Cover art for the N64 port.
Mace: The Dark Age is a game released for arcade and the Nintendo 64, developed by Atari Games and published by both Atari Games and Midway. Its arcade released only in North America on March 1997 while it released in North America to N64 on September 30, and in Europe in December of that same year. A PlayStation port was planned but never released due to poor sales.
Plot[]
A.D. 1300
It is a time of Darkness. Europe, Arabia, and Asia have endured centuries of despair at the hands of the demon Asmodeus and his Covenant of Seven. But now the Seven each seek to betray Asmodeus and wield the dark magic of the Mace. Others vow to stop the spread of evil. Only the strongest shall survive...
The history[]
For centuries an impenetrable darkness has shrouded Europe and Northern Africa, with countless victims succumbing to the ravenous hunger of unchecked pestilence and war. Once a promising glimpse of humaity's potential, the cradle of civilization has become a well of despair.
Many great kingdoms have been devastated, but a select few have grown more powerful. These comprise of the Covenant of Seven - lords who have allied with Asmodeus, a practitioner of the dark arts who wields the fabled Mace of Tanis. The Mace is embued with necropotic energy, offering those who wield it a tantalizing promise of ever-lasting life and unbridled power.
With this power comes a terrible price: Asmodeus must feed off despair, disease, and poverty. In limited doses Asmodeus grants the Seven the power they need and crave. In return, they expand their kingdoms with bloody battles and torment their peasants. But Europe can no longer sustain Asmodeus' ravenous appetite. He now reaches East into the Orient, to find new lords who yearn to sample the dark powers.
But there is a rebellion. Each of the Seven, addicted to the corrupting power of the Mace, dispatch their best warriors to kill Asmodeus and steal his power. Leaders from the east sense Asmodeus' plottings and strive to destroy him before it's too late. Heirs to kingdoms long since vanquished seek revenge on Asmodeus and those who wield the dark energy.
They are the fiercest fighters on Earth, and they all have one thing in common. They all must possess the Mace.
Gameplay[]
The game takes inspiration from both Mortal Kombat (and similar to Bio F.R.E.A.K.S that released the following year) in the form of fatality moves referred to as executions that may be performed against an adversary after winning two rounds of combat. It also possibly takes skewed inspiration from 1996's Soul Edge and Dead or Alive franchises; although they take the concept of ring-outs are technically used, they have been altered to have the arena surrounded by dangerous terrain that will damage any character that should land outside the ring. Like many 3D fighting titles of the era, the game allows the player to use an evade button to step into the background or foreground and move around their opponents.
11 initial playable characters grace the screen: Al'Rashid, Grendal, Hellknight, Lord Deimos, Mordos Kull, Namira, Ragnar, Takeshi, Taria, the Executioner, and Xiao Long. Secret unlockable characters include Ichiro, Ned the Janitor, Pojo, Sir Dregan (unlocked by default in the N64 port), Spanky, and Warmech. The game's final boss is Asmodeus.
Development[]
The game began development around 1995 and took roughly two years to develop and release. 30 characters were initially developed for the game, but these were purposely whittled down to the 11 seen in the game with the help of teenager focal groups. Atari chose to use then-modern motion capture technology for this game, with a single member of Atari that happened to also be in the worldwide historical reenactment group known as the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) being used for all motion captured.
Originally releasing into arcades, the game initially ran on the 3Dfx Voodoo graphics card, the same card used to power Midway's 1996 arcade racing title, San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing. Using this chip was actually cheaper for Atari to use than to instead develop for a proprietary system; the savings made using this existing chip let Atari sell the game at a lower cost to arcade operators.
Reception[]
Although it was considered to be a commercial success, the game managed to only garner mixed critical reviews. While the N64 port was said to be the best fighting title for the console at the time, this was barely a compliment with Next Generation magazine being quoted as saying, "The best fighter to hit Nintendo 64, Mace: The Dark Age, would still get pounded into the ground by any PlayStation or Saturn fighter game." and Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot saying it "looks fantastic but still plays poorly."
Years later in 2011, Complex magazine included it on the list of ten "most blatant Mortal Kombat ripoffs", adding, "If anything, it was like a more brutal version of Soul Edge."