Damocles (occasionally advertised as Mercenary II) is the second game in the series. Damocles contains many real-world references, particularly drawn from the UK in the 1980s. For example: the president of the planet Eris is named Margaret, after Margaret Thatcher (British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990); and there is a bank called Lawson Bank, after Nigel Lawson (British chancellor of the exchequer from 1983 to 1989; though a real Lawson Bank does exist). Some of the references are more elusive; for example, several stores are called "GUM Stores", after the real Russian Gosudarstvennyj Universalnyj Magazin department stores. However, the fictional planet of Eris is not a reference to the real-life dwarf planet of the same name, as the latter was only discovered in 2005, some 15 years after the release of Damocles. Read more
Mercenary is the first in a series of computer games, published on a number of 8-bit and 16-bit platforms from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, by Novagen Software. The second and third games were known as Damocles and Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis respectively. The games were notable for their smooth vector and polygonal graphics, vast environments, and open-ended gameplay which offered several ways to complete each game. All three titles were favourably reviewed when they were originally released, and the titles have a following in the retrogaming community. Read more