Doctor Who nostalgia: Looking back at Destiny of the Doctors (video game)

Along with saving the Doctor’s first seven incarnations, you also have to fight against the Daleks, Cybermen and other enemies in the video game Destiny of the Doctors.

(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.

Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)

We look back on the mid-nineties video game Destiny of the Doctors, and how it shaped this particular writer’s love for Doctor Who and its history.

It’s kind of funny, the things that can help to shape a person’s fandom. Sometimes, it can be the TV series or the film franchise itself. Other times, it can be random merchandise or rare oddities.

For this Doctor Who fan, my fandom was shaped by a couple of things. First, an introduction to the series through Jon Pertwee repeats during the show’s thirtieth anniversary year. I was too young to really care much about what was going on, but the theme tune always stuck out to me as super cool.

The second thing that helped make me a fan was the TV movie a few years later. I was introduced to many more key concepts of Doctor Who through that, including regeneration and the TARDIS being bigger on the inside. (Seriously, in all the Third Doctor episodes I had seen before, I don’t think I had actually seen that, at least not at that point.)

Catching up on the Classic Series through VHS tapes was the third element. Diving into it randomly and getting any story that I could when the videos were on sale was a great way to explore it.

But there was one more thing that helped to shape me as a fan. A little piece of forgotten Doctor Who merchandise called Destiny of the Doctors.

Hit-and-miss gameplay

Released back in 1997, Destiny of the Doctors featured the Master taking over a planet of pure psychic energy and imprisoning the first seven incarnations of the Doctor in his own prison, the Determinant. He plans to eradicate the Doctor from all of space and time but, before he can do that, the Doctor creates a psychic being called the Graak to stop him. And it’s this character that the player takes control of.

Gameplay wise, Destiny of the Doctors was in some ways basic and very limited. While you had access to the TARDIS, you couldn’t simply go anywhere in time and space. In fact, most of the game took place on either the Doctor’s or the Master’s TARDIS.

The only exceptions to this were the levels in the Determinant where you could rescue each incarnation of the Doctor one by one. And even at the time, the graphics weren’t exactly the best.

However, I said the gameplay was limited in some ways. There is a surprising amount of non-linear gameplay throughout. For example, you could select the order in which you rescued the Doctors.

You even had the choice of what levels to play to get to the Determinant, as the Master gave you a selection of challenges to pass. If you failed at one, you could try again and succeed with another. It was a nice little addition, and did allow for some replayability.

And of course, there were many iconic monsters featured throughout the game. Autons, Cybermen, Sontarans and of course Daleks and many more enemies showed up throughout the game. I must admit, starting up a level and hearing the Dalek heartbeat sound indicating that they were around always gave me chills.

But while the gameplay was hit-and-miss, there were other interesting features that were included.

Destiny of the Doctors was one of the last performances of Anthony Ainley as the Master before his death in 2004.

Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.

Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.

A final performance

Throughout the game, players would be treated to video sequences of Anthony Ainley as the Master. Whether he was introducing the game, giving a “game over” speech, or simply boasting about how awesome he is, it was great to watch Ainley playing his iconic role once more.

It turned out that this would be the last time he would play it. While Big Finish had approached him to play the role once more, they were unable to reach an agreement. As a result, Geoffrey Beevers was brought back as the Master for 2001’s Dust Breeding.

However, while Destiny of the Doctors is incredibly difficult to track down now, and even more difficult to play on a modern system, you can watch all Ainley’s scenes on the DVD of Survival, at least.

The game also features vocal performances from Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. It also features Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier. Even today, it’s quite an impressive cast list, and feels like a natural precursor to Big Finish.

A wealth of Doctor Who knowledge

But there was one more thing that Destiny of the Doctors had going for it. And this is something that really is nostalgia, because while it was fantastic at the time, it’s definitely more than a little redundant now. And that was the TARDIS database.

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The TARDIS database was abolutely full of information from the Classic Series. It contained information on characters, races, planets and events from the first twenty-six years of Doctor Who. It also featured images and even video clips, as well.

This may not sound quite so impressive now, but in the age before Wikipedia or YouTube, this was absolutely perfect for someone who wanted to know so much more about the series and still had so much of it left to watch.

Back then, I could literally spend hours reading stuff from the database. Especially as it featured hyperlinks to other entries, so it was so easy to keep going from one piece of information to the next. It really stood out as a great feature for the game.

Of course, over twenty years later, and the Internet has grown substantially since the days of Destiny of the Doctors. Along with Wikipedia, we also have the TARDIS wiki to go into the series in even further detail, not to mention numerous other fan sites. The TARDIS database has less appeal than it used to.

Still, I’ll always remember being a young kid, eager to learn far more about Doctor Who, and the wonder I felt at the huge history of the show when reading through that database. If the Third and Eighth Doctors were the roots of my fandom, then Destiny of the Doctors helped to strengthen it.

Do you remember this video game? Do you have fond memories of it? Or do you have fond memories of other pieces of Doctor Who merchandise, instead? Let us know in the comments below.