For a time as a young child, I was obsessed with space. I loved reading factual books about the Solar System and I was delighted when a teacher once set the task of creating models of the planets out of different coloured tissue paper. They hung in the classroom and I would take plenty of chances to show off my knowledge when people came in to look at them.
Back then I was good enough at maths to be placed in a class with children two to three years my elder, but still unable to tie my shoelaces, never mind confidently handle a social interaction. To me the world was a baffling place, where people just accepted things that didn’t make sense. I’m not even talking the things we got taught Catholic school here, but, like, the idea that people always need to wear clothes! Looking at space, knowing that there was all so much out there moving to a logic and order that existed beyond people, was appealing.
I never played Damocles, but at about the same time I was balling up red tissue paper into Mars, I played and loved space exploration and trading game Elite. ‘Influential’ or ‘important’ are loaded words, so let’s just say that David Braben and Ian Bell’s Elite is one of the pre-AAA games that I most wish came within our scope. I was terrible at it, but even just looking at its space maps, floating through the galaxy and crashing when trying to dance my way in to dock at its rotating space ports was revelatory to me. I suspect that its wonky synthetic rendition of the Blue Danube waltz may even have had a formative impact on my music taste.
Soon after Elite, another developer called Novagen released Mercenary, a game with similar wire-frame graphics and open structure applied to a planet-based setting. Damocles is its sequel, and Novagen used the Amiga’s power to upgrade wire-frame to blocky filled in polygons. Bigger than that, they expanded into space as well, offering the chance to explore a whole solar system and its individual planets and moons.You do that exploration from a first person view, a game approach which would later come to have some different associations but in Damocles puts the emphasis on what you’re looking at. The sights are the star.
The block colours of Damocles give a stark alien feel even when showing the green grass, blue sky and lovely night starscape of its first planet, never mind when you travel to orange worlds with purple skies, or picked out in yellow and red. I found myself stopping moving around to just watch the sun or moon set a few times.There’s a lot to see and the sense of a vast setting, but it’s not always the busiest one. Producing such a vast world in 3D is enough of a strain that the planets are sparsely and somewhat repetitively populated. Damocles features some striking brutalist architecture, and even some windows, but that aside its buildings contain a lot of very similar boxy rooms where only the colours and floor numbers change.
Damocles isn’t only about exploring, though. The metaphorical dangling sword of the title is a comet called Damocles, headed towards the planet Eris. The President has set you the task of doing something about it, for a substantial reward, but you arrived a bit late, so you only have three hours left. After a bit of introductory admin, you are provided with a key for a ship that can travel at near-light speeds, but you have to deal with the effects of special relativity. Do what I did, go straight to full speed, and unwittingly set the controls for the heart of the sun in the process, and the hours whizz by. Waste too much time and (spoiler alert) ERIS DIES. Game over.…or not.
Eris is gone, but life carries on. You get a message from the President pointing out that you’ve allowed her planet to get destroyed, but oh well, they evacuated, no hard feelings. She even points out that she still has the reward money around if she ever needs you to do anything else. This is a triumphant design decision: you have no Tardis or Ocarina of Time to take you back in time in game, but this way you can work out most of what’s happening at your leisure and then start over again holding on to your new found knowledge for a new three hours.
The sardonic message from the president is also one of the biggest examples of what the society depicted in Damocles is like. I haven’t found as many direct references as in Elite to Douglas Adams’ comic sci-fi Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Damocles feels all the more of a type. It’s a mode that sees space as somewhere to magnify the absurdities of society, in particular a certain type of British bureaucracy, to new heights. Hitchhiker’s opened with Arthur Dent discovering that his house was about to be demolished to make way for a new road and he’d missed the notification, then discovering that the same thing was happening to Earth. Damocles doesn’t have any set piece as brilliant, but it’s significant what kind of interactions it does put in its sparse cities.
Go to the wrong floor of one office and you lose all your money to a lawsuit defeat catching up with you. Another building contains a file of political proposals, including one where the President suggests a poll tax and “believes this will be electorally popular”. It may be an alien planet, but where better for some contemporary British political satire. People create a lot of nonsense, the message sometimes comes across.
That whole area often feels like a minor part of Damocles, though, not least because any conversation is delivered through one small line of written message space. Together with the general emptiness, the lack of visible people supports another aspect of the first person view, which is that it gives a freedom of characterisation that wouldn’t be possible if you saw who you were talking to, or especially whose perspective you were seeing from. You’re told you’re a mercenary, and beyond that you can fill in as you wish. Apart from the humanoid-suited furniture you can pick up and sell off as you travel, there’s no strong reason to assume that you’re even human, never mind any particular gender or race or anything else. You can explore as you see fit and fill in the gaps as you see fit.
In truth, the flipside of its size and freedom is that Damocles feels like it reaches for a lot more than it can comfortably achieve. That’s partly me speaking as a modern player, though — I had trouble even navigating through its clumsy automatic doors and found myself reflexively trying to use a second stick to control the camera, which isn’t a problem players at the time would have faced. Life has moved on and left me lacking the patience and methodical approach needed to do more than skim the game’s surface. But I can think of a six year old with a shelf full of books on space who would have loved Damocles.
[This piece originally appeared on AAA]