Retrospective: Die Hard Trilogy

Plus it features one of those golden video game moments that everyone who's played it instantly remembers. That's right: driving into pedestrians, accidentally on purpose, and watching their bodies flip into the air as McClane quips, "Sorry pal!"

Even better: switch to the in-car view and watch as blood splatters onto the windscreen and briefly obscures your view before the wipers wash it away. Not since Turbo Esprit on the Spectrum has mowing down innocent people been so hilariously wrong.

As with many early PlayStation games, the 3D visuals haven't aged too well. The lumpy, polygonal people are particularly comical. But Die Hard Trilogy remains a supremely fun game that shoehorns in an enormous amount of value.

If the three games had been released separately, you'd imagine that each one would score around 6/10. So whacking them all on one disc as a single release was beyond generous.

A few years back I was lucky enough to meet up with Simon Pick and James Duncan, two former Probe employees who were part of the Die Hard Trilogy team. The pair have been in the industry since the 8-bit days and have worked on loads of games, yet both revealed that Die Hard Trilogy was the one title on their CVs that always received the most interest. "You did that?!", people would ask, before immediately bringing up the blood on the windscreen bit.

I did exactly the same thing and they told me how the game's development was a real kitchen sink affair. Members of the team were constantly throwing ideas in the mix: "Let's blow this up!", "Let's set fire to that!"

There was no development document as such. Probe boss Fergus McGovern was happy to let them get on with it and Twentieth Century Fox wrapped nothing in red tape.

But I knew all this already, as it's all up on the screen in plain view. Die Hard Trilogy is transparent and unpretentious. It's clearly the product of impassioned developers given the freedom to go off and do whatever the Hell they want.

Pick and Duncan did tell me one surprising thing, though. At Probe it was actually a tale of two trilogies, as Alien Trilogy was in development in the same building at the same time.

The Alien team was larger and more experienced, and the general feeling was that their game was more likely to succeed. The Die Hard team was even nicknamed 'Try Hard' by some, due to its hugely ambitious plan to create three distinct games.

By comparison, Alien Trilogy was solely a first-person shooter. While it was decent enough and fairly atmospheric, it lacked the raw thrills and sheer variety of Die Hard Trilogy. Maybe the Alien team should have been dubbed 'Try Harder'...