That a rather crude game produced in the thousands rather than millions could cause such a fuss is evidence, perhaps, of how strained east-west relations were at the time. Had the game been given a science fiction theme, it’s likely it would have been more quickly forgotten – from this point of view, its title and subject matter could have been seen as strokes of marketing genius. The game itself involved preventing the Soviet Union from taking out US cities with its ballistic missiles, but doing this was a curiously involved affair: it took considerable skill just to get your fighter jet out of the hangar doors, so fiddly were the controls. Later releases of the game were even shortened to the less inflammatory Raid in order to calm everybody down a little bit. This otherwise minor action game from US Gold sparked quite a bit of controversy on its release, when the Finnish government argued that it was anti-Soviet and irresponsible. “You have to think in Russian,” is one piece of advice Eastwood’s troubled pilot is given as he journeys into the heart of the Soviet Union to pilfer this valuable piece of hardware.Īs history later revealed, the Russians’ technological superiority was somewhat overrated. Tom Clancy’s Firefox, and Clint Eastwood’s misfiring movie, reversed this speculative theme, suggesting that the Russians had not only created an extraordinarily powerful fighter jet, but had also found a way of flying the thing using thought alone. Interestingly, the first flying saucer ever made (appropriately called The Flying Saucer) reveals that the title craft is a secret project of American origin, and that a communist sympathiser is trying to steal it for the Soviets. Using footage from the film, stored on an expensive bit of 80s science called a laserdisc, Firefox was essentially an into-the-screen shooter where the player – flying the stolen Russian plane from the title – shoots down the approaching aircraft. Firefox (1982)īased on the novel by Craig Thomas, Clint Eastwood’s 1982 film was about the theft of bleeding-edge technology, and at the time, this Atari coin-op was itself an eye-popping piece of programming. More than any other game from the period, Missile Command rendered the destructive horror of a nuclear war with chilling simplicity. Missile Command was programmed in the shadow of what was later referred to as the Second Cold War, which took place between 19, at a time when relations between the USSR and the west were at their worst since the Cuban missile Crisis. In the latter, Missile Command aptly summarises the film’s themes about war and its futility. It renders the possibility of extinction by nuclear attack into stark videogame form, so much so that the game’s appeared several times in film and television its famous The End screen was used to close 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High, while a young John Connor is seen playing the game in James Cameron’s 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It’s said that programmer Dave Theurer found the images he’d created so disturbing that they gave him nightmares – further proof of the game’s oddly disquieting power. If all the cities were lost without reaching a high score, the concluding screen displayed the chilling words ‘The End’.
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