The mystery Terminator 3 game for the Sega Mega Drive

Hi everyone!

Welcome back to my retro blog.

Back in 1993, I upgraded my brown Commodore 64 to a console I was so eager to get my hands on. A Sega Mega Drive. My uncle Adrian had recently got one with PGA Tour Golf II and Lotus Turbo Challenge. I’d played Streets of Rage at my mate Aaron’s house. I needed this console badly.

Then my uncle Adrian contacted my Mum and said that he could get one for me. My Mum and Dad said that I could have it, but I would have to sell my C64. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my C64, but when you’re 12 you want the latest and coolest thing. It was a done deal. I remember I had the option of having Sonic the Hedgehog or The Terminator with it. I went with The Terminator. Sonic is an awesome game, but The Terminator sounded so cool.

So, I got the Mega Drive. I remember playing The Terminator on this old 14-inch beige CRT TV, with a dial to tune in the RF signal output from the Mega Drive. The graphics were awesome. The music was awesome. My cousin Marcus came over and we played for what seemed hours. We struggled to get past the first level, not realising that you had to set a bomb at a reactor and then escape within 45 seconds. We’d get to the end of the level and just try and jump through a laser turret’s fire, which lead to our death most of the time. Then I fluked it and managed to jump through a gap in the laser fire. The Mission Complete music started playing and the storyline about going back in time to 1984 Los Angeles set the scene for the next level.

The next level was pretty easy. Get past the cops and street punks until you make it to the Technoir discotheque, where a brief battle with the Terminator occurs before you find Sarah Connor in a booth at the back of the club.

The third level was a lot trickier. In a large police station, you again have to shoot at the cops and street punks as you make your way from the basement cells to the roof, and then back down into the rear part of the station. Another battle with the Terminator ensues, however this time it’s a lot tougher as you have not only The Terminator shooting at you, but also the cops and the street punks throwing Molotov cocktails. Not sure why, but you seem to be the most hated person in the world right now! Why aren’t the cops shooting The Terminator or the street punks? Why are the street punks attacking me? What did Kyle Reese ever do to them!? I died. It was too tough.

Marcus managed to work out that the bomb needed to be placed at the reactor on level 1 and once you’d sussed out the way, escaping in 45 seconds is relatively easy.

He got past the police station level to set up a final battle with The Terminator in its endoskeleton form. The key to this level is not to shoot The Terminator, but to try and make it follow you through the maze of the factory. Once you get to the giant press at the end of the level, feel free to shoot The Terminator. After blasting it away 5 times, it’s reduced to a crawling upper torso that crawls into the press after you. Sarah presses a button and crushes The Terminator.

The ending explains what happens after, indicating that Kyle Reese died but lives on in the form of Sarah’s unborn son. For a start, how did Reese die? The Terminator didn’t kill him. Did Sarah kill him? Also how does he live on in the form of John Connor? Obviously if you’d seen the movie you’d know that Kyle and Sarah fall in love and have sex before the final battle, but if you hadn’t, then you’d have to try and work that out yourself.

Not a bad game, but a little on the short side. I can literally run through the game in 10 minutes now.

Time travel forward to now, I live in another country. I first moved to Australia from England in 2004, although my initial stint was for only 6 months. During that period, I purchased a Mega Drive 2 from eBay, back when retro consoles weren’t as expensive as they are now. When I moved back to Australia in 2011, I found my Mega Drive 2 and still use it, although it was getting more and more expensive to buy games as retro gaming became more popular.

Then I stumbled across AliExpress. Reproduction Mega Drive cartridges are so cheap. Individual game carts are about AU$5-6 (£2.50-3) and that includes the postage from China. Multi game carts with literally hundreds of games are about AU$25 (£12.50).

As I was browsing through the games I came across a game called “Terminator 3”. This immediately caught my attention as it had the art from the movie on the sticker. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released in 2003, after Sega’s demise in the console market, let alone the Mega Drive’s. The Mega Drive remained popular in Brazil, so technically it may have been officially released there. I just had to order it to see what it was.

Much to my delight I had a voucher I could use, so the game, including the postage, only cost AU$1.62!

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001877508558.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.9b194c4d3ejKV4

It took about a month to arrive in the post.

The cartridge just has a sticker with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-850 on the left and Kristanna Loken as the T-X on the right. The title “Terminator 3” in standard “Terminator” font is below them.

The cartridge feels light and cheaply made, with words “16 bit” in the Sega styling where the Sega logo would normally be found on the back of the cart.

No screws holding the cartridge together. Just 2 pieces of cheap plastic that clip together. It fits into the Mega Drive 2 with no issues. As long as it plays then I’m happy.

Pressing the red power button on the Mega Drive 2, you’re greeted with the standard “Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises Ltd.”. I don’t think that’s necessarily true in this case, but we’ll roll with it for now.

Some music starts before a white background appears with a red circular logo. The words “Glorysun 版权所有” appear. Google translate informs me the Chinese characters mean “All Rights Reserved”. I’m sure that’s legit! segaretro.org advises: 

Glorysun was a group which produced unlicensed Sega Mega Drive games for a Russian audience. Very little is known about them.

All known Glorysun's releases are hacked versions of other Mega Drive games.

So now I know this is probably a hack of an original Mega Drive game, but which one?

The next screen shows a pixelated likeness of Arnold as the T-850 and “Terminator 3” in red at the bottom, although it isn’t in the standard “Terminator” font.

It then moves to a title screen with “Terminator 3” at the top, but this time in pink.

The options are:

Start Game

Password

Options

Highscore

Working from the bottom, “Highscore” shows the Highscore as 0000000 and the Last Score as 0000000. Something tells me your high score won’t save if you turn off the Mega Drive.

The “Options” menu first tells you what the buttons are:

A=Fire

B=Jump

C=Lines

I have no idea what lines are. Can you do cocaine in the game as a power up? Pressing to the right on the option gives you 6 different button configurations.

The next option allows you to change the difficulty from Easy to Hard. That’s it. Nothing in between.

The next option allows you to turn the music off or to a volume from 00 to 20. It defaults at 14. There doesn’t seem any reason to change it, but why 14? Why not have it in the middle at 10? And shouldn’t 00 be no sound?

The next option is a music test. There are 42 different songs to listen to. That’s quite impressive. The music seems pretty decent too.

The next option is “SFX”, or Sound Effects to people who don’t know that acronym. There’s only 35 sound effects. Obviously the music was deemed more important than sound effects!

Before you exit, there’s an option to view the credits:

Produced by…. Wang Kai Xin

Programmed by…. Windsoft Studio

Programming…. Zhang Feng

Aided by…….. Gettop Soft

Graphics by…. Yangshuming

Musicians…. Yan He Tz and Mary What

Games Testers…. Xiao Zhai, Yang Xiao Jun and Mou Mou Mou

Technical Advice… Du Zhi Rong, Li Quan, Wu Jia Qi, Liu Fei and Wang Long

China’s best Mega Drive ROM hackers listed right there!

Back on the main menu, the “Password” option prompts you to enter a 5 character password, defaulting at XXXXX. Normally the password section on games are for allowing you to restart on a level you’ve previously reached, being rewarded the password at the end of each level. That also means there’s possibly other passwords for cheat modes. Seeing I don’t have any right now, I’ll just select “Start Game”.

It starts with what looks like a cyborg forming on screen, in a level with a jungle in the background. It’s feeling very much like Probotector on the NES at this point. Plus the movie is definitely not set in a jungle!

I can see I start with what I think are 4 lives. I’ve never seen a 4 like that! A timer begins counting down from 600 seconds (10 minutes) and I have 3 of something, but I don’t know what it is. Is this the “Lines”? I press the C button and 2 vertical lines of fire shoot out from me in either direction. The number of lines drops down to 2. Well that seems like a waste. Obviously you use it when there’s a lot of enemies around to kill them all off as it covers the whole screen. However it did reveal a stone square suspended in mid air behind me, with some kind of icon with a lightning bolt in it. I collect it and a voice says what I think states “Surround” although nothing seems to noticeably change. I still have the same weapon that fires one shot at a time.

The cyborg has a pretty good jump on him, further proving that your character isn’t human, although I’m not convinced it’s Arnie’s T-850.

Attacks come from other almost identical looking cyborgs, giant spiders in spiked pits and hornets, complete with hives to destroy.

On my first attempt I didn’t get past the first level. Not the most encouraging of starts.

On the second try, I realised that if you hold down the Fire button, it fires a wide laser beam that you can move around in a 360 degree arc. It’s kills the bad guys so much quicker and is great for swatting away the hornets and aiming to destroy their hives. All of a sudden, this game got a lot more interesting.

Then by accident, I became a spinning spiky ball! What the hell did I do?! After trying a few combinations I worked it out. If you press down and jump, you’ll turn into the cyborg equivalent of Sonic the Hedgehog and wipe out your opponents. It also appears that you’ll stay in your ball, which you can move left and right, until you press jump again.

With these new found skills, I make it to the end of the level with relative ease. Surprisingly there’s no boss at the end of the level. You just get to an “Exit” sign and that’s it.

At the end of the level, a picture of Arnold as the T-800 from Terminator 2 (?) and a level password are shown. CHSGM.

This was my key to working out what this game actually was!

I searched “Mega Drive CHSGM” in Google and got results for…

Universal Soldier

For those of you not acquainted with this, Universal Soldier is a 1992 action/sci fi movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as cyborg soldiers. They’re elite killing machines, but things start going wrong when they start growing consciousness. JCVD as the good guy and Dolph as the bad guy. Definitely worth a watch if you love cheesy, violent action and sci fi movies. I actually own a Japanese copy on laserdisc.

The Universal Soldier video game was also released in 1992 by Ballistic, a publishing arm of Accolade. It came on a unique square cartridge, kind of similar to the Electronic Arts cartridges but without the yellow tab on the side.

Interestingly, Terminator 3 isn’t the first time this game has been hacked, although the first time was licensed. The game is a modified version of Turrican II, which was released in 1991 on many of the home computers at the time. Rumour has it that Turrican II was to be released on the Mega Drive, but after the Universal Soldier license was picked up by Accolade, the game was altered so it could tie in with the movie.

Whilst I was researching the game, I found the actual credits for the original game, so a shout out goes to:

Produced by…. Chris W. Bankston

Programmed by…. The Code Monkeys

Programming…. Colin Hogg

Aided by…….. Elliot Gay and Mark Kirkby

Graphics by…. Joe Lewis and Manfred Trenz

Musicians…. J. Dave Rogers and Paul Kenny

Games Testers…. Robert V. Daly, James Kucera and Steven Graziano

Technical Advice… Chris W. Bankston, Tim Wilson, Russell Shiffer, J. Dave Rogers and Natalie Healy

With that mystery solved, I’m off to complete the game with the following cheat codes I’ve acquired!

I’ve got something pretty awesome from Japan for my next blog. See you then!