It’s not surprising how far apart I generally find myself from contemporary reviewers of the games I’m writing about, who were working from an extremely different perspective. I was nonetheless surprised by the particular gap for Platoon. To me, it’s another military shooter, but one a mile away from the fantasy chaos of Commando. Its basic mechanics are walking around and shooting, sure, but its approach is utterly different.
Instead of wide open spaces and clear views, everything is depicted in an ugly, claustrophobic haze. I’ve commented on the graphical limitations of the Spectrum giving atmospheric bonuses to games like Ghosts’n’Goblins before, but never has an approach of embracing the jagged edge felt so deliberate and effective as in Platoon. The disorienting effect of switching between soldiers; the terror posed by enemies popping up from the ground when you can barely see them against the teeming scenery – everything feels too mucky and fraught to be glamourising. Another positive of its dark impressionistic feel is that there’s very little to actually place it in its setting of the Vietnam War. So while I found it a bit too repetitive and opaque to enjoy that much as a game, I thought it had a lot more going for it as a version of the horror of war than other similar games I’ve covered.
Yet Platoon is, in fact, where the general gun-ho attitude of ‘80s computer game magazines turns out to have had its limits. “Ocean’s claim that the game […] focuses on the ‘tragedy of war’ is a bit dubious” says Crash. “The game does trivialise a serious subject and you may find some aspects of it stick in the throat” writes Ace’s Andy Wilton. Sinclair User ends its review of Platoon with “the first casualty of marketing is good taste”. I was surprised to find that my initial reaction to Platoon was more generous than that of many magazines at the time. Investigation reveals two main reasons for this.
The first reason is the matter of historical perspective. To me, 1988 is well in the past, but it’s almost within the grasp of my own memory. The early ‘70s, on the other hand, is a completely different world. The proximity of the two vanishes in the distance. It was only after seeing the reactions that I tried projecting the timescales forwards and noted that Platoon’s setting in the war in Vietnam is not too different to someone making a game of the Iraq war now, which would feel immediately, obviously wrong. There’s a clear reason the nearest mainstream examples to that we’ve had have stuck with more completely fictionalised modern warfare.
The second reason is that I haven’t seen Platoon the film and knew almost nothing about it. A read of the synopsis later, newly filled in on its portrayal of terror and internal strife and war crimes, things make more sense. As a medium, games can contain a lot and can and sometimes will tackle those themes, but doing so in a movie tie-in from the country’s biggest commercial publisher is another matter. The Hurt Locker: The Game, anyone?
Regardless of the merits of the actual execution of the game I’m playing, in context the entire concept of Platoon the basic shooter is a ghoulish parody, and reviewers didn’t miss that. I’ll give the last word to Rachael Smith of Your Sinclair: “Platoon (the game) turns you into just the sort of killing machine that Platoon (the movie) made you so queasy about”.
