War With Iran: The Videogame(s)!

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Videogames have been associated with warfare pretty much since the beginning.

1970s arcade rats that found Pong a bit too tame could, for the price of a mere quarter, experience a harrowing simulation of a dystopian future Earth locked in a life-or-death battle against implacable, unrelenting invaders from outer space. But it was the increasing popularity of the personal computer in the early 80’s that first allowed gamers to experience the raw reality of historical conflicts like World War 2 in the comfort of their own homes. Or at least the parts of World War 2 that involved a 2-dimensional stick figure trying to avoid bulletproof SS guards while escaping from a randomly-designed German castle or Germany invading Russia using little pink and white squares.

Throughout the '80s, the then-raging Cold War was also being fought by proxy through videogames. Pimple-faced American teens were being prepared and trained for what seemed at the time to be an inevitable war with the Soviet Union, first by learning how a nuclear war could be won through superior trackball skills. Once America’s cities had been rebuilt using additional quarters, the U.S. would then deploy one soldier at a time to rush and attack the Red Army and two soldiers at a time to kick Communism’s ass in Central America, while others stayed behind in case the President was kidnapped by ninjas. In response, the Soviet Union created Tetris in an effort to improve their wall-building capacity. But by the early-90s, Mikhail Gorbachev found himself unable to balance political and economic reforms while rotating a tricky series of falling Tetrominoes, causing the Iron Curtain to collapse and consigning Communism to the dustbin of videogame bad guy history.

The videogame industry responded to the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War by promoting terrorists and “rogue nations”, already popular as second-string videogame villains, to the #1 spot. However, as video arcades slowly died off during the 1990s, replaced by increasingly powerful videogame consoles and home PC’s, war-themed videogames went from featuring shirtless dudes with machineguns liberating the nation of “Kookistan” from the mutant armies of an evil Saddam Hussein-style dictator who turns out to be alien space Hitler to somewhat more realistic depictions of military action and counter-terrorism. It was this new focus on “realism” in war-themed videogames that led to more and more games being based on real-life wars and battles, including World War 2,the Korean War,Vietnam,Somalia and Desert Storm. Game developers have released slightly modified versions of U.S. Army training programs as commercial videogames and the U.S. Army has returned the favor by releasing their own videogame as a recruiting tool.

A company called KumaWar is taking the Law & Order approach to military-themed videogames, ripping from the headlines actual Iraq War battles and turning them into videogame “missions” as soon as possible after they actually take place. So if you’re, say, a pro-war blogger who doesn’t feel like volunteering to fight in the actual Baghdad surge, at least you can experience the virtual version without all those pesky real bullets spoiling your fun. Plus, in the videogame version, you can turn off “friendly fire”.

Not content to re-create actual ongoing military conflicts in videogame form or to just allow videogamers to kick ass as John Kerry, back in 2005 KumaWar stirred up even more controversy by releasing a mission called ”Assault On Iran”. In this episode, players take on the role of a U.S. Special Forces soldier on a mission to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz in order to rescue an Iranian nuclear scientist turned double-agent and then destroy uranium-enrichment centrifuges, presumably before Duncan Hunter nukes them from orbit.

To the shock of pretty much nobody, this didn’t exactly go over too well with Iran. Deciding to fight fire with fire, the hard-line Union of Islamic Student Societies started work on their own military-themed videogame, originally called “Commander Bahram” but then creatively renamed “Rescue The Nuke Scientist”. In the Iranian game, joystick jihadists can take on the role of Iranian security forces on a mission to rescue two Iranian nuclear scientists who have been kidnapped by U.S. and Israeli forces and are being held prisoner inside Israel. No word if you get bonus points for saying the Holocaust never happened.

Faced with the Iranian videogame “Sweet Home Alabama” to their “Southern Man”, KumaWar took advantage of the Iranian game’s long development time to whip up a response of their own, “Payback In Iraq”. Claiming that they wanted to foster a “serious political dialog within, of all things, a video game”, the plot of “Payback In Iraq” involves U.S. Marines attempting to re-re-rescue the same Iranian nuclear scientist, who they take pains to mention is intentionally co-operating with the United States to “build a new future for his country”.

This isn’t the first time that Islamic fundamentalists have taken umbrage at an American videogame. Back in 2003 a plucky young conservative named Jesse Petrilla whipped up a hilariously awful FPS game called “Quest For Saddam”. In response to this and Petrilla’s 2001 game “Quest For Al-Qaeda”, a group called the Global Islamic Media Front modified Petrilla’s game and released it as “Quest For Bush – The Night Of Bush Capturing”, which promptly joined “Mr. Do!”, “Lode Runner” and “Rally-X” in the “Videogames That Sound Like Porn Movies” Hall Of Fame.

While relations between the United States and Iran are as tense now as U.S./Soviet relations during the Cold War, both in the real world and the virtual one, perhaps all hope is not lost. Less than 20 years after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Russian soldiers are now videogame good guys, something that would have been unthinkable back in the 80’s. Of course, at this point the only thing I can think of (other than maybe some diplomacy) that’d cause some of our current enemies to fight along side us would be an invasion from outer space.

Hey, now that’s a great idea for a videogame!

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