The intro to Medal of Honor: Allied Assault posed a question: can one man truly make a difference? The game then answered that question at length: if that one man has the ability to run at full pace for miles carrying an extensive arsenal, and after being hit by a hail of bullets to take an instant swig of medicine and carry on as if nothing had ever happened, if the enemy are incurious at the micro level and fail to identify this man-shaped superweapon and redirect their war effort accordingly at the macro level then, yes, one man truly can make a difference.
The question of individual events changing the wider course of history also comes up when thinking about the military shooter genre. Looking back through my list of the bestselling games each week in the UK, there is a distinct lack of that type of game making it to the top prior to 2002. If you stretch one or both words of the definition a lot you can bring in Tiberian Sun, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and Metal Gear Solid from 1999, but otherwise there’s… GoldenEye 007, and then you have the Strike and Cannon Fodder series from earlier in the ‘90s and all the way back to the ‘80s for Platoon and Commando and Operation Wolf. Yet after that irregular presence, the two Medal of Honor games to reach #1 in 2002 were just the beginning and there would be regular games of their type thereafter.
Medal of Honor was conceptualised by Steven Spielberg, following the massive success of his World War II film Saving Private Ryan. He saw his kids playing first-person shooter GoldenEye 007 and decided to make a game like that which would serve to both entertain and to educate about the war. It was a success, turned into a more successful series, and then some team members went off to work on a rival WWII shooter series called Call of Duty, and then things took a turn.
Looked at from there, the timing of the game genre breakout was down to the film, which could be linked to the wave of nostalgia associated with the fifty year anniversaries of various events during World War II. British national myth making based on the war is if anything even stronger than American, and media showing it through American eyes has never seemed to be too much of a bar to popularity here (Saving Private Ryan was not the most successful film released in 1998 in the UK like it was in the US, because we got Titanic that year and because Dr. Dolittle also did a little better, but it was third).
There was also the happy coincidence of a console generation change and new consoles much more suited to the vision. The first two Medal of Honor installments were on the PlayStation. Allied Assault did more with the additional power of the PC, but that was in many ways a dry run for Frontline, built for the PS2’s increasingly mass audience, which ended up spending ten weeks at the top of the UK charts. A combination of improved 3D capabilities and the very control mechanisms of new consoles, with two analog sticks perfect for control over movement and aiming simultaneously, meant that new types of fast-paced console shooter were possible.
As Ben noted in his post on Allied Assault, it was the mission set during the Normandy landings which was that game’s centrepiece. It came several hours in. Frontline jumps straight into the same setting from the beginning and ups the dramatic effect even further. After sitting on a boat approaching the beach, the view plunges under the water, with muffled sounds coming from the distance, before bursting up onto the surface to a cacophony of yelling and gunfire and bombs. Turn the volume up and the sound design is gobsmacking in its own right, even before adding the massive explosions blowing chunks out of the beach right next to you. It’s a triumph of spectacle, and a magnificently invigorating first impression that goes beyond what would have been possible a few years before.
Putting D-Day first leads to a compromise on the intensity of the gameplay, since walking straight into near certain death comes off a bit different as a first impression than as a later challenge. You move around the beach shooting at machine gun bunkers to provide cover for other soldiers, and your special hard-to-kill status is immediately made clear, even more so if you have trouble finding objectives and wander the beach a while. Insignificant soldiers die bloodlessly and vanish like grey ghosts around you.
After that, the game provides you the chance to get inside the bunkers and turn the tables, soon giving you a machine gun post to deal rapid fire death from. From then on there are a similar range of scenarios to Allied Assault, arranged in a different order. This was the first game in the series for which Spielberg wasn’t involved in the story, but doesn’t change much. And the appeal of working out the angles to make your way through a space, to draw enemies out or to rush them, zigzagging and firing madly, is very much the same.
You get to fight through different types of settings, sneak on board a submarine and plant some bombs, and use lots of different weapons along the way, including the sniper rifle which lets you zoom in from a long way out, although all guns have some kind of zoom to compensate for the more fiddly aiming offered by a stick as opposed to a mouse. When it steps outside of the basics of shooting people, trying to keep out of the way and collecting things, it generally isn’t much of a change in mechanical terms — just going to a goal point and pressing the action button to do whatever is required — but within that things are kept as varied and fast moving as possible.
The compromise between the all-action tour and authenticity often shows. Levels are frequently set out in a straight line, notably on the U-boat where some improbable holes and ladders make it marginally more plausible. Others use things like impassible crates which get blown up by outside forces as soon as you’ve collected the equipment you need, and lots of fighting goes on around you as soon as you turn up anywhere. For all the additional complexity of presentation and the historical research, the approach for its hero has changed little since Operation Wolf.
It’s a theatre of war in every sense, its actors waiting for you before doing their lines and departing. And as Frontline keeps upping the drama to keep to video game expectations, it inevitably gets even further removed from reality. It ends with a boss fight against a taunting general, followed by our hero stealing an experimental plane and flying away. It’s not quite a Wolfenstein 3D-style climactic battle with a chaingun-wielding cyborg Hitler, but in realism terms it might as well be.
On which glorification note, let’s consider the other factor of timing in the success of military shooter games. There is a clear uptick from 2002 onwards, or, in other words, after the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001. With the US (and UK) at war in Afghanistan, and pro-war propaganda and jingoism at a high and about to rise still further, the timing couldn’t be better for games portraying the (literally) incredible heroism of soldiers. Even more so ones doing so with the sporadic mawkish sentimentality of Medal of Honor: Frontline, its soft nostalgic orchestral music and opening quote about soldiers going to heaven having served their time in hell.
Commercial game development is not generally a quick process, and many of the new wave of hits were clearly in development already before the mood change. It’s not hard to see a link though, especially knowing where we have ended up with far more blatant government-funded propaganda games in favour of war crimes. And it makes sense for the beginning of that process to be a film and series on World War II, both thanks to its early prominence in previous rounds of first person shooters and because of the moral straightforwardness. It’s harder to take a stance against a war-based theme park ride when it’s Nazis that it’s shooting at. One man and one series can make a difference, especially if that one man is Steven Spielberg, but history doesn’t work that way alone.
Medal of Honor: Frontline spent a total of ten weeks as the UK’s #1 game, in an almost continuous run interrupted for one week. Details of what was #1 in other charts after the page break.
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