Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed: The Sequel That Fixed Countdown to Doomsday's Complaints

Rating band: Fan-favorite · Developer/Publisher: Strategic Simulations Inc. (SSI) · Year: 1992 · Platform: DOS · Theme: Science Fiction, Licensed

Sequels that actually respond to complaints about the first game are rarer than they should be. Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed is one of them. SSI took the feedback from Countdown to Doomsday seriously enough to rebuild the formula around it: noticeably fewer combat encounters, considerably more NPC interaction, and a broader spread of weapons and gadgets scattered through the world for players to actually find and use. None of the underlying engine changed in any fundamental way. What changed is how that engine gets spent.

The story picks up directly from where Countdown to Doomsday left off. NEO, led by Buck Rogers, has regained control of Earth from the RAM megacorporation, but RAM’s bases on Mars and scattered across the Asteroid Belt remain a real, ongoing threat. Your party opens the game on a space station orbiting Mercury, sent there by Rogers himself to secure the allegiance of the newly installed Mercurian Sun King. That diplomatic errand collapses almost immediately into something bigger: you meet a scientist with a theory for building a Matrix Device, a technology capable of transforming any matter into whatever new form is needed, exactly the kind of tool NEO would need to actually repair Earth’s ravaged ecology.

Before you can get that scientist safely back to NEO’s base, he’s kidnapped, and the group responsible gives the plot its real teeth. PURGE, standing for the Prevention of Unwanted Research and Genetic Engineering, wants every genetically engineered lifeform, referred to in-universe as a Gennie, destroyed, on the grounds of reclaiming the solar system for “pure” humans. That’s not an abstract threat in the world Matrix Cubed builds. Gennie communities like the Martian Desert Runners and the Venusian Lowlanders are shown as peaceful, fully realized cultures, deeply woven into NEO itself, which makes PURGE’s ideology something closer to ethnic cleansing dressed up in genetic language than a generic villain motivation. For a 1992 licensed RPG, that’s a surprisingly pointed thing to build a plot around.

Anyone who’s spent time with SSI’s Gold Box-lineage games will recognize the Matrix Cubed system immediately: simple, direct, and built for accessibility over complexity. That familiarity is a strength here rather than a limitation, since it means the engine’s revisions, the added NPC content in particular, layer cleanly on top of a system players already understood from the first game. Graphically, Matrix Cubed isn’t keeping pace with its early-1990s RPG contemporaries, and that gap only widened as the decade went on. What the game spends its budget on instead is narrative and mechanical depth, and by most accounts that trade pays off more consistently here than it did in Countdown to Doomsday.

The PURGE plotline in particular gives Matrix Cubed a heavier thematic register than most licensed tie-ins from the period bothered attempting. A lot of early-1990s RPGs, licensed or otherwise, treated their antagonist faction as a generic evil army with no ideology worth examining. PURGE is different: its members genuinely believe reclaiming the solar system for unmodified humans justifies destroying entire communities, and the game never lets you forget that the Gennies on the receiving end of that belief are ordinary people with homes and histories, not an abstraction. It’s a heavier idea than the Gold Box engine was originally built to carry, and Matrix Cubed carries it reasonably well anyway.

There’s something genuinely satisfying about watching a sequel take its predecessor’s biggest weak points and address them directly rather than just adding a bigger dungeon and calling it done. Matrix Cubed didn’t reinvent Buck Rogers as a franchise. It just made a more confident, better-paced version of the same idea, and that’s a harder thing to pull off than most sequels manage.

How to run it today

Matrix Cubed runs cleanly in DOSBox with no special setup. Mount the installation directory, launch the executable, and both the party-management and ship-based interface screens behave exactly as they did on original hardware.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Keyboard and mouse · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

Like Countdown to Doomsday, Matrix Cubed sits under two separate ownership questions rather than one. SSI itself stopped existing as an independent studio decades ago, its trademark eventually landing with Ubisoft, while the underlying Buck Rogers character license has been disputed among descendants of the original comic strip’s creators for years. Neither party has taken any public action regarding this specific game. Genuinely unclear remains the accurate description, not abandoned outright.

If you liked this, try

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, the direct predecessor this game continues from; Whale’s Voyage, a lesser-known sci-fi RPG built with a similarly dense, lore-driven universe; and Hard Nova, another early- 1990s space RPG that leans harder into open exploration than the Buck Rogers games do.