Vol.
2, Issue 9
January 24, 2000
Shot
out of a cannon into the past
ideo
game opening cinematics don’t exactly allow for three-hour
epics.
Their
main function is to brief the player for the game to come in a
hopefully interesting way, whether that be a montage of action,
a little slice of narrative or a simple introductory piece like
a character display (for an example of the latter see the intro
to Namco’s Soul Calibur). There are games, however,
which because of either sheer scope or stylistic concerns require
a different approach, a radical compacting of story, theme and
character into a hysterically operatic few minutes of viewer concentration
that generate in the player the sensation that he or she is descending
into a folkloric miasma, a tidal wave of legend.
Greeting
players with phrases like “in the dark times” or “and
so it came to pass,” these games catapult you backwards into
their own foundational history, and then quickly escort you, pointing
out the odd bit of local color, through a winding narrational
hallway that terminates in front of a door leading to the game
itself. Two recent GT Interactive releases provide a glimpse into
how this technique can succeed and backfire.
Unreal
Tournament (developed
by Epic Games) and The Wheel of Time (developed by Legend
Entertainment) both open with an informational hymn to a phantom
“first part,” a telling of events which the player has
never before seen that feels strangely more like a recapping.
There are two basic forms the “history pill” technique
can take, background filler as in Unreal Tournament and
force-fed need-to-know plot as crammed by WoT. Background
bits serve to add a little color to otherwise formulaic designs
and thereby presumably allow the player a more rewarding experience,
a context by which to dramatize the shooting and maiming. UT,
a combat game, seeks just such a “fleshing out.”
“...to crush your enemies, to win the tournament”
Beginning in the ruined underground of a subway and making its
way up and across the sky, weaving between hunched, diseased looking
buildings, Unreal Tournament’s “camera”
glides past the various architectures of the city before entering
the black and cancerous Tournament arena itself. A woman’s
voice, echoing the mid-Atlantic deadness of the characters populating
2001, chronicles the formation of the Tournament. Unreal Tournament
started as a tool for quieting rebellious miners and over
the past fifty years has developed into an obscenely profitable
money making scheme, attracting the most dangerous wretches from
across the universe. The Tournament started as one form of control
and grew into another, violence channeled into entertainment,
aggression into currency. There is no moralizing here, however,
just a back-story designed to give the player something to chew
on, a broader picture in which to wreak havoc. But is there a
hint of desperation in the narrator’s otherwise controlled
voice? A symbol lurking in the fact that the first thing we see
is the rotting foundation of the city’s underground, a darkness
that is, perhaps, leaking to the surface, infecting both machines
and man?
Well,
maybe not. As so many are bound to point out, it’s just a
fighting game after all...
