‘Why isn’t there any musketeer video game?’ - On the creation of En Garde! and the legacy of Swashbucklers
This article is an extended version of my original Twitter / Bluesky thread.
‘Why isn’t there any musketeer video game?’ 🤺
In 2017, as a game design student, I pitched a game inspired by The Three Musketeers. This idea turned into En Garde!, which released first as a student project in 2018, then as a full-blown commercial game in 2023.
Despite that, I’m still asking that same question to this day.
In 2024, there STILL isn’t any musketeer game.
Because En Garde! is not a proper “musketeer” game in the end. It doesn’t star a crew of french braggart noblemen working for the king of France. We set the action in Spain, and our protagonist is a vigilante, closer to Zorro than to d’Artagnan.
What caused that shift of focus for En Garde? Well, when I was doing research for the game’s concept, I quickly stopped looking at Alexandre Dumas’ musketeers only, as I digged into the rich legacy of the Swashbuckler genre.
I realized that, not only there were no “musketeer” game, there weren’t any classic “swashbuckler” game either!!
Swashbuckler was a genre of historical fiction, with adventure, romance and intrigue galore, featuring sword fights between charming scoundrels, damsels in distress and mustache-twirling villains.
Basically all of my favorite things in the world!
It’s also a very french genre. We call it de cape et d’épée — “of cape and sword”. We have our own classics.
In french, the name implies less “pirate adventures” and more “dueling noblemen with flair”. It’s considered old-fashioned, even more so than in English.
The french name is interesting as it’s very explicit with 2 majors components:
- The “sword” is obviously referring to the action, duels and conflict inherent to the genre.
- The “cape” can be an actual accessory, used for fashion and/or combat. But it’s also more metaphorical (not all heroes wear capes!) — it evokes both the social rank of the characters, and their charisma, panache, flamboyance.
The french term de cape et d’épée interestingly morphed into “cloak and dagger” in English. Cloak and dagger stories are more about secrecy and espionage, which are also sometimes a component of Swashbuckler.
In classic literature and cinema, the swashbuckler genre was big.
The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Zorro and basically every pirate story, all belong to this genre.
There are also many others, nowadays forgotten, like The Scarlet Pimprenel, Scaramouche or Le Bossu.
During Hollywood golden age, Swashbucklers shared the spotlight with Westerns. It fueled the TV and cinema industries around the world for a century. The Three Musketeers alone has more than 50 film and TV adaptations listed on Wikipedia. Zorro has more than 40 too!
The Princess Bride, released in 1987, is a “late classic”, when put in perspective with movies from the 30’s to 60's. I’m not sure if the genre was considered old-fashioned already during the 80’s, but the Princess Bride was definitely created as a pastiche — of both classic Swashbucklers and Fairytales.
Before working on En Garde!, I barely knew about all this. I only had some clichés in mind — sword fights, feathered hats, swinging chandeliers… But that’s what works so well about En Garde!’ concept. You don’t need to actually know.
The swashbuckler tropes are rooted in popular imagination, and can be found everywhere in modern adventure fiction.
In today’s media, the tropes and “vibes” of the genre expanded and evolved into other things. Indiana Jones was described as a swashbuckler by Lucas and Spielberg. Guardians of the Galaxy is swashbuckling in space.
Several Disney/DreamWorks films draw from swashbuckler tropes too.
En Garde! owes a lot of its light-hearted tone and comedy to it.
Flynn Rider from Tangled was created as a typical swashbuckler protagonist, and an hommage to actor Errol Flynn.
Disney’s Aladdin (1992) also checks most of the boxes: you got a picaresque scoundrel protagonist with righteous ideals, who defies authority. You got action scenes, adventure, romance and intrigue. You got the damsel, the conspiring villains (okay, one of them is a parrot, but that still counts), the oblivious king, and good-for-nothing henchmen.
Of course, Aladdin is less ‘historical’ than what you’d expect from a classic swashbuckler. You have the 1001 Nights setting, with fantasy and magic.
Though, in video games, another work using that same middle-eastern setting was definitely inspired by classic Swashbucklers too: the original Prince of Persia games.
Jordan Mechner famously filmed his little brother running and jumping to use in his rotoscoping process. But he also used footage of Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), one of the swashbuckliest movies ever! (I swear that word exists).
Prince of Persia 2 opens with an action scene which is swashbuckling at its finest. The action starts in medias res, after the prince was framed in a conspiracy and escapes breaking a palace window — you run and jump across rooftops while fighting a hoard of guards chasing you, over a frantic action music. You kill some guards who fall off the roofs. You reach the harbor and jump aboard a departing ship at the last moment.
I always was fascinated by this scene as a kid, and years later, I understand why.
Apart from Prince of Persia, I came to realize some other of my favorite video games could arguably qualify as “swashbuckling” experiences too — Uncharted (as described by Amy Hennig herself), Assassin’s Creed Black Flag…
But none of these games actually recreated the “classic” definition of swashbuckler, especially regarding the historical setting.
With En Garde!, we wanted to pay homage to the swashbuckler genre as a whole. We chose to set the game in 17th century Spain, because the genre initially came from here (‘comedia de capa y espada’ were popular theater plays from that period).
We loved the Hispanic flair, and the Golden Age Spain setting also felt more original to us than doing French Musketeers — which is ironic, considering my initial thought on the lack of Musketeer video games.
En Garde! was made as a melting pot of references.
Older generations will “get” the nostalgic swashbuckler feel. Some younger players have described it as a pirate game… which is fine too!
It also came out right during the Puss in Boots hype. 🐱
So, there’s still no proper musketeer game then. En Garde! isn’t one. Why isn’t anyone else doing it? I’ve been wondering for years.
Apart from a bunch of obscure abandonware, it’s still an unexplored setting.
I’ve heard about several devs and studios having ideas for a musketeer game, here and there. In a blog post for Playstation, Brian Fleming from Suckerpunch told they considered musketeers as their next game setting, before going for feudal Japan with Ghost of Tsushima.
Why none of these games ever gets made?
Well, my explanation is that popular video games tend to inspire from mainstream settings. Medieval fantasy, sci-fi, zombies, you name it.
And unfortunately for me, musketeers haven’t been mainstream for… a while.
In the 90's and 2000’s, despite Antonio Banderas’ best efforts as Zorro, classic Swashbuckler films had fallen out of fashion.
It was mostly seen as an old-school genre for kids, and most of the works coming out were either comedy or parody, such as Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).
In video games, you had the Monkey Island series, and although it’s been very influential, it was also just that — a parody.
This was until… 2003, when Pirates of the Caribbean came out!
According to its authors, The Curse of the Black Pearl was designed from the ground-up as a revival of the classic Swashbuckler formula, with added grittiness and fantastical elements thrown in.
It was a mega-hit, and made pirate stories mainstream again.
Remember how kids described En Garde! as a “pirate game”?
Pirate stories had always been, initially, a sub-genre of swashbuckler.
But in the 2000’s, swashbuckling became synonym with pirates.
Nowadays, most English-speaking people who know the word “swashbuckler” will intuitively associate it with “pirates”. Some younger audiences don’t know that musketeers even exist.
Pirates became the dominant genre, and in the process, overshadowed all the other old-fashioned fencers in tights.
But these fencers in tights had it coming. As I stated before, they were too focused on self-parody at this point, and too few popular films tried to rehabilitate the genre.
Since video games tend to stick to mainstream pop culture, we do get some great pirate games!
Basically, captain Jack Sparrow killed any chance for d’Artagnan and the boys to star in their own video game.
But who knows what the future holds?
There are still movies and TV series being made about the Musketeers, and some video games in adjacent settings (En Garde!, GreedFall, Assassin’s Creed Unity…).
The indie developers at Hildring Studio are making Sacre Bleu, a promising comedy platformer coming soon!
Moreover, new generation of artists are rediscovering the works of Alexandre Dumas. Check out the Dumariolles collective’s amazing work!
Maybe one day, a company will finally take a chance to make a proper musketeers video game adaptation. Let’s just hope they get it right!
By the way, regarding my fascination for Swashbucklers.
Disney’s Aladdin, The Mask of Zorro AND the first Pirates of the Caribbean, 3 movies I can’t stop rambling about, were all written by the same dudes — Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. I guess I should thank them? 😂