Covers of games with the word "Arcturus" in the title

In my continuing quest to choose article topics based on in-jokes that will appeal to a very niche audience, here's a quick survey of old video games that feature the word "Arcturus" in the title. First, some background: Arcturus is a red giant star located about 36.7 light-years from our sun; "Arcturus" derives from ancient Greek and can be translated as either "guardian of the bear" or "guardian of the north", and the star is part of the constellation Boötes (a name derived from the Ancient Greek word for herdsman). Given this stellar pedigree I wouldn't be surprised to see that at least some the games we'll be looking at today are space games, but I'm holding out hope for a game where you have to protect an adorable bear cub, or perhaps the entire country of Canada.

  Escape from Arcturus (Apple II, 1981)

Immediately I'm proven right about space games. Putting that aside, well, artists at the dawn of a medium are often not shy about playing fast and loose with copyright, I'll say that much. For example, the seminal 1922 film Nosferatu lifted its plot straight out of the novel Dracula, while early video games gave us several thousand obvious Star Wars knockoffs. Some are more transparent than others, as can be seen from the cover of Escape from Arcturus, featuring these drawings of what are obviously just an X-wing and a TIE Advanced. You know, from Star Wars. Sure, Star Wars is set in a galaxy far, far away and this spaceship battle is happening in front of an illustration of Saturn that looks like it was taken from a children's book about the solar system, but I'm afraid that won't fool the lawyers. 

Honestly though, considering the popularity of Star Wars it's just good business sense to try to grab a piece of that pie, and in fact this game predates the first officially licensed Star Wars video game, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600, by about a year. Speaking of which, that game has a hilariously vituperative review in Video (a consumer electronics magazine that was one of the first mainstream publications to dedicate space to video games) by renowned science fiction author and cranky asshole Harlan Ellison, who lambasts it with such charming phrases as "virulent electronic botulism". Ellison's main claim to fame in the field of video games is as the writer for the 1995 adventure game adaptation of his own 1967 short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, about a supercomputer named AM that hates humanity so much it eradicated most of it and now spends its time grotesquely torturing the rest. In the game Ellison himself voices AM, presumably because only he was obnoxious enough to pull it off.

 Arcturus (Acorn Archimedes, 1994)

 

A more abstract cover without any obvious theft of intellectual property for the 1994 game Arcturus on the Acorn Archimedes, a 32-bit machine released in 1987 by the British company Acorn Computers, which sounds like the name of a computer manufacturer in a children's television series about anthropomorphic squirrels. Anyway, the cover. The palm trees sprouting directly from a checkerboard floor as the sun sets in the background give this one something of a vaporwave feel, don't you think? Put on some sax-heavy jazz fusion and it'll feel right out of Paradise Killer. As for the floating white octahedron, it represents the object you'll be piloting in the game's Marble Madness-style gameplay, although to be honest my brain initially resolved it as a hollow upside-down pyramid. Rounding out the image is a stylized depiction of a star that looks like it began its life as the compass rose of a Renaissance-era world map before it decided to try and break into the hi-tech world of video game cover artwork.

Arcturus (ZX Spectrum, 1984)

Another game called simply Arcturus with even more abstract artwork. Actually, the similarity of the cover art of the last two games is kind of striking. For whatever reason, both feature geometric figures—in this case, menacing red and yellow cubes depicting what it would be like to be attacked by Jell-O—floating over a checkered floor while the distant horizon is illuminated by the baleful light of a blazing star, presumably the titular Arcturus. As far as I can tell the gameplay of these two games is not particularly similar, so what inspired this convergence? 

I assumed based on this cover that the gameplay would also feature red and yellow cubes, which would make sense considering the Spectrum specialized in graphics consisting of simple shapes in eye-searing colors, but from a quick look at a gameplay video I dug up, it appears cubes are nowhere to be found and the game is in fact a sort of 3D version of Tic-Tac-Toe. The back of the box claims that this is the "ultimate mental challenge" sent by "Arcturuns" as part of a plan to "enslave the free world", and I'm sorry, but if the best weapon you can summon to try to take over the Earth is Tic-Tac-Toe then you have no chance, all right? Have you seen the crap humans have invented to kill things with? It's the only thing we've ever really done well!

Well, that's it! Not many games with "Arcturus" in their title. See you next—

Okay. Fine. Fine!

Arcturus: The Curse and Loss of Divinity (PC, 2000)

 

Okay, here we go. This Arcturus (subtitled The Curse and Loss of Divinity) is an RPG that was created by the South Korean developer Gravity, who are most famous for their MMORPG Ragnarok Online. Well, I call it Arcturus, this cover makes it look like it's called IRCTUR  : Curse and Loss           y, but never mind that—I'm not 100% sure whether that's intentional or some kind of scanning artifact caused by the metallic letters. Arcturus never came to the West (although it did make it to Japan), but in my considered opinion we didn't miss out on much. I haven't played this game, but I have seen it streamed, which means that I know that the character posing seductively down in the corner there is Sizz, and he's male. Normally I would think an androgynous protagonist like that would be pretty neat, but unfortunately I also know that this game doesn't use the concept in a way I found particularly satisfying. I can't tell you much more, though, not because of spoilers, but because I'm honestly not sure what even happens in this game. You see, Arcturus was going for a Xenogears-style science fantasy existentialism plot, and the result is a hot mess that by the end is completely incomprehensible (so in that sense I suppose they succeeded in imitating Xenogears). To be fair to Arcturus, I was watching a half-assed fan translation of the Japanese translation of the Korean original, but I suspect even being able to read it as it was intended wouldn't have cleared up much.

As for the gameplay, from what I saw most of the dungeons are bland, undifferentiated mazes where nothing particularly interesting besides monster encounters occurs, although the soundtrack of one dungeon did feature what sounded like a woman having an orgasm occasionally, which undeniably livened things up considerably. In fact, the entire soundtrack often seems to try too hard, with frequent heavy metal tracks that are novel at first but quickly become exhausting when you find yourself listening to guitars scream as you fight a group of hedgehogs for the umpteenth time. As for the plot, as I mentioned before it was going for an existentialist science fantasy vibe, but most of the moment-to-moment story consisted of the characters having deranged and occasionally uncomfortable conversations. My personal favorite was the scene where two characters are having a discussion that somehow turns to the topic of breasts, which the other characters in the party overhear, prompting them all to come running to find out more like that bit in Scrubs where The Todd blows the Booby Horn. An honorable mention goes to a character explaining to Sizz that his childhood friend is cranky because of her menstrual cycle. No, really.

Okay, that's it, for real this time. Not too many games out there with "Arcturus" in their title. There was an Amiga game called Secret of Arcturus, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a cover of that one. It's a real shame, if it had been more checkered floors and geometric shapes we would've have a real pattern on our hands.

(All images from the Launchbox game database.)