Terminator 2D: No Fate is the '90s-inspired pixel-art game of my dreams

Licensed games are less common these days, let alone ones that are supposed to tie in with a new film, not when studios can just stick their IP into Fortnite and call it a day. Terminator 2D: No Fate, however, is unapologetically old-school, a 2D side-scrolling arcade action game that lets you play through the story of the James Cameron-directed and Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring sci-fi blockbuster classic.

(Read our best games of the '90s list for a lowdown on how where Terminator 2D: No Fate is drawing inspiration.)

The game rights for Terminator 2 had actually been acquired over a decade ago by publisher Reef Entertainment. But after starting with the rather predictable path of releasing a modern FPS title, 2019's Terminator: Resistance, it seemed the publisher was interested in following with something a little different and reached out to Henk Nieborg, a veteran pixel artist working at UK-based independent developer Bitmap Bureau, where he worked on retro and arcade-inspired games like Xeno Crisis and his own personal passion project, Battle Axe.

Nieborg's expertise in pixel art spans decades, dating back to the Amiga but also the DS and mobile, where it continued to flourish against the high-fidelity arms race on home platforms. So it's no surprise that this meant Reef was after a more retro-inspired game adaptation, even more so than perhaps the original licensed Terminator 2 game at the time, which wasn't just a light gun game but one that adopted a 'photorealistic' look by turning the film's actors into digitised sprites.

Hand-drawn game art and assets

"Digitised artwork was very popular back then, looking at Midway’s other title Mortal Kombat, but we had something else in mind right from the start, which would use the license to its full potential in a retro-inspired game," Nieborg adds. "All the pixel artwork and animation work in our game is fully hand-drawn."

A good comparison to make with another licensed game of that era would arguably be Alien 3 on the Mega Drive, one of the best retro game consoles, also an example of how pixel art can be tailored to mature tastes.

But while a lot of contemporary pixel art also comes with some modern embellishments, the approach with No Fate has been "genuine unfiltered pixel artwork," according to Nieborg. "Even in the older days when I was developing for '90s game consoles, I never regarded hardware limitations as a constraint. It just triggered my creativity more, which is no different now."

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There's nonetheless a different scale in the kind of pixel art the team is producing compared to the 16-bit era, where Mega Drive and SNES games took a tile-based approach to take into account the limited amount of ROM space on a cartridge, as well as limiting the number of animation frames any character could perform.

"For instance, just one single Future War stage from our game wouldn’t even fit onto the standard Sega Megadrive’s ROM cart size from back in the day, which would be around 4- or 8-megabits. Back in the day, publishers liked to keep the ROM cart size small as it was quite expensive to produce," Nieborg explains.

"[With T2D], we got many different playable characters and enemies with standard moves but also bespoke animations just for one single cut-scene, which are all very fluidly animated, not to mention the elaborate background art which still looks tile-based but in fact is one huge map with loads of detail and parallax layers not possible on older consoles."

Bring back attract mode

Another level of detail comes in the large pixel portraits recreating instantly recognisable scenes from the film, some even taking up the full screen during 'attract mode', in tribute to classic games that would run demos or flashy advertising if the game was left idle on the title screen.

When it comes to old licensed games of films, I personally fondly remember Disney's Toy Story, which faithfully followed the original plot by having every level practically have its own mechanics that sometimes flipped genres. That's a similar approach to No Fate, such as how the opening level with the T800 fighting in the buff is played like a brawler, while Sarah Connor's escape from prison incorporates stealth.

"The initial idea was creating a run-and-gun action game, a mix between Contra Spirits [and] Elevator Action Returns, but with this approach, we couldn’t cover all the well-known action sequences from the movie," Nieborg explains. "So we have multiple game genres instead of just one, but it feels right when playing the game."

Going beyond that, you can even play as John Connor fighting the war in the future, which was never even really seen in the original film, something that a die-hard fan like Nieborg no doubt relished.

"Most of the Future War run and gun stages have newly designed content – enemies, backgrounds – not seen in the movie, which had to be approved by the license holder first," he says. "Most of the art was approved pretty quickly as we understood the iconic Terminator 2 / James Cameron visual style inside out. We also grew up with this movie and must’ve watched it around 100 times now!"

Terminator 2D: No Fate releases for PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on 12 December.