The Two N64 Games That Drew a Forgotten Blueprint to the GTA Style Game
The year is 1998. Body Harvest has just been released for the Nintendo 64 by developers DMA Design. That game is late; it was supposed to be one of the console's launch titles on the West, two years earlier, but in addition to complications in development, the game had also suffered some meddling from Nintendo execs, who were nervous about its level of violence. If you were following the works of DMA Design - which you had little reason to, since they had very few games of note, with the possible exception of Lemmings, which had been over ten years before - you might have noticed this new game fit neatly into a new wave of design, matching a game they had released the previous year for the Playstation 1. Both games took place in large, expensive 3D levels scattered with missions. Most importantly, in both games you were able to enter vehicles found in the levels and drive, giving the player unprecedented breadth in how to interact with the world. The game released the previous year had not made many waves, though - despite the ambitious approach, it didn't look very dazzling, and most players believed it to be 2D, which was quickly falling out of fashion as the first 3D-capable console generation came into vogue. (It actually was 3D, but a fixed overhead camera and the use of sprites for all characters certainly gave it a 2D look.)
That game was called Grand Theft Auto. Within a few years, the third game in the series would become one of the best-selling, best-known, most influential games in the world, sparking a slew of imitators and leaving an indelible mark in the discipline of game design. In the present day, the latest installment of the series is the most profitable media product of all time (a standing certainly helped by the fact that they won't stop releasing it). But we're still in 1998. Rockstar is still called DMA Design and, if anyone asked what their best-selling or most famous game was, the answer would almost certainly be Lemmings, which was over ten years old by that time. Grand Theft Auto was little known, a cult classic at best, and no one referred to it as GTA. It would take the greater power of the next console generation for a game to deliver their vision of an expansive, immersive 3D world in which you could go anywhere and drive any car you found without yourself or the cars looking like they were made out of paper.
Except that's not the case. The game they had just released - on the friggin' N64, of all things - already did that.
Enter Body Harvest.
Ok... I guess the cars do still look like they're made of paper? They just look like paper sculptures, instead of cut-outs...
Still, thinking of Body Harvest as a downgrade to GTA, as a poor man's (or poor console's) version of the series is misleading. Remember what Grand Theft Auto looked like at the time:
Compared to that, Body Harvest wasn't worse, just different. GTA had NPCs that walked and drove cars dynamically; Body Harvest had a massive array of vehicles, including not only land vehicles, but also planes, choppers, gunboats and even a hovercraft. GTA’s gameplay was, to put it mildly, insufferable: the same controls were used on foot and in a vehicle, which meant that you had to accelerate and steer your little dude. (The honk button, in a very Rockstar-esque move, caused you to burp or fart if on foot.) This would be somewhat acceptable if it was a car-driving game that happened to let you walk around, but you couldn’t use weapons in cars, so this cursed movement model made combat a chore. Body Harvest, conversely, had separate controls on foot and on cars, and combat gameplay that can be fearlessly described as competent. Sure, Body Harvest looked... well, let's call it 'nineties'... but there are many GTA fans who consider this game to be a sort of precursor to the series. After all, it may look ugly to modern standards, but if a GTA game had been released with graphics and gameplay like that, well, no one would have thought it was a 2D game.
It's also, very notably, not a game about being a criminal.
Body Harvest is, in many ways, a very conservative game if compared to its lawless sibling. It almost seems like a necessary step to reach the unique liberty and depravity of the GTA series (but, most likely, was just a taming down of the same concept for Nintendo, since the two games must have been developed more or less in tandem). Your character is no criminal, but rather your bog-standard gun-toting videogame hero, sent from the distant future of… 2016? Really? Anyway, our hero Adam lives in a world in which human-eating space aliens have attacked every 25 years since 1916 until they literally ate every last human on Earth, so the few remaining humans in a space station travel back in time to set things right. Despite the quite large levels – specially for the Nintendo 64 – they are completely linear, broken up into stages physically separated by a magical supertech shield wall, and even within individual stages you have a set order of missions that must be completed in order. The only semblances of the modern open-world game as we know them are hidden items in each level, “Harvest Wave” events in which you must protect villages from aliens and certain missions in which you must save people from alien-caused disasters like a fire, a volcanic eruption and a nuclear meltdown – although this last one is part of the missions, so it isn’t so much a sidequest as it is a mainquest you’re allowed to fail.
This conservative approach might not have helped it at the time of its release, but it brings the game to sharper focus if we look back at it from our tired 2022 eyes. GTA is one of those trailblazers that eventually ended up living on a boulevard. I remember when Counter-Strike was seem as an innovator with its deadly, tactical combat based on a realistic modern setting when it first came out in a world of Doom and Quake; now we’re drowning in AK-47s and it’s the magical space combat that seems like a breath of flesh air (that was a typo but we’re talking about Doom so I let it stand). Likewise, GTA’s focus on crime and its cynical take on society was untrodden ground when the game was released; nowadays, it’s a Joker meme.
This gives me pause, and makes me think of how different the gaming landscape would be if it was Body Harvest that had fallen into the mainstream, instead of GTA. I have previously wrote about how the success of GTA caused a slew of imitators, and those imitators tended to focus on the criminal aspect, since it's easier to ape than the open-world design. However, we're now over twenty years since the success of Vice City, and we still tend to look at the open-world game as the realm of the criminal. Sleeping Dogs and post-GTA Driver games have you play an undercover cop, which is the most shallow way to upturn this approach; True Crime had you a cop, but in the Hollywood way that shows a cop as just a gangster that works for us (there is a reason why the first game in the series took place in Los Angeles); Just Cause, Mercenaries and Ghost Recon Wildlands star soldiers, which are just cops on the world stage; Saboteur probably brings the best thematic flip, by having the player be a criminal in the eyes of Nazi occupiers, but it still doesn't stray far.
There is one series that comes close to what Body Harvest might have given us: Prototype. The first game gave me serious Body Harvest vibes, since it's the only modern open-world game in which you can fight a giant alien thing on a tank. In fact, Prototype shows me that my problem isn't with the criminal activity itself, but with the drab representation of the real world in each of them - sometimes through a cynical veneer, but always realistic. We never get to drive through fantastic vistas or monster-struck towns or alien worlds; it's always just a city in some country in the 20th or 21st century and you get shot in them. Rockstar were the ones to deviate the furthest from their own playbook before it was even written.
That’s not the only difference between Body Harvest and Grand Theft Auto that I want to bring attention to. The first one is that it sees vehicles more as tools than just a cool thing. GTA might tell you that you need to drive a garbage truck during a mission, but you’ll just be driving it down a regular city street. In Body Harvest, you’ll often need to find a specific vehicle to progress because otherwise it’ll be physically impossible to do so. The end of the very first stage requires you to drive a tank to the boss because no other vehicle can climb the steep slope leading up to it (yeah, I know tanks aren’t really known for their dirt grip) and many other missions require that you find a boat, plane or even car wot goes fast so in order to get past an otherwise impassable geographical feature. It’s curious that Body Harvest has much better on-foot movement but also sees the vehicles much more as an extension of the player’s avatar. It makes you think of how a game would be like if the on-foot sections existed only to bridge moments between different vehicles, which perhaps might have even more extreme differences in their movement options and weaponry.
Oh? It didn’t make you think that? Well, it certainly made the devs, since they’d later create Space Station: Silicon Valley. This game, also from 1998 reclaims some of the debauchery Rockstar would be known for, with a bizarre storyline involving the transvestite president of Earth (which I don’t recall seeing in the game itself, only referenced in ancillary material). But let’s stick to the gameplay for now. You are a robot that explodes during the opening cutscene and is reduced to a chip. Fortunately, you are in a space zoo/park/ark/thing full of robot animals, whose bodies you can hijack once their original minds are taken offline. Each animal has different abilities, needs and even movement patterns; both the ‘spring sheep’ and the bunny rabbit, for instance, can only move while jumping.
If Body Harvest lays the blueprint for a more fantastic game in the open world genre, Silicon Valley kicks through the door and redefines it entirely. Cars don't need to be cars and driving doesn't need to be driving. Silicon Valley is not a very complex game, but already it defies expectations by including a very complex framework for what is essentially a simple adventure game, since you need to identify what ability you need to progress, what robot possesses that ability, and how you can defeat it in combat in order to steal its body. A modern remake could have complex ecosystems and force players to 'play along' and analyze their opportunities.
Sadly, that's not what we got. I've never been fond of the 'GTA clone' moniker, since I find it reductive to refer to an entire genre as copycats of their precursor, but this is one genre in which the term does fit snugly. However, even if this well is dry, perhaps a nearby aquifer can be tapped. The genre of open world epic fantasy has seen a kind of resurgence lately - possibly spearheaded by Breath of the Wild, and more recently reaffirmed by Elder Ring. Hell, one might say that Death Stranding fits my desire to a T: an open-world game in a setting deeply removed from the real world in which the core gameplay is about helping people and vehicles work much like tools. I haven't played it, sadly, but these works give me hope that a new genre may yet blossom as a colourful offshot.
Oh, there's also the Saints' Row game that takes place in hell. That one's pretty cool.
April's Link Roundup
The Exophonic Writer’s Journey
OK, this one's a bit of a cheat, since Renan Bernardo mentions Eita!, which I'm a part of, and can be technically considered to be an aquaintance. But many of the things he says in this article about writing in a foreign language hit close to home for me, a writer who's trying to get published in the anglophone market and who is, right now, writing a newsletter in a language that's foreign to him.
As NFTs continue to burn down the planet, it's good to remember that there are plenty of smart people against them. Molly White is one of my favourite voices in this fight, providing quick, well-written, amusing but relatively unbiased reports on the latest cryptofiascos. This interview goes in deep and shows her to be far more knowledgeable than many of the CEO's that are adopting this accursed tech.
The Schism Breaking Apart the “Prepper” Community
This article's title is a bit incendiary - the "prepper" community isn't burning to the ground, but a new, woman-focused reddit has shown preoccupations that women preppers have that have been looked down upon by the traditional, mostly male prepper community. It brought to me memories of Ursula LeGuin's 'purse theory' of storywriting, and shows what different people think is important in life.
Extra: the new casual Ludum Dare format
Not really an article, but I thought y'all'd want to know there is now a new, casual way to make a Ludum Dare game that doesn't necessarily involve you ruining your weekend.
This month's video recommendation is Love & Theft. I know as much about what it means as you do, which I think is suprisingly plenty.
