It’s mostly the first Golden Axe that sustains a reputation. It was an arcade centerpiece back in 1989, drawing players in with a vision of sword-and-sandal violence and brutish fantasy staples, as facsimiles of Conan and Red Sonja and your favorite Tolkien dwarf slew enemies by hacking them, kicking them, casting elaborate spells, and hijacking dragons and cockatrices. Today the controls are a little awkward (and the scoring system is bizarre), but there was no matching it for spectacle in the late 1980s.
A lot of arcade games, and Sega games in particular, drew in kids with video-game simulacra of the movies they probably weren’t allowed to see just yet. Your parents might not let you rent some cheaply made barbarian flick with an incongruously amazing cover full of muscular warriors and hideous demons in the style of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, or Julie Bell, but they couldn’t stop you from playing Golden Axe. And while those cheaply made barbarian flicks never remotely lived up to their box art, Golden Axe delivered monsters and violence aplenty.
I first saw Golden Axe during one of those unfortunate arcade situations when I had plenty of time to kill but was also flat broke and all by myself. So I just wandered around and watched the games. And nothing there was as fascinating to watch as the Golden Axe demo. It showed just enough of the game’s varied fantasy scenery and screen-filling magic spells to get me curious, and it also introduced the playable characters. And I most of the afternoon to ponder and choose a favorite.
Hmm. So the broadsword-swinging Ax Battler (or rather, Axe=Battler, as though the characters are all odd equations or progressive rock songs) wants revenge on Death Adder, who slew Ax’s mother. Yes, that was very tragic, in line with the original Conan the Barbarian movie that I hadn’t yet seen.
Ah, and Gilius Thunderhead seeks similar vengeance for the death of his brother. That seemed like a good motivation. Incidentally, Gilius’ brother is apparently called Gari, though that’s never mentioned in the game, possibly because a name that could be read as “Gary” doesn’t evoke an atmosphere of ancient conflicts and dwarven vengeance.
But what’s this? Tyris Flare, the amazon warrior, lost both her mother and father to Death Adder! To me that made her the most immediately sympathetic of the trio. Sure, Ax and Gilius were out to avenge family members, but they weren’t made orphans like poor Tyris. And since Golden Axe showed a harsh fantasy world lacking even the Dickensian standards of workhouses and gruel, Tyris must have grown up fending for herself, a parentless and destitute urchin in a land of monsters and bandits and countless medieval cruelties. That may explain why she can’t afford much in the way of clothing.
There are obvious reasons why a preadolescent boy would find Tyris Flare the most appealing of the three Golden Axe characters, but I’m not kidding when I say that it was her single-sentence backstory that won me over. Watching Golden Axe’s display over and over let me envision a childhood of Tyris begging and scraping by like a humbled Disney princess, and the game clearly didn’t allow for perky animal sidekicks or heartening musical numbers.
So when I finally had a quarter and the opportunity to play Golden Axe, I picked Tyris and sped her forth on the game’s most justified quest for recompense. It lasted all of three minutes. I wasn’t very good at video games.
This was a lot to extract from just one sentence, but that was the way of things. If we didn’t have a magazine like Nintendo Power handy, we knew only what the game told us, and Golden Axe’s introductions were fairly detailed for the era. Such limited narratives often enhanced a game, amplifying each little fracas and victory into something important. And if our impressions were wrong, there was no vast online repository of wikis and forums to unravel our beautifully entwined ignorance and imagination.
So was many years later that I learned the truth about Golden Axe. I looked up the actual backgrounds for the characters and saw that Tyris is the princess of the Firewood Kingdom and that Death Adder destroyed it and slaughtered her parents…when she was seventeen.
Hold on, though. The PC Engine version of Golden Axe has more elaborate cutscenes for the characters, and it revamps Tyris Flare’s origins. She’s now all of four years old when Death Adder arrives and kills her royal parents, thus setting off the tale of shattered childhood happiness that my pre-teen brain extrapolated from the arcade attract-screens. She’s found and raised by a tribe of amazons, of course, and I gather that makes for an upbringing better than begging on cobblestones or eating rats in a ditch. Golden Axe for the PC Engine is seldom praised, as it removes the multiplayer element and disrupts the pacing, but I salute it for proving me right about Tyris Flare in some capacity.
One might expect Tyris and her combat swimwear to be the most popular part of Golden Axe, but it’s actually Gilius who shows up the most. He’s in some Sega racing games, and he provides a recurring gag in the surprisingly funny Sega Hard Girls anime series. Tyris only gets the spotlight in Beast Rider, a game beloved by no one but Dave Halverson, and that seems to have done her few favors as a Sega mainstay.
No matter its history, Golden Axe gets periodic revivals and promotions from Sega. The latest is a Comedy Central animated series from some of the folks behind Star Trek: Below Decks and American Dad. The press release describes Ax Battler as a warrior whose “brain outweighs his brawn,” Gilius as having “poor hygiene,” and Tyris as deadly with “her sharp wit,” which is what happens when writers are afraid to assign a woman actual flaws. And there’s a new hero, the earnest neophyte adventurer Hampton Squib (or possibly “Hampton=Squib”). Comedy Central hasn’t shown a trailer yet, but I admit that the show is already evoking some nostalgia: once again, I feel sorry for Golden Axe’s characters.
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