crap. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”^[29] Miraculously, Sword of Sodan somehow managed to avoid featuring earlier in the same issue in a segment titled “What’s The Worst Amiga Game You’ve Ever Played?” This piece managed to bring together a number of established industry veterans to talk shit on some of their least favorite games; including Mindscape’s Phil Harrison calling Ocean Software’s Epic “quite probably the most over-hyped and overdue game ever,” Mike Montgomery of The Bitmap Brothers declaring that Mastertronic’s Chopper X as “the worst game ever,” and a young Peter Molyneux deriding Cinemaware’s Defender of the Crown as nothing less than “a con.”^[30] Oh, Peter: If only you knew what folk would be saying about you thirty years in the future…

Believe it or not, this sobering reception to the Amiga re-release wasn’t quite enough to dissuade Bethesda from giving Sword of Sodan one last shot in the market. At some point prior to canceling the sequel and disbanding their Scandinavian studio, Søren and Torben apparently knocked out a Macintosh port of the original game for the publisher (they’re the only two names that appear in the credits of the conversion), released in either March or April of 1994. It’s possible that the pair had completed work on this version of the game earlier in their brief tenure with Bethesda, and that the company had just been sitting on it all this time; maybe hoping to include it as part of the sequel’s Macintosh release (or to at least launch it at around the same time), before ultimately shoving it out the door in the hopes of recouping some of their investment. In either case, the Mac version is intended to faithfully recreate the Amiga original, but manages to fall short in a few very noticeable ways; despite the benefit of more recent / ostensibly more powerful hardware, and the pair of developers having since moved to Apple computers as their primary workstations for development on the planned sequel.^[26e] For one thing, it’s not a content-complete port: Same as in the Genesis conversion, “In the Heart of the Forest” is missing in action again, despite the fact the game still spans three floppy diskettes. I’d have to guess that graphic compression for the Mac was more challenging than on Amiga? (Either that, or Søren and Torben just really came to hate that stage.) This may have been additionally compounded by a need to present the game with two different graphics options as a matter of system compatibility — giving users the choice between 16-color and 256-color modes, selected in accordance with what their model of computer was capable of outputting.

Needless to say, the 16-color mode is decidedly lacking, stripping the backgrounds and characters of their already limited perceptions of depth. The graveyard level in particular really suffers for this lack of additional colors, as it struggles to paint the stage’s darker tones with the allotted palette. I suppose it’s better than folk with older models of computers not being able to play the game at all? Regardless of how many colors it’s afforded, Sword of Sodan on Macintosh is completely missing most of the technical tricks that Søren had incorporated into the Amiga version; including the scrolling effects on the game’s title screen and map transitions, parallax scrolling within backgrounds, the lightning effects seen in the graveyard stage, and a number of special effects tied to the battle against Zoras. Clearly, there was a struggle here with figuring out how to make these tricks work on the Mac, as Søren wasn’t afforded the time to get properly acquainted with the hardware. (That probably didn’t bode too well for work on ‘Sword of Sodan 2’s Mac version, either.) But perhaps the most unfortunate change made to this version of the game is to its enemy damage scaling, which has been buffed to the point of being utterly ridiculous. See, the classic health bar on the side of the screen has been removed from the port, and replaced with a numeric indicator at the top of the screen — where ‘Energy’ is represented on a scale with a maximum value of 10. This would be totally fine, if not for the fact that enemy attacks all deal four damage to you apiece, meaning that you now go down in just three hits from the likes of the lowly pikemen (instead of the eight or nine it takes on Amiga). This, in turn, makes the game roughly three times more challenging — downright impossible for most, I imagine. And without the benefit of selectable difficulty modes seen on Genesis, you’re just stuck with a completely unfair level of damage being dealt to you, where so many hits are still completely unavoidable. With this change alone, Macintosh Sword of Sodan secures its spot as the worst version of the game by far, to where the Genesis conversion shines by comparison..

I have to imagine distribution for the Macintosh release was quite limited, seeing as I could only track down a single review for it. It comes to us courtesy of Margaret Chan for the ‘South China Morning Post’ — a publication not exactly renowned for its comprehensive video games coverage, but which dutifully covered the beat nonetheless. Though there’s no score attached to the review, Margaret’s writing gets the point across clearly enough: “Bethesda Softworks has gone with the worst scaling algorithm ever seen in Macintosh games. This results in some chunky graphics. Most experienced Mac gamers might find this too uninteresting because the combat just comprises swinging a sword until the enemy advances into it. You can easily kill them all by using the same method. After you have used up your five lives, the game is over but you won’t be able to re-start play from the point you ‘died’ as it doesn’t offer a save function to the players. The music and sound effects are not as good as most Macintosh games currently available in the market.”^[31] If plans for the sequel were still in motion at the time the Mac conversion released, Bethesda would’ve surely scrapped them after this fiasco: Seeing their star developers fail to bring their five year-old game to modern hardware may well have been the last nail in the coffin for the doomed endeavor, and possibly led directly to the dissolvement of Bethesda’s Scandinavian interests. And with that, the Sword of Sodan story finally draws to its close: Having been granted more chances than they probably deserved – across three separate systems, over a span of five years – it was time for Søren and company to accept that the market simply wasn’t interested in the product they had dedicated so much time and money to peddling… Well, outside of Japan, anyway. But I’m not entirely sure that their particular brand of “enthusiasm” for Sodan necessarily counts, here.

Actually, that brings us to one last point on the subject of Sword of Sodan: Remember that Apple IIGS conversion we mentioned earlier? Well, for whatever reason, a number of Apple enthusiasts sure did; where some went as far to spend the following thirty years tirelessly attempting to track down a working prototype of it. Okay, so perhaps that’s something of an exaggeration: A few folk in the decades since had certainly expressed a wish for it to be discovered and dumped for the public, which resulted in a three-level “demo” being unearthed some time in the mid-2000s. Similar to the demo for the Amiga version seen on the Discovery Software Demo Disk, this program (circa 1989) presented an automated playthrough of three of the game’s stages, demonstrating what the IIGS hardware was capable of. Attempts were made between 2009 and 2010 by France’s ‘Brutal Deluxe Software’ to make the demo actually playable — to hack in player control, and fill in some of the missing gaps in game logic. But those efforts seemed to fizzle out past a certain point, and left interest in this version of the game to fizzle out with it. And then from out of seemingly nowhere came a breakthrough in 2018: Jimmy Huey – the Visionware employee who had been tasked with completing the conversion back in the day – stepped forward in order to release a nearly-finished prototype he had been sitting on for nearly three decades! Having gotten in touch with enthusiasts in the Apple IIGS scene, he was able to send the surviving floppies containing the still-unfinished game to one Rich Walter — a software engineer and preservationist, who was able to archive the contents before the disks deteriorated. This in turn led to the archived application being released through a IIGS fansite, and made playable for those capable of emulating the hardware [or loading the program on a genuine machine]. And yeah, at the end of the day, we’re talking here about folk getting excited to play a half-finished version of Sword of Sodan, of all games. But there really is something to be said about the power of preservation, and for the fact that so much work went into rescuing such a niche piece of gaming history.

All that leaves us with is the “where are they now” files on the prominent developers behind Sword of Sodan, where we’ll start with the titular Sodan himself, Søren Grønbech. Now, if ‘Sword of Sodan 2’ had actually come to pass, one of the next games on the docket for Media Technology Scandinavia was meant to be a conversion of Søren’s own Datastorm to further console and computer platforms.^[26f] But seeing as the studio was shut down before then, the Datastorm conversions never came to pass, likely leaving Søren doubly dejected by how the whole Bethesda situation had played out. As a matter of fact, I get the feeling that Grønbech would probably rather forget this entire phase of his career, as he spent the next several years pretending as if none of it had ever even happened. In recounting his post-80s period for an interview with the ‘In Media Res’ project: “After I got back from USA in 1989 (doing Sword of Sodan and Datastorm), it was over for me. I sold my computers and started to do other thing for a while.”^[1b] While we can definitively state that this timeline provided here doesn’t ring true, it’s likely that it reflects what Søren got up to shortly after the Media Technology work fell through, where he likely felt burnt out on the entire business of game development for a time. He falls off the map for a time here; until picking up a job with a Danish cable provider between 1998 and 2000, getting into the technical consultant business, and eventually establishing his own company ‘Sodan Design’ in 2001. It’s during this period where he positions himself as an IT and programming contractor, catches up on the modern advancements of the computer industry, and picks up work across various tech companies.

In 2012, Søren would establish his next company, ‘Build a World ApS’: An initiative program with the goal of producing virtual worlds and simulations for use in Danish classrooms, with the goal of teaching students to learn how to design within 3D applications for themselves. From video that exists demonstrating their flagship application in action, it seems to crib many of its notes from Minecraft’s style of blocky voxels and simplified architecture, which would allow school-age children to quickly pick up on how to create buildings and sculpt the landscapes provided to them; typically for the purposes of recreating their schools and hometowns within the virtual space, as well as accounting for how services like electricity and water are distributed through infrastructure. All in all, an admirable initiative, which I’m sure students appreciated as a means of breaking up their traditional curriculum and lesson plans. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the company ever quite took off in the ways that Søren had hoped, or was adapted on any sort of major scale across Denmark: At a point in November of 2022, the company’s website went offline, and Grønbech indicated the end of his involvement with it on his LinkedIn profile. Having since shuttered Sodan Design as well, he now works as a full-time ‘Infrastructure Architect’ for the CIMT (Center for IT og MedicoTeknologi), where he contributes to maintaining his country’s healthcare system by enabling medical technology to function. I’d certainly wish him well in that pursuit, and hope it brings him a sense of fulfillment that the games industry never quite seemed to afford him.

Moving on to Torben Bakager Larsen: The Danish designer continued on in the games industry in the years to follow, including contributions to several of Hugo’s home game adaptations (1996’s Hugo for DOS, its conversion to PlayStation in 1998, and a further Windows port in 2002). He’d stick around with Bethesda for a while longer as well, working in capacity as a contracted artist across The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II — Daggerfall and Protector on the Atari Jaguar. There was an eight-month stint at The LEGO Group in 1996, which I imagine being a matter of compulsory part-time employment for Danes along the same lines as their military conscription. From there, he’s seemed to bounce between consultancy gigs in the telecommunications field, which I imagine comprises the bulk of his proper employment post-2000s. But there’s actually been one games company that he’s managed to actively maintain since 1987 — which continues to exist in some capacity to this very day: Cope-Com. Yes, both Torben and Martin B. Pendersen have managed to keep the brand alive for all this time, in order to “preserve and support [their] 2 classic vertical shooters Hybris and Battle Squadron” (as per the company’s website). In the years since, they’ve converted Battle Squadron and Hybris to the likes of Android, iOS, and Windows; keeping their legacies alive, and touting them as the “World’s best retro shooter(s)!” In other words: They’ve been unable to come up with any new game ideas for the past thirty years now, and are content at this point to ride the nostalgia circuit into the ground. Like, it’s great that folk who have fond memories of these titles have a means of buying / downloading them to their smartphones on a whim; but past a certain point, are they actually engaging any new players with these re-releases? Is anyone getting turned on to these games in the 21st century who weren’t already intimately familiar with them back in the 20th? I suppose that might not matter much to them though, and that they’re just doing it for the love of the hobby at this point, which I can’t really knock.

Which brings us to Julian Lefay: By this point, you obviously realize that the Bethesda Softworks we’ve been mentioning is one and the same as the present-day publisher for franchises including DOOM, Fallout, and of course, The Elder Scrolls. Say what you will about them, but they have absolutely established themselves as a pillar of the industry, and are likely to continue being a major player in the decades to come. And much of that success is owed to that Elder Scrolls series, which Julian has been described as no less than the “father” of. It was Julian who suggested that Bethesda adapt their office Dungeon & Dragons campaign into its own video game franchise — who coined the “Elder Scrolls” branding, established key details of the world, and led programming on the first entry; The Elder Scrolls: Arena. With that title’s success came its first sequel – Daggerfall – on which Julian served as project lead, programmer, and designer. He’d reprise those same roles in developing An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire; before apparently getting passed over as lead on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, getting disillusioned with the company’s new corporate structure and culture, and leaving Bethesda to pursue outside opportunities.^[32] Chris Weaver apparently had to beg Julian to come back to the company to serve as a consultant on Morrowind, which he did before leaving the company once again and mostly retiring from the AAA games industry. You can still see him referenced in almost all the Elder Scrolls entries to follow, as ‘Julianos’ – the God of Wisdom and Logic – is one of the “Nine Divines,” whose names are known to all denizens of Tamriel.

Since leaving Bethesda, Julian has mostly applied his programming skills towards educational games — a genre which he freely admits he isn’t particularly passionate about. In his own words: “I don’t care what I program, honestly. In other words, I don’t care about the product and I don’t care about my job, but I care greatly about my work.”^[33] Inspiring stuff. At the same time, he’s still invited to contribute to a variety of different projects and titles by industry folk who continue to hold him in high regard: He apparently worked for a short time on the development of Skullgirls, for which he didn’t stick around long enough to earn a credit within the game itself, but which still makes for an amusing bit of trivia nonetheless. The biggest news involving him in recent years is his association with the studio ‘Once Lost Games’ since 2019, where he has been working alongside fellow industry veterans Ted Peterson and Vijay Lakshman (both formerly of Bethesda Softworks) to develop the upcoming RPG ‘The Wayward Realms;’ as they strive to “restore scope, choice, consequence and role-playing” to the genre (as per the company’s Twitter bio). As of December 2022, the company is still active on social media, and development on their game is presumably still active as well. Whether or not the game ultimately materializes is still yet to be seen, but something tells me that Julian has a better shot of successfully driving its development than Søren or Torben would in his position. Needless to say, Lefay’s legacy in the games industry is quite firmly established at this point: Of the three lead developers responsible for Sword of Sodan, Julian is the one who went on to make the smartest bets and contribute to the most iconic games. Not too shabby for only having composed two or three songs for that original Amiga release, eh?

And with that, we’ve just about put a wrap on the legend of Sword of Sodan. Something tells me that we won’t be seeing it mount any sort of comeback or reboot in the coming years: Søren still freely gives the Amiga version of the game away (💾) on his personal website, as I presume he holds the rights to the IP and elects to do nothing with it. Probably just as well, considering that it’s not really a franchise that ever made much of a major impact on the industry or which is held in particularly high esteem nowadays. That is, save for the sorts of Internet comments that inspired me to pursue and chronicle this bit of history in the first place: Among some sect of Amiga enthusiasts, Sword of Sodan still continues to see its intermittent mentions — fondly remembered as a title which sold consumers on buying their Commodore-branded computers, and which may have inspired several of them to take up game design for themselves. For a brief moment in time, Sword of Sodan really was regarded as an innovator in computer game presentation — as a disk-based beat ’em up that rivaled the arcade games of its era. And just as quickly as it established its reputation, it was demoted to the lowest status possible: Held by critics as an example of the industry’s worst tendencies, and derided for its “style over substance” approach to game design. What it truly stands as is an example of the industry’s own fickle: How what’s beloved one day can suddenly be hated the next, and how history can be revised and rewritten to claim that the game in question was always detested. But for those who care enough to discover the truth for themselves, there’s always a way to find it.

For as frustrating as my time with Sword of Sodan may well have been — between my issues with Amiga emulation, the experience of enduring each version of the game, and having to find a way to effectively articulate my thoughts in the form of this 40,000 word essay; I still can’t claim to hate the game. For as much as I may take umbrage with what Søren and his team saw fit to prioritize in its development, and for as wildly as their execution missed its intended mark; there’s still a sense of genuine enthusiasm and excitement that permeates every pixel of it, and which successfully conveys it to be the labor of love it truly was. For better or for worse, this trio of Danes made exactly the game they seemingly set out to make, and were briefly able to enjoy a moment in the spotlight for it. And so long as those folk with rose-tinted glasses can continue to remember it as a highlight title in their own histories with gaming, who are we to deny them those fond memories? I hope none of them ever actually get around to playing the game ever again, and can continue to hold on to that blissful nostalgia. But hey: If they should ever decide to swap out those spectacles for a proper pair of reading glasses, I hope some of them might read this article some day, and come to better understand the history they were a part of. All this is to say, please don’t stab me with a sword if I somehow ruined your memories of this underwhelming Amiga beat ‘em up. I swear that I don’t secretly serve Lord Zoras, and that I didn’t pen this scroll in an attempt to undermine the rule of the good Queen Shardan — long may she reign.

** I wanna quickly acknowledge the fact here that Bethesda’s 1991 MS-DOS release The Terminator was an incredibly ambitious, fully 3D, open-world survival game; complete with interactive storefronts, drivable vehicles, and a map modeled after a sixty-mile stretch of Central Los Angeles. And would you look at who directed and programmed it? None other than Julian Lefay, who must be responsible here for one of the single-most technically impressive first-person shooters in the pre-DOOM era. I dare say that with his work on The Terminator, he successfully showed up anything Søren had ever put out, and demonstrated himself to be the true master of programming and game design [between the two].

[1] b Carlbring, Per. “Interview – Sodan.” In Media Res. 1998. Web. (Archive maintained by Heikki Orsila)
[2] b c d Grønbech, Søren. “Old Bits.” Sodan.dk. Page accessed December 1, 2022. Web.
[3] b c Kjær, Sebastian. “How a 19-year-old entrepreneur created Denmark’s first major hit […]” TechSavvy. July 16th, 2021. Web.
[4] b “Laying Down Plans for an Invasion.” ZZap!64, Issue 22. Newsfield Publications. February, 1987. Print. (Scan available)
[5] Bill Jacob and Vinoy Laughner. “The Great Amiga World Holiday Software Buyer’s Guide.” Amiga World, ‘1986-87 Software Guide.’ IDG Publishing. November, 1986. Print. (Scan available)
[6] Horgan, Tony. “Entertainment – Sword of Sodan.” Amiga User International, Volume 2, Issue 10. Croftward Ltd. October, 1988. Print. (Scan available)
[7] Holmes, Chris. “Reviews – Sword of Sodan.” Amiga Computing, Issue 10. Database Publications. March, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[8] Glancey, Paul. “Reviews – Sword of Sodan.” Computer + Video Games, Issue 90. EMAP. April, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[9] Tucker, Troy. “Mini-Reviews – Sword of Sodan.” Amiga Resource, Issue 2. COMPUTE! Publications. Summer, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[10] (🇩🇪) Lenhardt, Heinrich. “Computerspiele – Sword of Sodan.” PowerPlay, Issue 13. Markt & Technik. April, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[11] “Oskars 1988 – The Megastars.” Commodore Computing International, Volume 7, Issue 3. Croftward Limited. November, 1988. Print. (Partial scan available)
[12] “A Game is Born – The Sensible Attitude.” Amiga Format Special, Issue 7. Future plc. 1993. Print. (Scan available)
[13] (🇩🇰) b c d e Prien, Søren. “Computer Ekstra – Unge Danskere Laver Super-Spil.” Ekstra Bladet, unknown issue. Politikens Hus. Circa March, 1993. Print. (Partial scan available)
[14] “The following are recent bankruptcy filings in…” Baltimore Sun. December 16, 1991. Web.
[15] Patterson, Mark. “Reviews – Datastorm.” Commodore User, Volume 6, Issue 10. EMAP. July, 1989. Print. (Scan available)
[16] Knight, Gareth. “Commodore-Amiga Sales Figures.” Amiga History. Page accessed December 1, 2022. Web.
[17] Bertz, Matt. “Reverse Engineering Success”. Game Informer, Vol. 21, Issue 219. Print. (Online reprint available)
[18] “Dragon Slayer – A never before seen Amiga game […]” Indie Retro News. July 30, 2020. Web.
[19] Regan, Matthew. “Mega Drive Review – Sword of Sodan.” Mean Machines, Issue 5. EMAP. February, 1991. Print. (Scan available)
[20] “Mega Drive – Sword of Sodan.” Sega Power, Issue 16. Future plc. March, 1991. Print. (Scan available)
[21] Aslan, C.T. “Genesis Proview – Sword of Sodan.” GamePro, Volume 3, Issue 3. IDG Communication. March, 1991. Print. (Scan available)
[22] (🇯🇵) “BE MEGA READERS RACE.” BEEP! Mega Drive, Issue 1995-01. Soft Bank. December 8, 1995. Print. (Scan available)
[23] (🇯🇵) “BE MEGA DOG RACE.” BEEP! Mega Drive, Issue 1991-10. Soft Bank. September 7, 1991. Print. (Scan available)
[24] (🇯🇵) ‘銀弾丸 (Gindangan).’ “がっぷ獅子丸.” 銀弾丸＠DOCO. June 25, 2006. Web.
[25] (🇯🇵) Katsuta, Tesuya. ”あの時代”を表現する「メガドライブミニ」というハードはいかにして生まれたか？” GAME Watch. June 5, 2019. Web.
[26] (🇩🇰) b c d e f Majiland, Tage. “Sword of Sodan: Amerikanske spil Made in Denmark.” HiScore Professionel, Issue 6. Dansk Medie Hus. March, 1993. Print. (Scan available)
[27] Leach, James. “Budget Reviews – Sword of Sodan.” Amiga Format, Issue 47. Future plc. June, 1993. Print. (Scan available)
[28] Upchurch, David. “Cheapos! – Sword of Sodan.” The One Amiga, Issue 56. EMAP. May, 1993. Print. (Scan available)
[29] Winstanley, Mark. “Game Reviews – Sword of Sodan.” Amiga Power, Issue 27. Future plc. July, 1993. Print. (Scan available)
[30] “The Hall of Shame – What’s The Worst Amiga Game You’ve Ever Played?” Amiga Power, Issue 27. Future plc. July, 1993. Print. (Scan available)
[31] Chan, Margaret. “By the Sword of Sodan.” South China Morning Post. April 3, 1994. Web.
[32] “Interview with the ‘Father of the Elder Scrolls’ […]” YouTube, uploaded by Indigo Gaming. October 31, 2017. Video.
[33] Lefay, Julian. “Ask Me Anything: I’m Julian Jensen […]” Reddit, via r/Daggerfall. November 10, 2017. Web.