GULLIBLE's Tomb Raider Page -Rick Dangerous

Rick Dangerous

Note: This page uses frames, if there is no navigation bar at the top (with lots of links), click on here to get to the main page and navigation bar.

Long before Core Design made Tomb Raider (about a decade before), this article shows the Tomb Raider gaming public just where Tomb Raider evolved from, in the hope that maybe a new legion of fans will have a bash at this absolute classic game that's been forgotten over time.

What is it then?

Long before Lara Croft was invented in the minds of Core, they had this little fella, an obvious rip-off of Indiana Jones, so obvious that the start of the game involves running away from a boulder! On the cover of the box is a picture of a bloke that looks a whole heap like Indy, holding a pistol in front of a bunch of tribesmen. Not that the gaming public minded though, many of us wanted to share in some way the experiences on screen that Indy experienced and if a blatant rip off is what was needed to avoid licensing issues, then so be it! :-)

So what was the game like?

It was a two dimensional platformer, like Commander Keen or Megaman etc, but it's main strength was that it was a puzzle game. Certain actions/reactions would get you out of a jam and let you move onto the next room, eventually you completed a section and moved onto another country to.... tomb raid.

So what's it got to do with Tomb Raider?

After playing this for a while and then having a go at Tomb Raider, I noticed that Core had put lots of things into Tomb Raider that were in Rick Dangerous so that old fans would recognise them. If you look at this in-game screenshot below, I'll point out the similarities.

If you look on the central pillar in the air, you'll notice two sets of spikes coming out of the bricks. Rick Dangerous is full of spiketraps, quite often put in secret places to catch you unaware, Tomb Raider quite prominently features spike traps, spikes that shoot out of the floor are quite common and were a major part of Rick Dangerous.

The golden mask (golden mask, that sounds familiar...) that is on the left that Rick is running towards is actually shown in Tomb Raider 1, the mask itself isn't there, but run about on the first level (The Caves) and look about for the picture of it on the walls. If you go into the secret area in the room where the pack of wolves attack you, and there's a timed door, jump towards the platform with lots of foliage on it and climb on, run into the room that's ahead and not only will you get a medpack, but on the wall is a huge picture of the face!

If you look at the face on the wall that's left of the mask, with the red eyes, they quite often are dart traps, if you want to see a dart trap in action, just look at the screenshot below. The darts in Tomb Raider and Rick Dangerous even look pretty much the same, and both feature spike traps hidden in the walls. Like I mentioned before, Rick Dangerous has running away from rolling boulders, which Tomb Raider also has, but Tomb Raider features them a lot more!

Throughout the game there are many enemies, whether human or animal (the former screenshot features an Amazonian tribesman), Egypt has a bunch of blue guys that wear strange hats and Europe has secret agent guys with hi-tech weaponry, all of these kind of enemies are very heavily used throughout Tomb Raider. Not only do both of the games have different countries to travel to, but both feature them as a goal, something to strive for, a change of scenery and environment to give the game different feeling. Well I could go on for days with all the little similarities, but I don't want to bore you, so I'll get onto the next bit. ;-)

How can I play it?

Well it's a very old game, so you could try looking for it on an abandonware site, but I run XRick, which is written by a bloke in France who calls himself 'BigOrno'. I'm afraid that's it's designed to run under Linux, but it might be able to be compiled under Windows too (he just wrote to me the other day, there's a Windows version now, you may be able to disregard the next few lines), you'll need a C compiler and SDL installed, to go to BigOrno's website, visit http://www.bigorno.net/xrick/ and to get SDL, visit www.libsdl.org. A word of warning though, compiling from source code is NOT for newbies!

If you want to see some more screenshots and the story boards for Rick Dangerous, have a look at my follow on page here. I'd certainly recommend it to any hard core Tomb Raider fans, as you'll learn a whole lot more about Core Design. I'd recommend grabbing yourself a Linux distribution and giving it a go, it's magic to play on a weeknight after work when you don't want to get involved in a game that's absolutely huge in size, I mean this game's got a high score table for smeg's sake! You can get some of your mates over and compete, it's a great time waster! ;-)
anarchist tomato