Valhalla by Anarchy Entertainment - beta of an unreleased DOS game

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MrFlibble
Posts: 718
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2011 9:29 pm

Valhalla by Anarchy Entertainment - beta of an unreleased DOS game

Post by MrFlibble »

A while ago I was browsing sites preserved by the Wayback Machine and stumbled upon a more or less intact copy of the GamesDomain download site:
http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pc/games/gamesdomain/demos/

Among other things, it has a file called valbeta.zip, which turned out to be a playable beta demo of a versus fighting game called Valhalla. It was developed by Anarchy Entertainment bu apparently never completed. The Wayback Machine has preserved a pretty intact official page of the game:
http://www.anarchyent.com/val/val.html

There isn't a lot of stuff on the site but the premise is that this is a versus fighting game in the vein of Mortal Kombat but featuring gods from the Norse pantheon. In the beta, you can play three of them (Odin, Heimdall and Modsogner). There are four different stages and you can play against the AI to successively defeat all three characters, or against another player on the same computer.

The game runs well in DOSBox in 320x240 resolution. It appears to have received very little (if any) magazine coverage but the beta demo was published on the February 1997 coverdisk of the Czech/Slovak gaming magazine Score. Here's the GamesDomain download page.
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mrfunnylaughs

Re: Valhalla by Anarchy Entertainment - beta of an unreleased DOS game

Post by mrfunnylaughs »

Pretty interesting - I've never heard of this game before but it does have a neat concept.

MrFlibble
Posts: 718
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Valhalla by Anarchy Entertainment - beta of an unreleased DOS game

Post by MrFlibble »

It plays fine too, and the art is really nice -- hand-drawn but without copying the Street Fighter II visual style that was the hallmark of the genre back then.

It seems that development stalled as Anarchy Entertainment decided to port the game to Windows 95 (as stated on their website's pages accessible via the Wayback Machine). It's not clear how complete the game was at that point but the screenshots show most of the planned characters and more stages than are available in the beta.

I wonder how much more assets are in the beta data file compared to what the demo allows to play. Perhaps the executable can be hacked to open up more characters?

Dr_kirk
Posts: 10
Joined: Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:28 pm

Re: Valhalla by Anarchy Entertainment - beta of an unreleased DOS game

Post by Dr_kirk »

Hi. I had a look at the game's archive and extracted a lot of the contents. There are sound files for all of the eleven characters, plus some menu icons/images. But I think only the three available characters are playable, as there are only three .chr files which seem to have the relevant data for each. I'm not sure if there are any unused levels, though.

Edit: No, only the four main levels are in the archive.

MrFlibble
Posts: 718
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Valhalla by Anarchy Entertainment - beta of an unreleased DOS game

Post by MrFlibble »

Hey, thanks for looking this stuff up! Nice to know that (I expected as much), cheers!

I think there could be a flimsy possibility of some development builds gathering dust on some of the former devs' HDDs or backups. Hard to tell because I have little knowledge about Anarchy Entertainment. They produced a couple DOS puzzle games but then had more ambitious plans with Valhalla, another fighting game called Yuk Fu, a fantasy blobber Siege (a demo was available from their site but cannot find it yet), and two browser point-and-click adventures, Dread and Dread 2.

It appears that the company did not close but became Anarchy Enterprises, which is still around. Perhaps some of the people involved with Valhalla can still be reached. The game was still mentioned on their site in 2001 with the same old screenshots from 1997. It's not clear what prevented them from releasing it, maybe they could not find a good publisher for such a game in the early 2000s.

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