GVMERS

During the 90s and early 2000s, few other pastimes were scrutinized more for their violence than video games. Spurred on by the bloody excesses of titles like Mortal Kombat and Doom, a generation of lawmakers, politicians, and parents took it upon themselves during this period to highlight the medium’s seeming depravity, and try to hide it from developing minds. To them, the thematic content that the video game industry explored was bad enough on its own – but its willingness to sell this subject matter to children warranted immediate action. Soldier of Fortune was one such series that came under this scrutiny. Developed by Raven Software in collaboration with the mercenary magazine of the same name, Soldier of Fortune garnered controversy around the globe for its intense level of gore, which at the time offered one of the more graphic depictions of bodily dismemberment ever seen in any first-person shooter series – a product of Raven’s custom-made GHOUL modeling system. Yet underneath the goriness of its modeling system, it also provided those that actually tried it with a polished gameplay experience; one that kept its player base thoroughly entertained well after the initial shock of seeing enemies blown to pieces wore off. It wasn’t utterly revolutionary in the way that contemporary shooters like Half-Life or Halo were, but it showed Raven to be more than capable of balancing both style and substance – and left its fans appropriately distraught when faded into nothingness. This is the rise and fall of Soldier of Fortune.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved. After butting heads with the United States for over four decades in proxy wars and crises around the globe, the Communist state had found itself besieged by a mixture of economic stagnation and social unrest, and decided that a brighter future awaited it as a democratic nation. It was a quiet end to a conflict many had believed for years was going to culminate in a nuclear tempest that would have torn the world asunder. But what if history had gone differently? What if the Soviet Union had refused to go quietly into the night, and made one last ditch attempt to conquer the rest of the world on the eve of its demise? This was the premise of World in Conflict. A real-time strategy game conceived by Swedish developer Massive Entertainment, World in Conflict tasked players with defending the United States and Europe from a surprise Soviet Invasion in 1989. Compared to the likes of Command & Conquer, which had depicted the Cold War turned Hot with a high degree of fantasy in years prior, Massive’s strategy title offered a largely grounded experience; one that depicted both its combatants and their battlefields with enough realism to make their plights feel genuinely sympathetic. Yet where it truly set itself apart from its competitors was its gameplay, which mixed together tried-and-true real-time strategy mechanics with some of the most distinctive elements of shooters like Battlefield to spectacular effect. So much so, that diehard fans would continue to steadfastly support it well after its creators – and its original online infrastructure – would move on. This is the history of World in Conflict.

Few video game genres instill power and satisfaction as easily as the shooter. While players can’t raise hell in titles like Call of Duty on the same scale as they can in games like Civilization, the immediacy of the former’s gameplay has proven time and time again to be far more efficient of an endorphin rush. Decades after players were first able to do so in Wolfenstein, unloading one’s clip into an unsuspecting enemy is still sublime like few other experiences in the medium; an unequivocal act of domination bereft of drawbacks or emotional trauma. But every now and then, a shooter goes against the grain, and attempts to subvert these very foundations upon which it is built. Spec Ops: The Line was one such game. Released in 2012 on consoles and PC, The Line began in an unassuming fashion, casting players as the leader of a three-man team tasked with investigating the fate of a rogue colonel in a sand-swept version of Dubai. Those who kept with it, however, quickly discovered that underneath its modest premise laid a hellish odyssey, one that forced its protagonists into disturbing predicaments at every turn, and repeatedly questioned the ethicality of how they chose to solve them. Like many subversive games before it, The Line received critical acclaim upon its release, but disappointed at retail, selling well below other, contemporaneous first-person shooters. Almost everyone who was involved in its production, however, was almost relieved that it didn’t end up becoming a massive hit – for bringing it into being had been its own personal hell, and nobody was ready to go for a second round. This is the history of Spec Ops: The Line.

Of all the video game genres, few are as taxing – or rewarding – as stealth games. Whether they involve sneaking past security cameras in a future dystopia, or hiding from bloodthirsty guards in the ancient past, stealth games are often slow and stressful affairs, lacking the pizzazz or immediate gratification that so many other experiences offer. But when everything comes together, and one squeezes through their quiet gauntlets without leaving a trace, the sense of satisfaction that they provide is unlike anything else. For a generation of gamers, few other experiences epitomized this better than Looking Glass Studios’s Thief: The Dark Project. Where competing stealth titles like Metal Gear Solid allowed players to go full Rambo at the drop of a hat, The Dark Project forced its audience to keep to the shadows, and use every affordance its mechanics and environments provided in order to avoid being caught. It was among its genre’s most formative experiences, and it was followed shortly after its release by a sequel that all but improved its greatest qualities – establishing both as being among the greatest gaming duologies of their era. Unfortunately, no sooner had the series made itself known than Looking Glass was forced to close its doors, and its ownership was passed on to Ion Storm’s Austin branch. The latter would do its best amid trying circumstances to do Thief justice, and deliver a game that, while not perfect, would have plenty of strong points. But like a curse from on high, this third entry would neither save Ion Storm from its own subsequent demise, nor prevent the series from resting afterwards in peace. Were this all that there was to Thief’s history, one wouldn’t be remiss calling it tragic. Yet in between all of its mainline titles, the series saw no shortage of support from its fans, who did their best to keep its memory alive with pro bono projects of stunning ambition. And when these fans were also triple-A developers, the games tha

Few video game villains are as versatile as zombies. The number of settings that they can appear in are unlimited. The range of powers and attributes that they can possess are vast. And because they lack a pulse, the ramifications of killing them are nonexistent. When Nathan Drake murders hundreds of mercenaries in Uncharted, one can’t help but wonder whether he is truly a good person. But when Leon Kennedy does the same to the undead in Resident Evil, there’s no question as to Leon’s righteousness. The only major downside to zombies is that because of this versatility, there are no shortage of games that feature them – and because there are no shortage of games that feature them, their presence alone is rarely enough to make whatever they’re part of feel special. Few games from the mid-2000s were more acutely aware of this than Dead Rising. The brainchild of Capcom’s Keiji Inafune, Dead Rising cast players in the role of Frank West, a photojournalist-turned-vigilante who tasks himself with discovering the scoop of a lifetime in a zombie-infested shopping mall. While many players picked it up because of this premise alone, most stayed with it when they discovered that underneath laid a challenging, yet deeply rewarding gameplay experience; one that exacerbated the danger of its zombies with a stringent time limit, and an unforgiving save system. When the dust around its release settled, the industry had crowned it one of the most unique takes on the genre, and a solid demonstration of how the seventh console generation would be able to take the medium to new heights. Yet Capcom was dissatisfied. It felt that Dead Rising could have been better had it leaned more deeply into its Western design elements, and that its development team had been unable to do so because it was almost entirely Japanese. As a result, the company would enlist Vancouver-based developer Blue Castle Games to take over the series in its stead – a decision that helped improve it in the s

When Naughty Dog released Uncharted 2: Among Thieves in 2009, the video game industry was awash with praise. After rising to prominence with the Crash Bandicoot series in the mid-90s, the Santa Monica-based studio had been delivering action title after action title for over decade. Each new release saw the studio grow and mature in some fashion – and Uncharted 2, with its blockbuster-like production values, appeared to be the culmination of this maturity. It was the apex of everything the studio had learned about how to engage players since its inception, rolled into one swashbuckling package. Few could have predicted that four years later, Naughty Dog would surpass itself yet again, and rise to a whole new tier of stardom with The Last of Us. An action-adventure game flush with supernatural horrors, The Last of Us followed survivors Joel and Ellie on a harrowing journey across a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by fungal zombies. Its world was a sight to behold, and its combat encounters left many dizzy with excitement. Yet when all was said and done, players were captivated most by Joel and Ellie, with the nuances of their relationship transfixing almost all who dared to join them on their journey. From the outside, the game seemed so masterfully constructed, that it was hard to imagine Naughty Dog had so much as broken a sweat developing it. In reality, however, shifting from Uncharted to The Last of Us had been a painstaking, difficult process – one that forced its chief visionaries to accept failure for years, and second-guess themselves on a continual basis. This is the history of The Last of Us.

In June of 2011, Gearbox Software released Duke Nukem Forever. The fourth mainline entry in the Duke Nukem series, Forever disappointed tremendously with its shoddy level design, tired tropes, and assortment of technical issues. To the industry at large, however, the fact that Forever had made it to store shelves at all was still amazing – for prior to this, the much-maligned shooter had been in development hell for over fourteen years, churning and molting through endless iterations under its original stewards at 3D Realms. What had once been one of the industry’s most infamous cases of vaporware had finally managed to see the light of day – and over course the next ten years, many more cases of vaporware would follow suit. Fumito Ueda’s The Last Guardian would emerge from obscurity and be re-unveiled as a PlayStation 4 game. Final Fantasy Versus 13 would be re-worked into Final Fantasy 15. Even Shenmue 3, which fans had long given up as a pipe dream, would manage to find its way onto store shelves after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Yet amidst all of this, a little known first-person shooter by the name of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 would continue to remain elusive. The third episodic expansion to Half Life 2, Valve had originally announced that Episode 3 would see release by 2007, and set the stakes for the series’s next mainline entry, Half-Life 3. By 2017, however, neither the expansion nor the threequel were anywhere to be seen. A consistent stream of rumors, leaks, and even teases from Valve proper suggested that the company still had every intention of returning to its landmark science-fiction series in some fashion, with a decent number of sources suggesting that it might even jump into the realm of virtual reality. But there was no timeline of when this return would happen, and no reason to believe Valve would put its money where its mouth was. While the company continued to support the likes of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 with ne

By 2010, players had their choice of heroes in action-adventure games. From space marines and treasure hunters to assassins and powerful mages, it seemed there were few adventurous professions the medium had yet to explore. But on the heels of creating two projects with a Punisher-like detective turned vigilante at the helm, Remedy Entertainment set about crafting a character whose occupation wasn’t exactly video game-friendly—a novelist. In writer Alan Wake, the Max Payne studio designed an inventive new protagonist, one whom audiences could more easily relate to. It took a long while for Remedy’s vision to fully form, though, as at the start of its production, Wake had far more in common with the company’s previous leading man. Yet, the iterative process of a lengthy development cycle saw the writer evolve into the dynamic figure many a gamer has come to know and love. To see their vision through to completion, Remedy’s developers were forced to follow the instructions they set for players in Alan Wake’s nightmarish journey through darkness—follow the light. Still, the path forward proved difficult to navigate as an open-world game took on a linear structure, all while the studio altered its managerial approach more than halfway through production. Out of this rather tumultuous period came an instant cult classic, which fans remain eager to see return in some capacity. This is the history of Alan Wake.

During the early 2000s, Star Wars video games could be found in nearly every genre under the sun. Kart racers, flight simulators, real-time strategy games, and all manner of other titles burst out of LucasArts and its licensees at light speed, bombarding fans with exotic new ways to experience the world of George Lucas’s famed space western. Some of these titles managed to carve out a place for themselves in players’s hearts. Others were forgotten by the wayside. Only a few, however, went on to stand the test of time as classics, and had a substantial influence on the industry as a whole. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was one of these titles. The masterwork of Canadian developer Bioware, Knights of the Republic sent players on a role-playing themed journey into the space western’s distant past to uncover a dastardly conspiracy. Its wealth of intriguing characters and gameplay scenarios proved immediately popular with fans, as well as provided Star Wars loremasters with prime material to incorporate into future stories. Yet perhaps most importantly, its development enabled Bioware to hone its talent as a master storyteller, and become an industry rockstar. A direct sequel helmed by Obsidian Entertainment would see release a short while later, as would an MMO from Bioware set three hundred years after the sequel’s events. The former came out less-than-ideal due to the rushed timeline in which it was crafted, while the latter – for better and for worse – offered a very different experience than either title before it. But in the end, these grievances would do little to dampen its popularity or legitimacy within the Star Wars universe – even after its events were declared non-canon. This is the history of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.