The Howard mythos is an exaltation of the individual talent; King Kull screams, "By this Axe, I rule!" smashing the table which represents the law. Heroes have no real origin; they come from a distant land, raised by wolves. The very last words of Howard's story In the Forest of Villefère are the perfect example of his heroic brutes looking after their own skin: "Fearing madness, I snatched up the thing's own sword and hacked it to pieces. Then I flung the sword away and fled." Which is incredibly telling but hardly has the pomp and circumstance of the ending lines of The Dark Man: "I am King Turlogh of Bal-Sagoth and my kingdom is fading in the morning sky. And therein it is like all other empires in the world - dreams and ghosts and smoke." Everybody gets to make his mark. As long as "everybody" is a white male barbarian with a penchant for decapitation.
The sun-baked earth, the grim-faced enemies of nameless races; they're just background information. What matters is that our heroes - Conan, Kull and the others - are free to forge their own little epic narrative. While Rastan has no official connection to Howard's writing, the lineage is not a simple genre mash-up with cute music. Rastan is not even homage; it's an interactive love letter to the grim world of Conan and its antecedents.
Silver Coins for the Storyteller
The monsters ahead begin simply enough; a static grimacing lizardman armed with a club and an assortment of bats that require timing to effectively smack out of the air. The third enemy type, however, is some sort of Vedic nightmare, a Hindu god come to life, spewing fire. Luckily, they're just as easily put down as the lizardmen. You bounce from platform to platform, occasionally finding a new weapon or power-up. Of course, this is taken from the world of Robert E. Howard, so the magic potion sometimes hurts you, and the damned healing potions barely do anything at all. Magic is the work of politicians and mumbling law-givers - hardly the muscular world-breakers Howard idolized. Even in death, the mythic element emerges: Rastan slowly disintegrates from the feet upward while bellowing; he is simply too tough to merely bleed or stumble, only a mysterious force can take him away from his task.
After each outdoor area, the game becomes more of a platformer, where the rabid Conan fan might imagine Arnie moving through caverns and swinging from trap to trap. Yet for all the greatly mythological gameplay, it's the aesthetic and aural touches that elevate Rastan into the realm of myth. With mood carefully planned and distinguished, the mental glue cools and players weave a mythological fabric more detailed than the 8-bit game could ever push out. In Rastan, moving the player around was secondary to head banging and whistling to the music and getting far enough into the game to experience the sunset. Such as it was, it became a more perfect love letter to Howard's world than the Conan film on which it capitalized so well.
Myths are not stories; they are living, playing, bleeding memories - from our lives and from history. In each game since Rastan that features swords and hulking muscle, I rename the characters Rastan; the quest continues across platforms, across eras and across companies. His rage is immortal, all because of a haunting, driving main theme and simple refrain you hear on the first level. The music may have been technically rudimentary, but to me, it was blood and trumpets.
Christian McCrea is a game writer, academic and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. He submitted this article with the threat to "drive his editors before him and hear the lamentations of their spell-checkers."
