Retro Game of the Day! TechnoCop

Retro Game of the Day! TechnoCop

Technocop for Sega Genesis, released 1990 by Razorsoft (for that console - original PC publisher was Gremlin)

In the 1980s, Nintendo had a stranglehold on almost all the 3rd party licensees who created videogames for their hugely popular 8-Bit NES unit. This means any games you'd see released on competitors' platforms (Atari, Sega) were likely developed by those particular companies themselves - it was not likely you would see Ikari Warriors or Rush 'n Attack on an Atari! (Actually, I think they might have ported Ikari Warriors, but you get my meaning) The point is, when Sega was rolling out their new 16-Bit unit in the States, they had to snap up whatever "leftover" licensors were willing to play ball. That's how they could wind up dealing with a company like Razorsoft, and this game saw release.

Technocop was a very simplistic game - walk to the right, shoot bad guys, drive around in a 3D mode. It all sounded good on paper, and the screenshots released prior to the game's shipment looked compelling. The game was getting some advance word of mouth for it's highly graphical depictions of violence (you'd shoot up an enemy and his bloody carcass would spread across the wall in the background). Such violence was completely unheard of in videogames of the day, and especially when console games were concerned - immediately this was becoming a game to keep an eye on.

Of course, it released and console players saw it for what it was - junk, pretty much. The actual in-game graphics looked rather crude, and the gameplay itself was rather thin, play control was lacking, overall it was a rough-edged package that didn't add up to a whole lot of fun. Too bad, Technocop looked like it could have been a kind of trendsetter in many ways for what was to come on the new Genesis system-