Everytime I listen to the Gladiator soundtrack, in particular the track entitled “Barbarian Horde”, I get memories of a game I used to play years and years ago.  I never could remember what it was called but today I did.  Outpost!

I remember playing it back in the mid-90s on what I referred to as the ‘Black Mac’, a Power Mac 5500 ‘Director’s Edition’. Anyway, ‘Outpost’ was developed and published by Sierra (what a wonderful studio they were) and was released for Mac and Windows 3.1.  Essentially, it was a hard sci-fi version of Simcity with dire consequences and a rather grim beginning.  Basically, the premise for the game is that a big asteroid is heading for Earth, they try and destroy it but they just split it in two, and as such the two halves will wipe out pretty much all life on Earth (pleasant!).  The player’s task is to build a colony on a nearby world that can inhabit man and prevent mankind’s total extinction.  One hell of a task.

This game was fun and rather punishing. Although I was roughly 9 when I was playing it, I was pretty decent at strategy games, so I wasn’t too horrible at it, but I did fail at it quite a bit.  Until reading the Wiki article earlier, I had no idea about some of the bugs that existed but they do explain an awful lot.

  • Outpost can sometimes end abruptly, as players who choose the wrong star system in the beginning can find him/herself in a star system with no habitable planets.
  • Sometimes, players will find the colonists on the planet dying en masse unexpectedly, thus causing the game to end when everyone has died. The colonists’ death rate during this occurrence is one of exponential growth, following the equation 2^n, where n is the number of turns passed since the widespread death bug began.

Ohhhh, my two main problems with the game, especially the second one. Ah well, it provided me with countless hours of enjoyment.
But as to why “Barbarian Horde” reminded me of ‘Outpost’, some of the music in ‘Outpost’ is identical to parts in “Barbarian Horde”. Yep, that simple!