Wolverines!!!
The collector’s edition of Red Dawn was released today. I remember seeing it in the theaters when it was released, and while I can’t say it felt like yesterday, it’s still hard to believe that it’s been twenty three years! Dammit, I’m getting old.
Red Dawn was (and still is) a silly, yet enjoyable, movie. Back then I can recall my friends and I going on a World War III gaming spree for a while, fueled initially by the movie. With the Iron Curtain still in place and no end in sight for the Cold War, wargaming and role-playing against a backdrop of another world war, possibly nuclear, had an interesting feel to it. As Soviet armored divisions, represented by lots of red and brown counters, headed into West Germany, it wasn’t historical gaming, it wasn’t futuristic gaming, it was gaming something that could possibly occur at any moment. We were gaming reality—or at least one possible reality.
For someone growing up today games based upon the premise of Warsaw Pact and NATO going to the mats must seem rather bizarre. Thinking about all the Cold War made hot games, they do occupy a rather strange place in our gaming history. When they were originally released they were potential future conflict games. Today, they’re alternate history titles, and yet would any serious designer of a World War III game want his game to be thrown into the same mix as Nazis and Japs battling it out in the Mississippi valley? (For those unfamiliar, that’s the subject of Ty Bomba’s Mississippi Banzai.)
I also find it strange that during the ‘80s it was entirely common to find wargames based on potentially fighting the Russkies (the old 3N rule of what sells: NATO, Nukes, and Nazis…which also got turned into a Ty Bomba game, by the way), yet how many modern wargames focus on the immediate threats of our time? Yes, they’re out there (and in fact the majority of ProSIM games deal with realistic contemporary threats), but not in truly large numbers. Consider how many games—board, computer, and role-playing—that were released in the ‘80s dealing with the Russian threat, and now consider how many today deal with battling Islamic regimes or China. Not so many.
It’s also interesting that we’re beginning to see a resurgence in fighting the Russians. World in Conflict is a Red Dawn scenario. There’s another upcoming game featuring Nazis invading America during the ‘50s. Judging from the trailer for Call of Duty 4, those nogoodnik Commies are once again up to their old tricks, although there does appear to be some nods to the Middle East.
So, are we purposely ignoring today’s threats in large numbers because it’s not politically correct, or is it simply more “fun” to battle the Russians?