WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Iron Helix

Publisher: Spectrum Holobyte Developer: Drew Pictures Port: Brian A. Rice, Inc. Release: 1995

I've brought up the idea of the multimedia frontier more than a few times in this series of posts. Back in the early- to mid-90s, the advent of affordable CD-ROM drives resulted in some very experimental games where ambitious developers tried so hard to meld classic video game mechanics to the incredible graphics and full-motion video the medium could provide.

It was an interesting time. A good number of these experiments were failures, but even many of those are remembered fondly for what they represented. Iron Helix appears to fall into this category. Looking at it today it's an extremely poor attempt to graft first-person exploration onto pre-rendered graphics and video. But as it was one of the earlier games to attempt something like this, people seem to remember it fondly.

It is the distant future, and there is an ongoing cold war between humans and an alien race called the Tanatosians. During a routine training operation, the ship Jeremiah O'Brien is infected with an unknown virus that mutates its crew, resulting in the ship's security robot – the Defender – to identify them as invaders and eliminate them.

A technical malfunction has put the O'Brien on an intercept course with the peaceful Thanatosian planet of Calliope, with the intention of firing a doomsday weapon known as the Iron Helix. If fired, this weapon would wipe out all life on the planet, and likely spark all-out war between the two races.

It's your job to enter the Jeremiah O'Brien with a series of probe droids in order to figure out a way to fix the glitch. You have a limited amount of power, and must avoid or destroy the prowling Ship's Defender, which will shoot your droid on sight.

It all sounds far more exciting than it is. Your droid creeps along at a snail's pace, with an insane amount of lag between your input and the on-screen action. All you're really doing is watching your map for signs of the Ship's Defender while you scan every nook and cranny for DNA samples, which are the only way to unlock the O'Brien's many doors and make any sort of progress. I don't think I even opened one door during my play time.

Iron Helix is the sole release by developer Drew Pictures, which was a group of artists and administration staff working out of company founder Drew Huffman's house in 1992. The group did work on one other published title – Bad Mojo. But that game was eventually finished after Drew Pictures merged with Pulse Entertainment. Bad Mojo was released in 1995.

The Sega CD port was done by a much more successful company with an equally unknown name nowadays – Brian A. Rice, Inc. Founded in 1981, this company started doing Apple II software, but eventually moved into video games, working for such publishers as Sega, Activision, and Sunsoft. They shuttered in 1996, as the rising cost and resources of making games proved to be too much for the small company to handle.

One more bit of trivia: the song heard in the game's main menu is, appropriately, Iron Helix. The song was created for the game by a band called Xorcist. The band contributed original songs to two other games - Bad Mojo (naturally) and Space Bunnies Must Die. The band was created by Peter Stone (who is also credited for doing sound on Iron Helix), and the name still exists today. Peter - aka DJ Bat - is still active in the DJ/VJ scene today.