30 years on, the story behind one of the Mega Drive's best RPGs

Mega Drive owners didn’t often glance enviously at their Super Nintendo friends. After all, we had amazing platform games. We had fantastic shoot ’em ups. We had great arcade conversions. But there was one thing we didn’t have: the sprawling RPGs of the Nintendo console, such as The Secret Of Mana, Final Fantasy and The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past. True, there were Mega Drive RPGs, but none with quite the epic feel and expanse of their Nintendo peers. Then, for a brief period in the early 90s, it didn’t matter. Because we had Buck Rogers: Countdown To Doomsday, a sci-fi RPG the likes of which never again appeared on the Sega console.

Countdown To Doomsday began life in 1990 as a PC, Commodore 64 and Amiga game. Released as part of its Gold Box series by Strategic Simulations Inc. (better known as SSI), the game was based on TSR’s Buck Rogers XXVC table-top role-playing game, itself a blending together of the famous sci-fi character with the Dungeons & Dragons second edition ruleset. As was common at the time, Countdown presents a first-person exploration view combined with an isometric display for combat. Yet while the original has its fans, it’s the Mega Drive conversion, released a year later, that is the most loved.

“I can still remember when I first laid my eyes on it,” remembered my fellow Eurogamer contributor Jennifer Allen in her loving tribute to Countdown back in 2018. “On a shelf full of the usual mid-1990s suspects… Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday stood out. A distinctive red box with some garish and heroic art, it couldn’t help but stand out.”

That box encased the famous Electronic Arts adapted Mega Drive cartridge after the company secured a contract to publish Countdown on the Sega console. Back in 1988, EA had signed a deal with SSI, making the developer an affiliate label and the publisher taking charge of distributing SSI’s games while acquiring a 20% share of the company. SSI president at the time, Joel Billings, takes up the story. “Since we didn’t have the money to get into console games, it was natural for us to license titles like our D&D games and Tony La Russa Baseball, and EA was a natural licensee due to their ownership in SSI.”

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Countdown To Doomsday’s story runs back to the end of the 20th Century as nuclear war devastates the human race. Sent into space to destroy a new deadly missile system, pilot Buck Rogers succeeds in his mission but not before becoming frozen in space as war rages on Earth. Eventually, power shifts to the planet’s corporations and by the time Rogers is discovered – 500 years later – it is dominated by the Russo-American Mercantile, aka RAM. Recently defrosted, the hero of yesteryear is now the hero of the future, joining up with the New Earth Organisation (NEO) to free the Earth and its colonies from the malevolent rule of RAM. Six bright and hopeful recruits are now thrust into the war, ready to take the fight to the colonies on Mars, Venus and beyond.