Krull (Arcade Review)

Gottlieb, much more famous for their pinball tables, really only had one “hit” video game during the Golden Age of Arcades. That certainly wasn’t Krull, a movie license they only “scored” because Columbia Pictures owned them at the time, and they happened to be the distributors of the film. They also did a pinball machine, but only ten units were made of it before it failed to attract any attention in route testing and was cancelled. It turns out, a movie license is only valuable if people actually go and see the movie. Who knew? Krull, Columbia’s “why not us?” Star Wars wannabe that weirdly combined Lord of the Rings with King Arthur in a space setting, cost as much as $30,000,000 to make (nearly $100M in today’s money). I’ve seen the film a couple times and I always stare at the screen in completely shock, wondering where it all went. It just looks like a silly b-movie. An especially cheap one, even for the time period. The end result: Krull barely earned half its budget back and was a legendary box office bomb. Well, yea. Even my father, who loves EVERY movie, calls Krull an, exact quote, “epic mess that runs hot and cold.” I think that might actually be the meanest thing he’s ever said in his life. Critics hated it too. When the buzz on a movie is that it’s boring, frankly, it doesn’t bode well for a game’s success, regardless of how good the game is.

As for Gottlieb’s one hit game? Well.. it did pretty okay.

And actually, Krull isn’t a bad little arcade game. I wouldn’t say it’s AWESOME by any stretch, but I expected to play it for an hour or two and instead put in over six hours. I guess it can’t suck too bad. It’s a multi-screened twin-stick adventure where you have to guide Frodo Skywalker.. excuse me, “Colwyn”.. through five different screens based on various scenes in the movie. One of those screens IS NOT the battle with Shelob.. excuse me, the “Crystal Spider“.. even though this scene is in the Atari 2600 version of the game. Golly, I can’t imagine why the arcade game did bad. The most memorable scene in the entire film AND ONE THAT LENDS ITSELF SPECIFICALLY WELL TO VIDEO GAME ADAPTION and they didn’t bother using it. I actually wondered if Atari had some kind of legal dibs on it. In reality, Atari bought the film rights with plans to port the arcade game to the Atari 5200. Instead, after both the film and arcade game bombed, they just made their own game, and instead of the 5200, they put it on the 2600. Weird.

To Krull’s credit, the challenge looks overwhelming, but actually, it’s not that bad. Great collision detection helps. Also I hate it when the screens are oriented differently. It makes the layout of my review harder to do.

The first level is the only one that doesn’t involve shooting. In it, you run up a mountain while avoiding boulders. The object is to collect the five randomly-placed pieces of the Glaive. That’s the galactic boomerang everybody thinks of when they think of Krull. After you collect all five pieces, the actual action part of this action game begins and Krull essentially turns into Robotron, only with a galactic boomerang instead of a gun. Like Robotron, the next two levels are based around trying to rescue people while taking out swarms of enemies with some twin-stick shooting. The “soldiers” you rescue have apparently lost their will to live and will charge with suicidal determination into the enemy hordes. Despite being specifically called “soldiers” they don’t actually fight or anything. It’s as they gained Wreck It Ralph-like sentience and said “wait.. I’m in the goddamned KRULL game? Screw it. I want to die. I choose death.”

You think I’m exaggerating? Oh no. They are programmed SPECIFICALLY to run away from you.

In the first action stage, the level ends when all the humans are either collected or killed by the enemies AND THEN you exterminate all the enemies. In the third stage (and second action stage), you have to once again rescue all the soldiers and the stage ends when you get them. The twist is, this time, when you pick them up, a little hexagon appears that you have to deliver them to. Or, you can just wait for it to come to you, because it will. Assuming it doesn’t get hung-up on the scenery. It happens. In fairness to the hexagon, it’ll happen to you, the player, as well. Yea, this is easily the most sloppy and haphazardly handled of the stages. Mind you, I had instances where I beat the fourth stage in about two seconds, so that’s saying something.

It looks almost Zelda-like, doesn’t it? Since this came out a couple years before Zelda, I wouldn’t be shocked if this had fans in Kyoto. Oh and that cluster of little rocks in the center of the stage is the bane of my existence. I kept getting stuck on them. The controls were spot on EXCEPT on this stage.

In the fourth stage, you have to rescue the soldiers from a giant hexagon prison. At this point, I’m not even sure what I need their help for. Instead of charging forward towards the big bad guy, I’ve had to now had to mount three rescues of these guys, apparently so they can wave to the screen after I save the princess. A princess I would have saved hours ago if not for all the many, many times I had to save their sorry asses getting there. In a way, I get it. If you go to all this trouble to rescue a princess, you’ll want witnesses. You know, for the bar stories that’ll no doubt follow. Anyway, in this stage, you have to wait for the wall to turn black and throw one of your Glaives at it. The walls have no hit-points, so if it’s black, the section vanishes instantly. If it’s any color but black, the galactic boomerang will get stuck in the wall for a few seconds. Don’t worry though. You can throw four of them at once. I don’t think that’s from the movie. If luck is on your side, you could win the fourth screen before a single enemy spawns. Even when the game ramped-up the difficulty as I got good enough to make it four or five cycles in, this is the only screen I never felt like I came close to dying on. In fact, I think I lost one life the whole time and that was when I walked into the wall.

I did like how the color was seemingly chosen at random each time I played this. Nice touch.

The final level is the ultimate encounter with “The Beast.” Now, in the movie, despite the effects and backgrounds looking really cheap, The Beast at least looks scary. Well, sometimes, at least. Sometimes it looks like an adorable, inquisitive baby King Kong wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask. I bring this up, because this is what it looks like in the game.

Fail, and also, the area you fight it in looks nothing like the area the final encounter in the movie takes place in. It makes me wish they’d done one of those tricks of the 8-bit era where you paint a giant background and then use clever animation to make it look like you’re really fighting a humongous boss. Like in Contra, or if you want a more recent example, the NES indie Garbage Pail Kids. The Beast throws fireballs at you, and while you can deflect the fireballs for points with the Glaive(s), the object is really to run to the end of the stage and reach the princess. Again, to the game’s credit, it more or less followed the plot of the movie. And now, I’d really love to know why there’s no giant glass spider battle in this game. Because, actually, Gottlieb did a pretty dang good job adapting Krull to the format. The Glavie is a fun weapon to use and the combat is nice and satisfying. Sure, two of the five levels aren’t very fun, BUT, three of the five work pretty dang well, and I really didn’t expect that, nor did I expect Krull to hold up. It does. Barely, but hey, most of the games I play are BARELY noteworthy. It still beats being unremarkable, right?

After this, the levels recycle at high difficulties, only without the explanation screens. Oh, and worth noting: the same technology that made Q*Bert swear is used to much better effect here. Krull’s digital screams and moans are almost chilling. I do wish the color scheme was better.

It’s not like those who never played the Krull game missed out on a masterpiece or anything like that. It’s certainly not that amazing. I’m more surprised that it rose to the level of being decent, if not outright pretty good. Sure, it’s annoying that the soldiers just run right to their deaths. I had some levels where a perfect score was out of reach within just a second or two because one of “my guys” charged right into enemy fire. Given how many times they got kidnapped, I assume it was out of spite for me being the chosen one. Otherwise, the most annoying thing in the whole game was getting hung-up on the level geometry on the third wave. What’s remarkable is the game doesn’t feel the way I expected it to feel. Generic. Bland. Soulless. Krull avoids all that, and that’s quite the accomplishment for a licensed game mandated by corporate synergy. Such projects rarely produce satisfactory results, and in this title’s case, a money-losing movie begat a money-losing game. Yet, Krull is much better as a game than it ever was as a movie. And, we’ll never see it get a proper release and celebration for what it accomplished. Ever. It turns forty years old this month, and it’s gone. Forever. It’s a crying shame. Oh sure, you can emulate on MAME, like I did. But, I kind of think there’s real value in Krull as both a gaming experience and a lesson to indie developers looking to make the leap to the next level. Sometimes success, or lack thereof, is completely out of your hands.

Krull is Chick-Approved

Krull was developed by Gottlieb