Games that time forgot: Gobliiins

I owe a lot of my gaming addiction to my Dad who always had a new game for me each weekend I came over to spend with him. One of those great games he received free from his friend was called Gobliiins. Gobliiins, the three “I”s standing for the three goblin characters you got to play, was a neat puzzle/adventure game developed by Coktel Vision and published by Sierra in 1992.

The story was simple: three goblins are sent on a mission to return their King’s sanity after a dark force uses a voodoo doll to drive him mad. The game style was cute and humorous, and yet dark at some points. The screams of the goblin king really struck me as creepy back then.

How the game worked was pretty easy to figure out if you had an instruction manual, which I didn’t, so it took me a while. You had three goblins to solve a level with 1 or more screens, by using their unique skills. Each goblin could affect objects on the screen differently to solve the level and move onto the next. The first goblin, Bobo was a warrior who could punch objects to make them break or move. The second goblin, Hooter was a magician who could zap objects and make something special happen to them. The final goblin, Dwayne was a technician who could pick up and use objects.

The goblins shared one life meter, so you had to make sure each goblin was left standing in a safe area or you could kill the whole team by hurting one goblin. Once the life meter was drained, the game was over. Lucky there was a safe code given for each level, so you were never more than one level back after dying.

Gobliiins spawned 3 sequels: Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon, Goblins Quest 3, and The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble.

I admit I never finished this game, but I was 10-years-old and very inexperienced with games at the time. Also it even said on the box it had hard puzzles for hardcore gamers and this was out in days before walkthroughs and the internet. It still haunts me to this day that I never finished it. I thought that I had even gotten to the last level of the game before I hit a wall, but I was wrong. I read a walkthrough for the game recently and saw that I was only halfway through. God darn it! I guess this will always be one of those games that will remain unfinished for me.