Description
Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza is another game based on the 1988 blockbuster action movie
Die Hard starring Bruce Willis. Unlike other
Die Hard games,
Nakatomi Plaza works to retell the story in-game as much as possible, allowing you to witness many of the film's events (or participate in them!) from inside the tender bare feet of protagonist John McClane.
Many areas from the film (and by extension, the actual Fox Tower where the film was shot) are reproduced with careful detail, and will be instantly recognizable to fans. The game reuses sound effects and background music from the film, along with imitators for the main actors (with the exception of
Reginald Vel Johnson, who reprises his role from the film).
Details also include using a lighter to navigate dark air ducts, an arsenal true to what was seen in the film, and a character who shoots all his guns left-handed (Bruce Wills is a lefty in real life, and in the film). The player is governed by three meters - health, stamina, and resolve. Health tracks the hits a player can take, stamina tracks how long they can run, and resolve grants accuracy bonuses as the player kills terrorists (confident), but makes the player a worse shot as they take damage or are pinned down by gunfire (afraid).
Nakatomi Plaza follows
Die Hard's plot to the letter. The player controls New York cop John McClane as he visits his estranged wife in L.A. during her company's Christmas party. Terrorists arrive and take over the massive Nakatomi Plaza office building, trapping all inside. The player must fight through waves of goons (with numbers substantially increased for the game) to rescue his wife and stop the leader Hans. The game also includes expanded levels and sequences, meant to suggest what John was doing in the time that other outside events or character discussions were going on in the film.
Alternate Titles
- "Stirb langsam: Nakatomi Plaza" -- German title
- "Duro de Matar: Nakatomi Plaza" -- Brazilian title
- "Die Hard: Piège de Cristal" -- French title
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Trivia
This game was originally going to be an elaborate, fan-made "total conversion" for
Duke Nukem 3D. The textures were to all be bitmaps of real-life items, with frame-accurate recreations of all locations from the film. The team's (Creative Creations) website (deleted long ago) displayed extremely impressive images from test levels, and side-by-side comparisons with frames from the film. The team even engineered a phony meeting in Fox Plaza (the "real" Nakatomi Plaza in Century City), posing as representatives interested in leasing space in the building, to shoot reference and detail images for scanning into the game.
About the time they posted this bit of trickery on their website, the site went down, and the TC was thought to be lost. Mention of it reappeared in Feburary 1999 on Halflife.net, now to be running as a mod for
Half-Life and utilising the advanced scripting capabilities of that engine. The mod was renamed to Nakatomi Plaza.
After E3 1999, work and updates to the mod ceased, ending in the website simply saying "CREATIVE CREATION'S SITE IS DOWN" for months and never returning. The mod was believed to have been shut down and given a cease and desist (many assumed it had been "Foxed", a term representing 20th Century Fox's reputation for shutting down websites infringing on it's intellectual properties, of which the Die Hard movies are part of.)
Behind the scenes, two of the team's founders created
Piranha Games, with the intent to take the work to
Fox directly and appeal for commercial support. It worked. Fox appeared to be impressed enough by their dedication that they offered to fund the game as a stand-alone budget title on the
Lithtech engine. The game was released on April, 1 2002, with a surprising and successful end for the ambitious little mod's journey.
This entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
NeoMoose (1106) on Apr 24, 2002.
