Adventures Through Space and Time: Doctor Who in Video Games

Doctor Who has transcended to more than just a BBC Television show over its near sixty-year run. Over the years, fans have had the opportunity to experience the Whoniverse in the form of books, audio dramas, podcasts, comic strips, action figures, fan fiction, fan art etc. Countless mediums and activities have caught the Doctor Who bug. Today, we will take a look into the franchise as it has been experienced in the medium of video games.

Who doesn’t love video games? If you’re like me, then you love to play some of the best storytelling out there in this day and age in big-budget PlayStation exclusives such as Spider-Man, God Of War, or The Last Of Us. You might have had a Nintendo Wii or DS and shared the joy of virtual games with family and friends. Or maybe you have played Tetris or Mario Kart at the Arcade. In any case, I feel like nowadays you must be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t been positively impacted by a video game at some point in recent memory. 

Having said this, it was inevitable that Doctor Who would make its way into video games at some point, given its rich universe. Adventures happen anywhere and everywhere, with a huge array of characters in the constant battle between good and evil – quite frankly, it would be foolish NOT to make a video game out of Doctor Who. 

And a fair few have tried! There are several examples over the last thirty years or so. And how did these all turn out? Well… it has been an interesting development, to say the least…

In the beginning…

Just in time for Christmas 1997, BBC multimedia released Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctors for Microsoft Windows. Correct me if I am wrong, dear reader, but I believe this is the first example of a Doctor Who Video Game. And it is no surprise that this was a product of the wilderness years: a time when the Who brand thrived and reached its fans on any medium that wasn’t television. 

The story, penned by the legendary Terrance Dicks, is that the Master, using the energy of the planet Siralos, plans to mould the universe to his will (whatever that means). Naturally, he starts by taking all incarnations of the Doctor at the time (apart from Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor, peculiarly – though some argue that this is a prequel to the TV movie). The player takes on the role of ‘the Graak’, a psychic, jellyfish-like being conveniently created by the Doctor to undo and prevent the Master from messing up the universe. 

If you watched clips of the gameplay on Youtube, the game obviously looks pretty dated. But for 1997, I would say the game feels rather innovative. It looks no better or worse than other games out at the time, it has a dynamic mix of monsters and characters (namely different incarnations of the Doctor) and even incorporates live-action scenes of Anthony Ainley as the Master. For Doctor Who’s first foray into the gaming world, they really threw everything but the kitchen sink in, and that’s pretty rad. 

Fast forward to when the show came back, in an age where social media didn’t totally dominate the virtual recreational scene, the Doctor Who Official Website was the place to be. I remember visiting frequently and playing a whole host of games as I was beginning to get into the show. I remember Attack of the Graske – an interactive live-action episode of the show where you become the Doctor’s companion (which will become a little bit of a trend, as we will soon see).

There was another one that I liked based on Fear Her, where you play as the Doctor navigating a maze while being pursued by a killer scribble monster. And another one where, if I remember correctly, your mouse controls the TARDIS and you have to drag it to falling meteorites to make it ascend further into space I guess, and the aim of the game is to get it as high up as possible (I don’t suppose they considered real physics with this one – a TARDIS hitting a meteorite would surely take some damage).

All of these games were part of Doctor Who’s rich intertextuality back in Russell T Davies’ first era when the show branched out into all conceivable forms of merchandise. The show was everywhere, and while as a cynical adult I realize the BBC was absolutely capitalizing on the show’s monumental popularity, this huge amount of content was a wonderful place to escape to when I was a kid, in any form it came in.

Let’s go on an Adventure!

Now those days of the Official Website games were a while ago, and Destiny of the Doctors took a bit of research because I never actually played that game (yes, shrink me with your tissue compression eliminator), but from here on in, I can mostly draw from my experience of playing all the games that I am talking about with a sharper memory. It may not be comprehensive, but I’ll try to cover a lot of bases. By all means, if I have missed something, or you have a cool memory of playing a Who-related game, hit us up on the Big Blue Box discord.

Let’s gloss over the Doctor Who Top Trumps game because let’s face it, it is a glorified virtual recreation of a just-as-good physical card game. No, the true beginning of single-player, narrative-driven Doctor Who games where you control the Doctor in a traditional adventure that you might see in the TV show, came with the advent of Adventure Games. 

Free to download on PC and MAC from the Doctor Who website from 2010, these games were marketed like additional interactive episodes of the series. Bringing back classic enemies, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan lent their voices and the games boasted amazing graphics for free games available from the BBC and were super popular at the time.

I remember playing them on a laptop that really could not handle the download; the games ran slower than a Gel Guard from The Three Doctors. But they were wicked still – full-blown Doctor Who games! City of the Daleks was a fun adventure, reimagining 1960s London as a full-blown Dalek-pocalypse and spending some time exploring Skaro. Blood of the Cybermen was a genuinely creepy, claustrophobic story set in the remote arctic, where no one can hear you scream (or get converted).

TARDIS (yeah, it’s just called TARDIS) was a bit rubbish – marketed as the game where you could explore more of the Doctor’s space/time machine, it transpired as being an underwhelming narrative that teeters out really quickly, in which you can explore a whole TWO ROOMS(!). I don’t think this is the fault of writer James Moran (who wrote the brilliant The Fires of Pompeii), I just think a game set inside the TARDIS that only has the capacity for two rooms places too much restriction on the storytelling and gameplay.

But then you finish with Phil Ford’s Shadows of the Vashta Nerada (Ford also writes all the other games in this series), featuring the return of the show’s scariest monsters ever (and I challenge you to argue with me otherwise!). It boggles my mind that they still have not popped up in the TV series again as of 2022 since their only appearance in 2008. The game itself is a bit repetitive and gimmicky (Christmas set base-under-siege story released around Christmas time), but I like that it shines another light on Steven Moffat’s criminally underrated, creepy, invisible piranha foes. 

The following year (2011), we had The Gunpowder Plot, once again penned by Ford. Aside from the advent of Rory – voiced by Arthur Darvill – as a playable character, looking like a glass-eyed demon who scurried up from the deepest depths of Hell, this game took what worked about the Adventure Games formula and expanded on it. We had a longer story, spanning multiple locations in 1605 London, multiple characters, and even multiple foes: the Sontarans and the Rutans!

Also, the Silence, if you manage to find them where they are cleverly hidden in the game. In an odd, but nevertheless cool move, this game doubles as a dynamic educational tool for the Gunpowder Plot, detailing the historical event through interactions with key players featured in the game – namely Guy Fawkes himself.

These games were not the only way to experience interactive episodes of the show. In 2010, Nintendo released some Who games – Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth for the DS and Doctor Who: Return to Earth for the Wii. In my opinion, both had poor graphics and really unfun gameplay – it’s almost like they were flung together in an afternoon. I can only imagine there were budget restrictions that hindered the creativity there. A little bit afterwards, Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock, the first in a cancelled series of games, was released on the Playstation 3. I did not play this sideways platformer, but it looked ambitious and cool. 

Despite these additions, I feel like the Adventure Games were the definitive Doctor Who game up until about the mid-2010s. Well, they were for me at least. But for an undiscernible reason, the adventure games after 2011 were no more. Though they were not perfect, their loss created a lasting nostalgia, and paved the way for a more frequent turnout of Doctor Who games…

The Building Blocks of Nerd Heaven

So Doctor Who took to PC and Macs broke into the Nintendo scene and very briefly slapped like a salty pancake onto the Playstation landscape. But arguably the biggest Doctor Who games commercially to date was not a standalone affair, but rather, a smaller part of an even bigger gaming experience. 

In the period where toys-to-life games were really hip (you know, Skylanders (my all-time favourite) or Disney Infinity, where on top of a base game you would get a ‘supernatural’ portal and some figurines, encouraging you to buy another fifty or so figures in addition, all of which you could play within the game, in effect bringing the figures to life), Lego Dimensions (2015) came out on all popular gaming platforms at the time. This game took the toys-to-life gimmick to a whole new level (which, let’s face it, was probably as far as it could go, because I don’t believe there has been a similar game released for a few years now), by not only having the mechanic of bringing real life lego mini figures to life but by releasing characters and levels from all the different franchises in Lego’s licensing repertoire in a crossover event bigger than Infinity War.

You name it – Scooby Doo, The Simpsons, DC superheroes, Back to the Future, The Wizard of Oz, Portal, Harry Potter, both generations of Ghostbusters, and – you guessed it! – Doctor Who. Now you might think which a suffocating amount of brands to create content for, that the Doctor Who stuff would be a humble little addendum to this Lego game. But oh no. 

In the main story, there is a level called A Dalektable Adventure in which your heroes: Batman, Wildstyle from The Lego Movie, and Gandalf from… well you know what he’s from – go on an adventure put to them by the Twelfth Doctor in which you battle the Cyberking, Weeping Angels and Daleks! That’s right guys, Batman battles the Daleks. And if you forked out even more to buy the Doctor Who level pack, you get access to The Dalek Extermination of Earth. This content, separate from the main story, involves you needing to defeat the Daleks who have taken over Earth in the future, and it is indescribably cool.

You can play as every single Doctor up to Peter Capaldi (because when you die, you just regenerate into the next one!), spend time in all of their TARDIS console rooms, and it is full of other random additions like the K1 robot, K-9, Davros, and Autons. To top all of that off, the voices of Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Michelle Gomez, and Julian Bleech could be heard in newly recorded material, as well as archived audio of others, including every single Doctor.

A lot to take in, am I right?

But it doesn’t stop there! The physical Twelfth Doctor lego figure is an exclusive collectable only available for this game. Mine lies proudly in storage (damn my lack of shelf space) with my 11th Doctor, Clara, Daleks, and TARDIS control room which were in the Doctor Who lego set that came out around the same time (I’m really nerdy, in case that was not obvious). Once more, we have intertextuality between different mediums of merchandising, through the combination of physical figures and digital recreations of them. The Lego & Video-Game era of Doctor Who was a very fruitful and happy one.

YOU are the character!

I believe there were a few interesting-looking mobile games also out around the time of the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who. But the most prominent post-Moffat into Chris Chibnall’s TV tenure was an acquisition of rights by game developers Maze Theory to make Doctor Who games.

Their first entry was the Virtual Reality adventure The Edge of Time (2019), which has you playing as an unnamed character who stumbles upon the TARDIS, where the Doctor – voiced by Jodie Whittaker – puts you on a mission through time and space, going up against Daleks and Weeping Angels. I never played this one because VR makes me hideously motion sick (I ain’t the only one – I remember our own Adam/The Geeks Handbag saying something similar on the Podcast!).

In 2021, Maze Theory released a couple more games, the first being the mobile horror The Lonely Assassins. You can check out Matt’s review elsewhere on this website. He says that this sequel to the 2007 episode Blink is “near impossible to pick fault with”, and I would be inclined to agree! You again play as an unnamed character who finds a phone and you must put a stop to the latest wicked plans of the Weeping Angels.

You primarily interact with Osgood (portrayed by Ingrid Oliver in audio and video sequences) and receive communications from Larry Nightingale, Rani Chandra from The Sarah Jane Adventures, and even a little bit from the Doctor herself. And the whole haunting affair bursts with originality. Putting yourself as the player in the shoes of someone who found a phone is easy thanks to Maze Theory cleverly utilizing the medium as the context of this narrative. I can honestly say that it is one of the most original games I have ever played.

Unfortunately, the second game released that year – The Edge of Reality, released on all the popular consoles – was nowhere near as good. No one could deny the bugs and clunky gameplay, even if David Tennant lends his voice for his incarnation of the Doctor as well as Whittaker and it has a range of monsters and settings. But one cannot forget Maze Theory‘s excellent and innovative skill elsewhere. With a bit more time, The Edge of Reality could have been closer to the standard of The Lonely Assassins.

In The Edge of Reality, you once again play as an unnamed hero. In all of Maze Theory‘s games, you play this mysterious protagonist, or if you like, you play as yourself. You are the companion! This is a cool concept; we’ve all had a fantasy about travelling with the Doctor and going on adventures at some time or other. It begs the question – is this, or playing as the Doctor himself, better? They both have their advantages, for sure. I think I prefer playing as the Doctor because, for me, it has always been a dream to BE them. Universe, consider this my formal request to play Doctor Who one day.

You might think it is bizarre that I talk to the universe, but let me point this out to you. Destiny of the Doctors, an innovative game for its time that had you playing as a character that wasn’t the Doctor, was the first Who game we looked at, and for the end of our retrospection, it just so happens that the latest Doctor Who games also innovate, and have the narrative focus away from the Doctor. It brings this particular retrospection, at this particular time, full circle.

Coincidence? I think not! Maybe we are living in a simulation, a video game of our own?

Ok, I’ll admit that I’m going too far now.

The Final Boss

What does the future of Who Games look like? Well, it would be terrific to get more Games in the style of Adventure Games: interactive episodes where you play as your favourite Doctors and companions. You could perhaps achieve scenarios on a computer that you couldn’t achieve in the TV show, which conjures a load of tantalizing ideas. Moreover, if I was being super greedy, a LEGO Doctor Who game, packed with humour and references, would be incredible and I would play it obsessively. I am also open to new innovative ideas like the ones offered by Maze Theory.

This might be wishful thinking, sure. But given the history of Who games that we have just reflected on, it goes to show that all sorts of brilliant things are possible. I am excited to see what comes next.

As I wrote about all of these games, I wondered if my praise and approval for Doctor Who spreading to other forms of merchandising made me sound demanding or materialistic. The God-honest truth is that as a show on its own, Doctor Who is more than enough. As of the release of the Centenary special The Power of the Doctor, we have 300 stories to enjoy, and more to come. We can laugh, cry, appreciate and despair about any one of these, decide what it means for us as individual spectators, and euphorically throw ourselves into the fictional universe presented to us. 

Anything extra, like a video game that may be mind-blowingly awesome or something that we’d hypothetically burn in a bonfire, is icing on the cake. Like the show, we can continue to laugh, cry, appreciate and despair, because it is all part of the fun. Whatever the quality, we are hugely fortunate to have all these avenues of entertainment which add to the rich experience of being a Doctor Who fan. 

Now, come on folks. Time to turn the console off. I need to get outdoors.