Cannon Fodder is the first game we’ve encountered to open with a screen which reads “This game is not in any way endorsed by the ROYAL BRITISH LEGION”. It came with a genuine, ban-this-sick-filth, tabloid controversy driven by its use of that charity’s poppy symbol in a computer game. A couple of decades on, the prospect of not having that symbol on the shirt of every player in a football match can cause similar issues so, you know, times change. These days games which take after real wars, sometimes pushing their realism alongside their fun game modes, are par for the course and have to try really hard to get the tabloids after them.
There is no real war portrayed in Cannon Fodder. In fact there’s an almost total lack of any context. KILL ALL ENEMY, as the mission briefing screen says, not for any wider strategic reason but because it’s what you do. They’ll kill you first otherwise, except when they won’t, poor AI and the possible deliberate portrayal of disinterest and terror shading into each other. Finish that mission and another one will soon follow, with another set of enemies all but indistinguishable from your own green uniformed troops.
How this plays out kind of resembles Syndicate, or at least the portion of it that involved moving tiny people around the screen and shooting each other dead. It narrows down and sharpens the basic mechanic — move an often even smaller team, with left-click to move and right-click to shoot — and still keeps thoughtful strategic complications around it.
Swim across the river to access supplies and leave yourself slow and exposed? Go in with all of your troops or leave a couple behind, reducing your effectiveness but giving you the chance to fight another day? Get to a safe distance from an enemy building before chucking a grenade, or get it done quicker and risk blowing yourself up in the process? (that one may just be me). Its expert marshalling of minimal elements is one of several things to remind me positively of Lemmings, and yet all of Cannon Fodder’s gameplay excellence is actually a relatively minor part of my experience of it. What it says is bigger than how it plays.
Cannon Fodder is tonally all over the place. Shoot someone and they bounce cartoonishly away in a burst of blood; shoot their body and it does so again; sometimes enemies don’t die but just lie in agony, their screams blending with the eerie echo of distant gunfire. Finish a level and you’ll get a scrolling tribute to those ‘lost in service’, complete with poppies, followed by one to your ‘heroes in victory’, all soundtracked by garish synth-funk which again recalls Lemmings. It makes me feel faintly queasy, but I can’t tell whether it’s in a way Sensible Software were going for or not. That people genuinely couldn’t see their anti-war intentions seems improbable; that they might have found it uncomfortably crass regardless is less so. And I’ve got this far without even commenting on the name!
Each time you get back to the between level screen, though, the message feels more effective, the way in which Cannon Fodder uses its game as a vehicle for desperate sadness more apparent. Team members who have been killed are replaced from a stream of newcomers queuing up for war, while the hill behind gradually becomes dotted with gravestones. There’s no such memorial for the enemy, but every death goes into a Sensible Soccer-style score at the top of the screen, sides labelled as ‘Home’ and ‘Away’, numbers escalating grotesquely. It’s not subtle, but being smuggled in amid cuteness and fun lets it have bite nonetheless.
Which brings us to one final argument in favour of the game’s approach: it was released only four years after Blackadder Goes Forth did pretty much the same thing more specifically for the First World War to vast acclaim. Perhaps Cannon Fodder‘s satirical messages failing to get through to everyone was in part down to video games lagging behind in cultural perception. It’s a game that shows that the lag wasn’t totally self-inflicted.
Amiga chart, Edge 006, March 1994