Die Hard Trilogy is an action video game based on the first three installments of the Die Hard series of action movies. Die Hard Trilogy features three games in one, each based on a movie installment and featuring a different genre and gameplay style. The game was well received and would eventually become a PlayStation Greatest Hits and PlayStation Platinum game. Die Hard Trilogy also inspired a sequel entitled Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas. The sequel retained the three different playing styles, but featured a spin-off storyline that was not connected to the movie series.
Gameplay
Die Hard
Die Hard is a third-person shooter. The player battles terrorists and rescues hostages in the Nakatomi Plaza, which is the setting of the first film in the series.
Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Die Hard 2: Die Harder is presented as an on rails-shooter, where the player must stop terrorists who have taken over Dulles Airport from the second film.
Players control the crosshair with a gamepad, light gun, or mouse. Die Hard Trilogy was one of the few light gun games available for the PlayStation that was not compatible with Namco's GunCon/G-Con 45 controller or GunCon 2. However, it was compatible with Sega's Stunner light gun for the Saturn version.
Die Hard with a Vengeance
In Die Hard with a Vengeance, the player goes on a joyride driving a taxicab, sports car, and dump truck throughout all of New York City and is tasked with finding and defusing several explosives before they can go off.
Development
The game was developed by a UK-based development studio, Probe Entertainment. The Die Hard with a Vengeance segment was developed first and was intended to be a standalone release, but publisher Fox Interactive insisted that the game should be more closely linked to the films, leading Probe to develop the other two segments. Probe were developing Alien Trilogy at the same time. Since Alien Trilogy was being published by Probe's new owner Acclaim Entertainment, technology and experienced personnel were prioritized towards Alien Trilogy, leaving Die Hard Trilogy to be developed by a small team of young programmers and designers working with Probe's oldest equipment.
Fox Interactive exerted little creative control over the project, allowing the Probe team to be unrestrained and improvisational in their designs. Lead programmer Simon Pick recounted, "There was no real design. We made it up as we went along. We knew the overall feeling we wanted and the various points we wanted to hit gameplay-wise. We had a design document, but it was written after the fact. We’d implement a feature and the designer would write it up to send over to Fox as an update."
The inexperienced team found they had taken on more than they could comfortably handle by promising three games in one, forcing them to make technical compromises as they went along. Initially the Die Hard 2 segment of the game was developed with polygonal enemies, but they were later replaced with digitized sprites. For the Die Hard with a Vengeance segment, the team had wanted to use an authentic recreation of New York City, but found that when driving at 200 miles per hour, an accurate model of NYC felt too small and confining. The larger models could not be built completely in RAM, so the team divided it into sections, designed a system to calculate which section to load next, and fixed the resultant errors by hand.
The PlayStation was chosen as the lead platform because Pick strongly felt that it was the most powerful format of the time. In particular, he reasoned that the Saturn and PC versions would come out better if the programmers were trying to emulate impressive graphical effects on an extant PlayStation version than if they were designing the game around the hardware limitations of the Saturn. In an interview during development, Pick elaborated on how the team intended to optimize the game for Saturn:
Reception
Die Hard Trilogy was a commercial hit, with sales above 2 million units by 2000. It became Probe's most successful release in terms of sales in the UK.