News
Wide-Open, Southeast-Asia-Inspired Landscapes of Death
When did the first deathmatch video game come out? The popular answer is in 1993 with DOOM, the first-person shooter that popularized online combat; others point to a few '80s games on early computers, though those were limited to two players at a time.
Over the years, SIMNET has been phased out of the networked games story. But it was almost certainly the first computer program to connect huge numbers of combatants. You might even call it the first massively multiplayer game, though it wasn't designed for fun. The US Military developed SIMNET in the '80s as a combat simulator, and its harrowing combat realism was featured in Wired Magazine's debut issue in 1993:
Redmond's Zipper Interactive is well-versed in SIMNET, as Zipper's co-founders helped develop it. In the era before home computers were up to such tasks, at companies like Bellevue's Delta Graphics, Zipper cofounder Brian Soderberg built tank and Apache helicopter simulators—as much the hardware as the image generation. In the early '80s, he and current Zipper president Jim Bosler took up jobs at Loral Aerospace, a defense contractor that was eventually bought out by Lockheed Martin, where they continued to work together on SIMNET.
“[The military] wanted to network thousands [of people] to run military exercises as simulations,” Zipper Vice President Michael Gutmann says. “There was a push to get the troops informed about the battlefield before they got there.”
Roughly 15 years have passed since Soderberg and Bosler left Loral to take that experience and apply it to video games, and the company's output has been exactly the sort of stuff you'd expect: combat in vehicles (MechWarrior 3), combat in planes (Crimson Skies), and combat on the ground (SOCOM US Navy Seals). The developer's latest release, MAG (PlayStation 3, $60), is perhaps the best fit with the company's SIMNET pedigree, though not just in terms of military combat.
MAG is ... well ... not fun. At least, not in the way you'd expect a modern, big-budget war game to be fun. No quick thrills, sense of humor, sweeping art design, or weird twists. You log online to join a neverending battle between massive teams (64 to 128 players) from three warring private armies.
Your side splits into a number of eight-person squads, each led by the most experienced players (based on points accrued), and gets a specific zone to defend on a super-sized battlefield.
After chatting with designers at Zipper, I got the impression that the team wanted MAG to come off like a video game. A special kind of video game, really -- a World of Warcraft with guns instead of swords. It's got all the trappings of that massively-multiplayer hit: experience points, weapons and accessories to buy, powers to unlock, customizations, perpetual scoreboards. But those trappings betray the true spirit of the experience--and to its detriment.
My time in MAG has been starkly different than any other war game I've played. Since no friends of mine own MAG, I have to join other players' combat teams. It typically ends awfully. Most players don't employ the “squad leader” system, perhaps the game's best innovation; when employed, it allows leaders to reward their underlings.
But that doesn't happen, and the rest of the unmanaged squad runs willy-nilly into the battlefield, only to be picked off. These aren't the closed corridors of DOOM or even the carefully sculpted arenas of Halo; they're wide-open, southeast-Asia-inspired landscapes of death. They're ugly and brown and full of roughly 128 people trying to kill you. Other first-person online games can be difficult with tough combatants, sure, but few feel so hopeless.
With that in mind, I try to give MAG the benefit of the doubt. I do so by imagining myself in a SIMNET rig. It'd be outfitted with authentic tank innards. Two other soldiers and I would sit in there, manning every control and listening to every networked squawk from squadmates connected to us on the Internet, and then the booming and banging would start—deafening, metal, and real, meant to prepare us for the intangibles of full-on combat. Our success would take time, patience, and coordination, and surviving such a harrowing ordeal would prove overwhelming.
The few victories I've experienced in MAG, in which I lucked into a smart squad with chatty members and an effective leader, have felt the tiniest bit like that vision. The battles are long and widespread, and I've appreciated the scaling between small squads and a huge war.
But in my month of testing, MAG's players mostly come expecting a video game, not a long-term dedication to a SIMNET rig, so I've lost and died a lot. And as other modern war games pop up—including this week's impressive Battlefield Bad Company 2, along with Zipper's own forthcoming SOCOM 4, announced yesterday—they'll surely pilfer MAG's best ideas and give players more flash and short-term fun. In that respect, will MAG be seen as an innovator in networked combat? It probably should. But then, so should SIMNET.
Over the years, SIMNET has been phased out of the networked games story. But it was almost certainly the first computer program to connect huge numbers of combatants. You might even call it the first massively multiplayer game, though it wasn't designed for fun. The US Military developed SIMNET in the '80s as a combat simulator, and its harrowing combat realism was featured in Wired Magazine's debut issue in 1993:
"Get them, sir," a deceased tanker muttered vengefully as he watched Alpha 24's heroic stand in the fake Mojave Hills. Another tanker, from the Alpha scout unit, griped bitterly about his death by friendly fire: "fratricide." Dying at the hands of his own platoon had been especially cruel. It was clear that the real-life lesson of unit coordination had sunk in well - at least for this poor guy.
"It's only SIMNET," another tanker told him at last. "You're not bleeding."
Redmond's Zipper Interactive is well-versed in SIMNET, as Zipper's co-founders helped develop it. In the era before home computers were up to such tasks, at companies like Bellevue's Delta Graphics, Zipper cofounder Brian Soderberg built tank and Apache helicopter simulators—as much the hardware as the image generation. In the early '80s, he and current Zipper president Jim Bosler took up jobs at Loral Aerospace, a defense contractor that was eventually bought out by Lockheed Martin, where they continued to work together on SIMNET.
“[The military] wanted to network thousands [of people] to run military exercises as simulations,” Zipper Vice President Michael Gutmann says. “There was a push to get the troops informed about the battlefield before they got there.”
Roughly 15 years have passed since Soderberg and Bosler left Loral to take that experience and apply it to video games, and the company's output has been exactly the sort of stuff you'd expect: combat in vehicles (MechWarrior 3), combat in planes (Crimson Skies), and combat on the ground (SOCOM US Navy Seals). The developer's latest release, MAG (PlayStation 3, $60), is perhaps the best fit with the company's SIMNET pedigree, though not just in terms of military combat.
MAG is ... well ... not fun. At least, not in the way you'd expect a modern, big-budget war game to be fun. No quick thrills, sense of humor, sweeping art design, or weird twists. You log online to join a neverending battle between massive teams (64 to 128 players) from three warring private armies.
Your side splits into a number of eight-person squads, each led by the most experienced players (based on points accrued), and gets a specific zone to defend on a super-sized battlefield.
After chatting with designers at Zipper, I got the impression that the team wanted MAG to come off like a video game. A special kind of video game, really -- a World of Warcraft with guns instead of swords. It's got all the trappings of that massively-multiplayer hit: experience points, weapons and accessories to buy, powers to unlock, customizations, perpetual scoreboards. But those trappings betray the true spirit of the experience--and to its detriment.
My time in MAG has been starkly different than any other war game I've played. Since no friends of mine own MAG, I have to join other players' combat teams. It typically ends awfully. Most players don't employ the “squad leader” system, perhaps the game's best innovation; when employed, it allows leaders to reward their underlings.
But that doesn't happen, and the rest of the unmanaged squad runs willy-nilly into the battlefield, only to be picked off. These aren't the closed corridors of DOOM or even the carefully sculpted arenas of Halo; they're wide-open, southeast-Asia-inspired landscapes of death. They're ugly and brown and full of roughly 128 people trying to kill you. Other first-person online games can be difficult with tough combatants, sure, but few feel so hopeless.
With that in mind, I try to give MAG the benefit of the doubt. I do so by imagining myself in a SIMNET rig. It'd be outfitted with authentic tank innards. Two other soldiers and I would sit in there, manning every control and listening to every networked squawk from squadmates connected to us on the Internet, and then the booming and banging would start—deafening, metal, and real, meant to prepare us for the intangibles of full-on combat. Our success would take time, patience, and coordination, and surviving such a harrowing ordeal would prove overwhelming.
The few victories I've experienced in MAG, in which I lucked into a smart squad with chatty members and an effective leader, have felt the tiniest bit like that vision. The battles are long and widespread, and I've appreciated the scaling between small squads and a huge war.
But in my month of testing, MAG's players mostly come expecting a video game, not a long-term dedication to a SIMNET rig, so I've lost and died a lot. And as other modern war games pop up—including this week's impressive Battlefield Bad Company 2, along with Zipper's own forthcoming SOCOM 4, announced yesterday—they'll surely pilfer MAG's best ideas and give players more flash and short-term fun. In that respect, will MAG be seen as an innovator in networked combat? It probably should. But then, so should SIMNET.
