Oldies of Fortune

"Eighties night

The kids get high and eat TV"

 

Metric - On the Sly

 

 

Allow me a little bout of nostalgia today. My first experiences with electronic games were in arcades and rare glimpses at computers at school or my family's workplaces in the early '90s, most by then outdated: Oregon Trail, a PacMan copycat, Pong, something about cavemen, a ninja fighting game, but also the cutting-edge Doom, Prince of Persia and the first Dune adaptation. My own family's first computer was a garage-assembled Sinclair Spectrum knockoff you could fry an egg on, programmed via audiotape. But it was enough for me to learn some basic programming in... BASIC, and Logo. (Turtle power!) Not that I stuck with programming after third grade, but a fundamental grasp of how instructions are fed into a machine served me well. It wouldn't be until several years later that my family would buy our first for-real off-the-shelf Windows PC and I'd really get into gaming with MW2:Mercs, C&C:Red Alert, SimCity2000 and so forth.

 

In between, though, I got a Sega Genesis as a gift in fifth grade. Major deal, since we couldn't really afford it. Among other things, it taught me what absolute poison proprietary systems are, and our desperate need for a universally-compatible, user-serviceable, moddable, scalable platform (which PCs best approach if not quite satisfy) with mouse-and-keyboard controls. Sega Genesis originally came with a three-button controller. Later I had to buy a six-button controller because some games flat-out required it, regardless any extra moves beyond three were redundant to their simplistic '90s formulae... deliberately so as to make you shill out for the extra buttons.

 

Three years later I sold it all off, along with my entire cartridge collection, for about... maybe thirty bucks? Fifteen for the console, fifteen for my admittedly meager collection? I remember trying very hard to feel like I was being mature and responsible about money and not letting things go to waste. 'Course, what I mostly learned from the experience is that being responsible gets you ripped off by the greasy jackass at the second hand shop.

 

Now, despite being remembered as Sega's competitive high point, the Genesis wasn't necessarily known for breaking tech specs so much as its excellent gamut of games. My own handful included:

- Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which still shows up as the iconic Sonic whenever anyone references the series (came with the console)

- X-Men 2: Clone Wars, still remembered for its level decor and mutant power implementation

- Eternal Champions, a fighting game more immersive than most for its character design and backstories

- the original Star Control, a TBS with Asteroids-like ship combat

- Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego ... look, it wasn't THAT terrible... for an educational game

- FIFA International Soccer (don't judge me!) (I was young and foolish)

- but there was another one, a top-down shooter. It had weird guns and weirder monsters. And default duo mode. And lots of rivers. And a cracked industrial aesthetic. Come on, what was it called, what was it called?

Unlike the others above, it took me an hour to find the forgotten Soldiers of Fortune, a.k.a. The Chaos Engine, having apparently been eclipsed by another top-down shoot-em-up called Mercs. Even at ten, I wasn't crazy about the twitchy point-and-shoot routine (and not just because I'm generally bad at it) so it was never my favorite. Looking back now, even the features I thought unique at the time, like the two-player gameplay or the ammo powerups or the monsters jumping out of the walls, had been standard for arcade games through the previous decade. But at least it put some minimal effort into justifying the monster spawning with a by-the-numbers multiverse phlebotinum (which was more than most games of its generation did) had distinctive characters, and one thing that stands out now is the setting.

 

Soldiers of Fortune was steampunk about a decade before steampunk took off as a fad, when cyberpunk itself was still just gaining traction with wider audiences. We're talking ~six years before The Matrix, couple years before even Johnny Mnemonic was made into a movie. Of course "punk" in general had been a major fad of the previous decade. So I'm thinking SoF / The Chaos Engine managed to land at exactly the wrong time. Where its competitor Mercs looks like it banked on more generic '80s/'90s action movie mass-appeal, this one depended on niches which had either died down or not yet sprung up. Weird Fiction was a bit passe and New Weird hadn't taken off yet, Punk was last decade's news and Steampunk hadn't hit its Wild Wild West / Fullmetal Alchemist / Arcanum / Girl Genius / etc. stride.

Reviewing creative works, it's very tempting to fall into the fundamental attribution error, to dissect every frame, every sprite, every bullet for flaws, when the bulk of success or failure may have been determined by milieu. Wrong place, wrong time, or maybe the product fell into a transitional period later forgotten altogether. On a larger scale, nobody associates the '90s with steampunk. On a personal level, even I'd forgotten the game's name for belonging to my brief console phase between computers.