TIL the US Government once released its own video game to inform, educate, and recruit prospective soldiers.
TIL the US Government once released its own video game to inform, educate, and recruit prospective soldiers.
A few things about America's Army:
It may (I am 90%, but not 100% sure of this) have been the first PC, online, FPS to feature ragdoll physics for dead players.
It employed a... rather baffling way of doing team conflicts:
You are always on Team America, and the opposing team is always Team Generic Terrorists. (With 80s/90s movie era costumes for the bad guys, dependent on map location)
What this results in is... you have your M4. You are shooting at bad guys with AK74su's. But... from the opposing team's POV, its the same.
So, if you kill someone... you can now pick up an AK74su. Even though from their POV they dropped an M4.
And so on, with rough equivalents as an SVD and an M110, an RPK and an M249.
These 'picked up' weapons would basically morph into having the ballistics of the Eastern Bloc weapon at the point they were picked up.
Very weird, I've never seen another game do that.
The game also had a good number of training courses, many of which were initially bugged as all hell.
I remember the SERE course failing me consistently, showing that I had been detected by guards who are apparently able to see through boulders or 30 feet of a hill (the camera would show you how you were spotted like a 'deathcam' and it was quite obvious it was often total bs).
Also, in certain training missions it was possible to shoot your instructor.
This would result in you being sent to the brig: Log in to your account, and for a week, all you get is a view from inside a prison cell, no game menus or options at all, rofl.
Oh, final thing: I am pretty sure this was the first online PC FPS that modelled that M203 projectiles must travel a certain distance before the explosive charge will detonate, so taking out someone with an M203 round to the face, non explosively, became a way to humiliate people, as you either had to be pretty skilled to do it , or your opponent had to have very poor situational awareness.
So, I worked on this. I built their in game support system (irc backed!), wrote a bunch of the web auth code, and accidentally once deleted the production user database from the secondary site (whew, disabled and re-replicated from primary).
It was a lot of fun and got me a trip to E3 back when it was the big thing.
It was an interesting concept because no matter what, you would play the american side and fight the terrorists. (you would look like a terrorist to the other team)
Didn't expect so much hate for this game... In terms of simulations, in 2002, the original game was light years ahead of its time. They did a lot of things right that it took the more popular mil sims years to get correct. I'd go as far as to argue it is one of the most realistic squad-based tactical shooters of all time.
The special forces test was hard.
For the written test. there's parts where you would be shown a helicopter for 100 milliseconds then have to remember the configuration, number of rotors, ordinance... Or you see a tank for a split second and have to correctly identify the barrel measurements and other little details.
The stealth mission was difficult too. I managed to be a medic and a ranger but not special forces.
This was legit very popular for a while. It was even common in e-sports.
Oh man, was it version 2.1 or 2.4 that was the best? I think it was the one where urban assault was released. So many hrs playing until 3.0. There was a test to be able to play medic in the game. It taught basic first aid.
Super fuckin dystopian
You never played as the “bad guys”. You and your team on your screen were always American, 100% of the time. The terrorists you were fighting saw a presentation on their own screen that you were the godless terrorists, and they were the heroic Americans. No one was ever the bad guys. Except, some “other” in some distant place. But not you.
We had heated arguments at one place I worked when AA wanted to hire us for some short contract. The one side of the argument was, guys, they literally just want us to set up and configure one web service for them. I don’t think we’re gonna wind up killing anyone from the global south in the course of setting up that server. The other side, which I remember verbatim, came in the form of a heated retort:
“Would you set up a blah blah blah server for the NAZIS?”
Its still around IIRC, been through like 5 versions now. If you're in the military you can use your .mil address and be marked in game as actual military for better or worse lol.
The most surprising part of the whole thing? It was actually a really fuckin solid game. (The original, can't speak for whatever version is out now.)
Had big vans parked on the UT Campus lawn paid for with Pentagon money, where you could play the game right next to a real live military recruiter.
I like to think about this while I'm looking at videos of Palestinian student protesters getting maced, tackled, and dragged away by campus security.
AA2 and AA3 were legitimately great games.
Now they just pay Activision to do that on their behalf with CoD.
The first iteration had a rules of war/ethics type system where as well as K/D ratios etc. it gave you a rank for how well you obeyed the rules of war. I remember I number of articles talking about how abysmally low all the scores were.
The game was such a realistic representation of the US army that players could just war crime to their hearts content with no repercussions.
The training/intro sergeant sounded just like one of my actual sergeants.
It had a reporting system. If you reported someone for camping, the vote would be turned against you and if people agreed you were kicked. 😂
I played the crap out of AA Proving grounds. Was a ton of fun! Had a bunch of shit "join the army" bs in it, which I doubt worked on anyone with a few brain cells, but the game was great.
Yep, pretty damn messed up. They put out like 3 or 4 of them before I guess enough people complained about the overt propaganda targeting minors
LOL. Played that game for years. Did the whole clan thing. It was pretty good fun
It was really good but they found other recruiting methods more effective
The Air Force once injected an unsolved, 1000-year-old mathematical puzzle written in another language into the game Prometheus, and an unemployed college dropout genius who lived with his mom solved it, got recruited to participate in a highly classified mission to the planet P4X-351 where he, a crew of Air Force officers and personnel, and a few civilian scientists ended up being forced to evacuate due to an impending planet-wide explosion (as well as an aerial assault by a band of space pirates) by jumping through a stable wormhole whose terminus was aboard the starship Destiny - an abandoned scientific vessel launched one million years prior by a species known as The Ancients who had planned to use it to travel to the center of the known universe.
Bush's War on Peace was a wild time back in the early days.
Greetings Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada....
I definitely played this in high school. Never joined the military