The Lost Vikings

05/17/2014
the lost vikings, computer games

For my very first blog entry I have come up with something somewhat special. Recently, I felt myself put back to my youth like from nowhere. The reason for that was that Blizzard had decided to re-publish my favorite computer game from 20 years ago for free: The Lost Vikings! The English version of this game can be downloaded from Blizzards platform battle.net.

A short introduction

The story behind the game is told quickly: The three vikings Erik, Baleog and Olaf are being kidnapped from their village by the evil space alien Tomator. That guy wants to have the three for his exotic zoos. Due to a short circuit, the three vikings are not materialized at the planned location but directly at Tomator's ship. From there they start their attempt to escape back home.

That much for the story. In the game you control each of the vikings separately. Everyone has different skills: While Erik can jump and run fast, Baleog owns a sword and a bow and Olaf can use his shield to block enemies and glide safely through the air. In each level one has to use the different abilities to solve diverse riddles. In the end all three vikings have to reach the exit alive.

Installation

For republication, Blizzard has equipped the game with a Dosbox and reconfigured it such that can be run directly even on modern computers. Once downloaded and extracted, under Windows you can start it immediately by executing the file The Lost Vikings.exe in the main folder. If you use Linux there are two possibilities: If wine is installed you can start the same file via the command wine The\ Lost\ Vikings.exe. If instead you have Dosbox installed already on your system, just enter dosbox in the main folder. This will start the game automatically (note that both ways are meant to be done in a terminal).

(Finally) played through!

Of course I started immediately to play the game through again. Well, "again" might be the wrong word because I seem to remember that back then I was never able to beat the final level. But this time I made it. As a little "proof", further down you find a screenshot directly from the end of the last level (you can recognize it as an contemporary screenshot because of one of the glitches directly above the vikings that within my recollection were not there in the original game).

For everyone who has started again playing the game, too but gets caught at a certain point and wants to continue with the next level, I have collected all the passwords. They are not picked together from the internet but - as already mentioned - collected by my own hands :-)