T2: The Arcade Game

Terminator 2: Judgment Day or T2 is a gun shooting video game based on the film of the same name, produced by Midway Manufacturing Company for the arcades in 1991. Home conversions were released by Acclaim Entertainment for various platforms under the title of T2: The Arcade Game in order to avoid confusion with the numerous tie-in games also based on the movie.

The story of the game falls in line with the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day: to save the leader of the Human Resistance, John Connor, and his mother Sarah from the T-1000, a mimetic poly-alloy Terminator, bent on killing them both.

The player takes the role of a T-800 Terminator cyborg, already captured and reprogrammed by the human resistance, and fights alongside them against Skynet in the year 2029. Eventually, the T-800 and John Connor penetrate Skynet's headquarters and destroy the system CPU. Discovering the time displacement equipment, the T-800 is sent back through time to John's childhood, with the mission to protect him from the T-1000 that Skynet has already sent back. In the past, John, Sarah, and the T-800 launch an attack on Cyberdyne Systems in order to prevent the development and creation of Skynet. The T-1000 catches up to the group and pursues them in a police helicopter and a liquid nitrogen truck. The T-800 is able to freeze and shatter the T-1000 with the liquid nitrogen, but it quickly melts and reforms in order to continue its pursuit of John. Ultimately, the T-800 must stop the T-1000 from killing John and blast it into a vat of molten steel to destroy it.

The amount of equipment destroyed in the Cyberdyne raid determines whether or not the company's research will continue, either averting Judgment Day or allowing the possibility that it can still occur.

Running on the Williams/Midway Y-Unit arcade hardware and Midway X-Unit, the 2 players essentially take part in controlling a T-800 model and gun down the terminators of the opposing side. The gameplay utilizes a first-person perspective, like the rest of the games in the genre.

The game was converted to the 16-bit game consoles to the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES, along with the 8-bit Sega Master System and Nintendo Game Boy. However, the Mega Drive/Genesis and Master System versions could not do scaling due to hardware limitations, and many of the images were redrawn at different sizes. The Game Boy version got around this problem by having the enemies move from the side or top of the screen.

The MS-DOS port of the game was very loyal to the arcade game in terms of graphics and speed. However, it was notoriously difficult to run because of the high amount of conventional memory needed to run (580K out of 640K) and would usually need either a boot disk or memory tweaking (or both) in order to load.

The game was also retitled to T2: The Arcade Game to avoid conflict with the platform game. Players could control the gun cursor with the control pad. The Super NES version supported the Super Scope and the Super NES Mouse in addition to the standard control pad. Other lower graphical ports include the Commodore Amiga and the Sega Game Gear. In North America it was one of the few games which supported the Mega Drive/Genesis's Menacer, but on the Master System, the Light Phaser was not supported, only a joypad.