Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy

Lore & Background

The game began as an animated film concept in 1999 by Spanish animation group Anibyte, which had worked with Eurocom on CGI cutscenes for 40 Winks. When funding for the film fell through, Anibyte brought the project to Eurocom and it was redesigned as a video game. Production started in 2000 and lasted three years, with a pre-production period of six months to a year. The team wanted an exotic setting, briefly considering an Arabian-style design before settling on Ancient Egypt after positive feedback on the mummy design. The characters and enemies were designed by Julian Romero, and the music by Steve Duckworth blended a Western orchestral sound with Arabian elements. Voice acting was desired by Eurocom staff but THQ declined it, a decision staff later felt was a mistake. The game was designed as the potential start of a franchise, with sequels and multimedia expansions considered.

Reader's Guide

Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy was Eurocom's first major attempt at creating an original property after years of licensed games. Its dual-character system, with Sphinx focusing on combat and exploration and Tutankhamun on puzzle-solving and stealth, was present from early production. The team aimed for a balance between action, platforming, and puzzles, and compared the experience to The Legend of Zelda. The game's basic design did not change during development, though the mummy's role grew due to positive internal feedback. Several areas and gameplay elements—including an underwater realm called Akaria and the jungle-dominated Sakkara—were cut to meet the release date. These elements were later restored in the remaster via fan-created mods. Despite positive critical reception for its gameplay and art design, the game sold poorly. Eurocom retained the rights after release and unsuccessfully attempted a sequel; the intellectual property was later bought by THQ Nordic in December 2016, leading to the remaster.

Did You Know?

• The game was originally titled Sphinx and the Shadow of Set before being changed to Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy.
• A mobile phone version was released in 2004, split into twelve levels and developed by Humagade.
• The in-game character animations were based on videos the animators took of themselves performing actions.
• A game-breaking bug related to a save point was present in the North American release.

Colonial Roots and the Romantic Mummy

The mummy-as-fictional-undead traces its earliest roots to the nineteenth century, a period when Ottoman-held Egypt came under the influence of French and then Victorian British colonialism. During this era, the first living mummies to appear in Western storytelling were overwhelmingly female figures, cast as objects of desire and romantic attachment for the story's protagonist. This framing was not merely a narrative choice; it functioned as a metaphor for the sexualized Orientalism and the broader colonial fantasy of the East as an alluring, exotic other. Writers such as Théophile Gautier, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Grant Allen, Julian Hawthorne, and H. D. Everett all contributed to this tradition. Everett's novel Iras: A Mystery pushed the trope to its most literal extreme, depicting a protagonist who actually marries a mummy that assumes the appearance of a beautiful woman. These early works established a template in which the mummy served less as a threat and more as a seductive, otherworldly companion, embedding colonial attitudes deep into the genre's DNA.

The Monster Mummy and the Gothic Pantheon

By the 1930s, the seductive, romantic mummy of the Victorian era had been largely displaced by a far more fearsome archetype. Boris Karloff's portrayal in the 1932 film The Mummy marked the definitive turn, transforming the bandaged undead into a genuine monster and slotting the mummy firmly into the same pantheon as Count Dracula and Frankenstein's creature. From that point forward, the mummy became a staple of horror cinema and pulp entertainment. The influence spread into comics as well: EC Comics' titles Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror all featured mummified antagonists, while Marvel Comics developed its own long-running mummy character, N'Kantu, the Living Mummy. Even the Crypt-Keeper's own family tree was steeped in the trope, as Tales from the Crypt issue 33 revealed his parents to be a four-thousand-year-old female Egyptian mummy and a two-headed corpse. This era cemented the mummy's identity as a creature of dread rather than desire, a shift that would define popular imagination for decades.

The Romantic Revival of the Late Twentieth Century

The late twentieth century brought an unexpected resurgence of the romantic mummy archetype that had dominated nineteenth-century fiction. Anne Rice's 1989 novel The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned rekindled the tradition by centering on a benevolent, immortal mummy who is reanimated by Edwardian-era archaeologists and enters into a sexual relationship with a female protagonist. The novel was later followed by a 2017 sequel, and the broader mummy mythology was further explored in The Kane Chronicles series. The trend gained additional momentum through the late 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, appearing in works as varied as Tom B. Stone's 1997 novella Don't Tell Mummy, the "Inca Mummy Girl" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Annette Curtis Klause's 2006 fantasy novel Freaks: Alive on the Inside, and Pendulo Studios' 2011 video game The Next Big Thing. This revival demonstrated that the mummy could once again function as a figure of intimacy and fascination rather than pure terror, echoing the colonial-era romances while updating them for modern audiences.

A Literary Lineage Spanning Two Centuries

The mummy's literary history stretches from the early nineteenth century into the twentieth, yielding a rich and varied body of work. Ludwig von Baczko's 1818 short story "The Magic Mirror" features a mummy that animates when a character attempts to destroy an enchanted mirror, while Jane C. Loudon's 1827 novel The Mummy! presents a science-fiction scenario in which an Egyptian mummy named Cheops is revived in the twenty-second century. Edgar Allan Poe contributed a satirical take in his 1845 piece "Some Words with a Mummy," and Louisa May Alcott's 1869 story "Lost in a Pyramid" helped establish the mummy's curse subgenre. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1892 "Lot No. 249" is often cited as the first story to depict a reanimated mummy as truly sinister, a stark contrast to the benevolent mummy in his 1890 "The Ring of Thoth." Bram Stoker's 1903 The Jewel of Seven Stars introduced mummy possession, a device later reversed by Robert Bloch in his 1938 "Eyes of the Mummy." H. P. Lovecraft wove mummies into his broader mythological framework in both the 1924 Houdini ghostwritten story "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," set beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza, and the 1935 "Out of the Aeons."