William Shatner's TekWar (1995) (Short entry)

Date: 1995
Developer: Capstone Software
Publisher: Capstone Software

System Requirements:
 - 486SX
 - 8MB RAM
 - MSDOS 5.0 or higher
 - VGA Compatible video card

Where to purchase?
 - TekWar is not available in digital form anywhere so check Ebay or Amazon for original hard copies.


TekWar is a FPS game developed and published by Capstone Software in 1995 that is a tie-in to thespian and national treasure William Shatner's TekWar universe.  Besides this game, the TekWar universe spans 9 novels, 4 TV movies, a TV series, and a comic book series.  Given this extensive background from which to draw lore and the pedigree of  William Shatner's genius and Capstone's stellar track record of PC game development in the 1990s, I fully expect this game to be a milestone in PC game history, taking a place alongside other greats like Doom, Civilization, Command and Conquer, and Operation Body Count.  

I remember playing the demo of this game off a PC Gamer demo disk when it originally came out in 1995, but other than that I have no experience with the game.  I also know nothing about the TekWar universe, so I'll be experiencing the rich and nuanced stories that make up the tapestry of legends that is the TekWar lore for the first time as well.  I am excited to get started, so let's fire up William Shatner's TekWar and get going!





-Development-

Despite Capstone being a relatively large developer in the 80s and 90s, there is not a lot of information out there about them and even less about TekWar, but I'll try to cover the basics.  Capstone Software was created in 1984 from its parent publishing company IntraCorp.  Capstone was primarily known for two things: Licensed games and low-quality FPS games.  Some of their licensed games include Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Waynes World, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Surf Ninjas, and Zorro.  I've played Zorro and it was one of the worst video games I have ever experienced.  It is essentially a copy of Prince of Persia, but even more frustrating and much less fun.

Capstone's first FPS games used the Wolfenstein 3D engine licensed from id Software.  At the time, id Software was beginning work on Doom so they were motivated to sell the Wolfenstein engine to squeeze as much money out of Wolfenstein 3D as possible before the release of Doom made Wolfenstein 3D out of date.  id Software actually reached out to Capstone and offered the use of the Wolfenstein engine for around $50,000 per game, which really doesn't seem like much.  Capstone used the engine to create their first two FPS games: Corridor 7 and Operation Body Count.  Neither of these games is considered a "classic".  While the former is a decent early FPS game, the latter is pure garbage.

Corridor 7

Operation Body Count

I am probably being a little unfair towards these early FPS games by Capstone.  After Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, the market was flooded with FPS games and many of them were a lot worse than Capstone's offerings.  While I maintain that Operation Body Count is quite bad, Corridor 7 actually has some interesting ideas and Capstone did some nice things squeezing every bit of functionality out of the Wolfenstein engine.

By 1994, Doom had been released and the Wolfenstein engine was outdated.  It is hard to believe when compared to today's relatively stagnant state of PC technology, but in the 1990s computer technology progressed so fast that one year was all it took to make a game engine become woefully out of date.  Seeing the capabilities of Doom, Capstone decided they needed to license a new engine for their next FPS games.  Since the Doom engine was either not available or too expensive, they decided to use Ken Silverman's Build Engine, of Duke Nukem 3D fame.  To read more about the Build Engine, I covered it in a bit more detail in my playthrough of Blood.  Two Capstone FPS games, Witchaven and TekWar (both in 1995), were actually the first commercial products released that used the Build Engine and came out a full year before the release of the ground-breaking Duke Nukem 3D.  

Switching to the Build Engine gave the Capstone developers a huge new arsenal of tools to create a more interactive, living world.  Instead of mindlessly moving through a single story maze shooting anything that gets in the way, TekWar worked to create a more realistic portrayal of a future Los Angeles.  Cars and city buses move around the city streets, a commuter train moves from station to station and can be boarded, and civilians and police move about the city minding their own business.  The player can holster their gun to move about without drawing attention, but drawing your weapon and firing will cause police officers to attack.  Capstone and lead programmers Les Bird and Jeff Shultz really tried to maximize what could be done with the early Build engine to create a realistic city environment.  Whether that translated to a good game is debatable...but I'll cover that a bit later.

William Shatner was very involved in the development of TekWar.  He apparently played a bunch of contemporary games like Doom, Myst, Magic Carpet, and...Johnny Mnemonic(?) to prepare for working with the Capstone developers in making TekWar.  He and Capstone even had plans to create a sequel, tentatively called TekWar: New York, but Capstone folded before that could come to fruition.  In 1996, shortly after the release of Witchaven II, Capstone was struggling financially and was trying to take the company public in an effort to save it.  This failed, and their final game, Corridor 8, was cancelled before it was finished and the company dissolved.

It is a sad ending to a truly strange developer.  As I said before, Capstone was known for some really low quality movie/TV licensed games, but they were also known for their eclectic and weird FPS games.  In 2006, Les Bird released the source code for TekWar, along with some other Capstone games.  The code can be found here. 

- The Game -

The game installs fine on DOSBox and I'm immediately impressed with the setup program, which includes a menu to change the keyboard bindings!  This is amazing to me for a game from 1995.  One of the more frustrating aspects of playing old DOS games is the clunky keyboard layouts a lot of older games used and the difficulty in trying to edit them.  It is rare to find a FPS game from this time period that had customizable controls, so big kudos for the game for that.

The game starts with a low res FMV intro that is straight out of the intro to the short-lived TekWar TV show.  It just oozes 90s atmosphere, I love it.  Here is a short GIF of it, but if you want to you can watch the entire intro on Youtube.

After this radical intro, I am greeted by my boss, Walter Bascom (played by William Shatner).  Bascom gives me a summary of the drug Tek that is making its around the USA.  I'm still a little hazy on the details, but Tek seems to be a mind-altering drug that comes in the form of a microchip.  There are drug kingpins that are controlling and distributing the drug, and Bascom wants me to take out these kingpins.

The future (and less subtle) version of DARE

The game then switches to yet another intro, this one made up of all early 90s CGI.  It seems to show a space station where an android or hibernating person is constructed/woken up, I was a little unclear which.

Me?

The game then presents the first menu in the game, which I guess functions as the main menu.  Here I can select which of the drug kingpins I want to go after first.  It looks like I can select any of them, so I guess the game is pretty non-linear in that way.

Selecting my first target

Selecting a target plays another quick FMV of Shatner telling me to get out there and take down my  chosen bad guy.  Shatner really went all out for this game, I will be seeing a lot of him.

Now its time to start the game proper!  The mission begins at a train station with a moving train and everything.

The first thing I noticed was my mouse is set to control my forward and backward movement, as well as strafing left and right.  I looked through the setup menu and there is no option to disable forward and backward mouse movement.  I also edited a few .cfg files to see if there was anything there, but no luck either.  It's manageable  I guess, but not ideal.

You can see the guy in the middle of my screenshot is a civilian who is ignoring me and going about his business.  I'm going to go check in the bathroom and see what that situation is like:

Maybe close the door next time buddy

The enemy sprites are digitized actors and they look OK but they are huge.  I feel like a kid running around while everyone else is a tall adult.  The perspective makes it seem like I only come up to their waists:

Looking up at a cop

(Update 10/13/18))
Unfortunately, I began writing this post in March 2018 but a new job and real life got in the way and conspired to take me away from playing TekWar.  When I finally came back to this blog and this game, I was unable to figure out the complicated settings and drive mounting I had used to get this game to run.  I did not mention this in my introduction, but it was a real hassle to get this game up and running.  The game has a lot of integrated FMV sequences that require the CD to mounted as a drive with some config file modifications.  Mouse control also required some significant modifications.  At some point, I lost my install of the game and was not able to get the reinstall working correctly.  So instead of having to start from scratch, I think I'll go ahead and post this entry and move on to another game.

- Review - 

So what did I think of my brief time with TekWar?  While I did not spend enough time with the game to give it a fair judgement, I can safely say that the game is definitely a first person shooter starring William Shatner.  Does that sound like enough to entice you into playing?  If it is, then maybe give it a shot.  Otherwise, don't bother.  The game is a hassle to get up and running, the control seems to be poor, and its use of the Build Engine looks to be quite a bit more primitive than other Build Engine games such as Duke Nukem 3D.  I did not get to experience much in the way of actual gameplay, so it would be unfair of me to be too harsh on the game though.  Perhaps the game really opens up with its open-ended missions?  Maybe the weapons turn out to varied and fun to use?  For all one knows, the story may be really engaging with compelling villains and a sympathetic main character?  At first glance, I was not very impressed with the game, but you should never judge a book by its cover.

Except this book...you should judge it by its cover

Something the game does do well, intentionally or not, is create a vivid atmosphere of mid-90s pseudo cyberpunk, which Shatner adds to nicely with his overacting and goofy sport coat outfits.

I think I'll leave it at that.  If anyone is reading this and has fond memories of TekWar or feels I was unjustly harsh on the game, let me know in the comments!  But for now, I'm not going to recommend this game to anyone. 

Now that I'm settled into my new job, I am hopefully going to get back into writing full entries again on a quasi-regular basis.  I'm not sure what the next game will be, but I'll hopefully have something up in the near future.