Cold war kids

I spent a decade freelancing for Hyper magazine. I wrote this back in the 2010s, but it feels as relevant today as it ever did.

Books, films, and video games are a reflection of the world around us. They can capture the mood of an era, and reflect both its darkest fears and greatest aspirations.

Glance back to the early 80s, and the mood was decidedly nervous. The biggest story in town was the renewed Cold War animosity between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A., and the very real fear that we were one button press away from nuclear war.

This international rivalry inspired and influenced a generation of games, providing the narrative for titles like Missile Command, Raid Over Moscow, Rush ‘N Attack, and countless others. In the process, it offered impressionable kids a not very subtle lesson in geopolitics and the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction.

The Soviet Union may be long gone, but the era and the games it produced continues to cast a shadow over the games industry, and the complex relationship between politics, the military, and technology.

A quick history lesson

The Cold War was a military stand off between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union (aka, the Russians), which lasted from approximately 1947 to 1991. It saw the two rival superpowers vying for control of the world via satellite states and proxy wars.

Since both sides had nuclear arsenals, any sort of direct conflict was out of the question, as it could easily spiral into Armageddon. Instead, they provided money, military equipment, and aid to their global partners, fanning the flames of war in Korea, Vietnam, and various other conflicts.

Tensions between the two superpowers rose and rescinded throughout the decades, but armed conflict was very much back on the agenda when Ronald Reagan took power in 1981 and referred to the Soviets as an “Evil Empire”.

Missile Command appeared in arcades around the same time, and its vision of nuclear warheads raining down on cities reflects the international political climate. But the connection between video games and the Cold War goes all the way back to 1958, when the world’s first electronic game - Tennis for Two – was created on military hardware.

Tennis for Two was programmed by American physicist William Higinbotham on a primitive analogue computer at a New York military lab. While the computer was designed to simulate missile trajectories, he realised those same algorithms could be used for a tennis ball, and created a crude tennis simulator in which you could adjust the angle of a shot by turning a knob.

These unofficial experiments continued behind the scenes, eventually giving rise to Spacewar in 1962 - generally considered the first video game in history. Programmed on military hardware at an MIT lab, the game consisted of two overhead viewed spaceships facing off against each other. While obviously simple by today’s standards, it showed the potential for computers to do more than just crunch numbers.

That same year U.S. President John F. Kennedy made his famous ‘Man on the Moon’ speech, promising to send mankind beyond the earth’s orbit by the decades close. Intended to counteract the Soviet’s growing lead in the space race, the announcement saw the U.S. government investing heavily in computers and a nascent military / scientific industry. Staffed by the first generation of programmers, these institutions were supposed to create breakthroughs that would give the U.S. government a technological edge. In the process, they invented video games.

As David Hussey writes in his essay, Cold War Kids: The Space Race, Cold War and Video Games, “Video games were born in the late 50s. This new media was a child of the space race and the Cold War. The intimate relationship between the Cold War and video games can be seen with the different types of games that come out during the highs and lows of Soviet American relations.”

The rapid acceleration of computer power throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s was a direct result of military investment, and as is always the case, the technology gradually began to filter out into the real world. It found a mainstream audience in 1972 with the release of Pong – the first commercially successful video game.

Developed by Noland Bushel, the game provided the funds to launch Atari, and five years later the Atari 2600 home console appeared on store shelves. 

Here come the ‘80s

As Stuart Brown explains in his YouTube documentary, Nuclear Fruit: How the Cold War Shaped Video Games, “Many of us have grown up with video games, but video games grew up during the cold war.”

By the time Ronald Reagan came to power in the early 80s, the military experiments and Pong replicas had made way for a rapidly growing home computer market, and the mainstream success of the Atari 2600. Whatever optimism this new technology offered, it was tempered by a US President obsessed with nukes in space (aka, ‘Star Wars Program’), and the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Basically, the world looked a lot like the plot of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Since this was the 1980s and things like ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and suchlike had yet to be invented, the world responded to all this military posturing with a mixture of creeping existential dread and hyper masculine bravado. You could see both ends of the spectrum in the games being released.

Raid Over Moscow cast the player as an American space pilot who had to stop a Soviet nuclear attack on an unarmed U.S.A. (because the idiot President had dismantled the entire arsenal).

War Games offered a far more strategic approach to Armageddon. Based on the Mathew Broderick film, the entire game was set within a military command centre and had you deploying troops against a Soviet invasion of the U.S. If too much of the country fell into soviet hands a nuclear strike was launched and everyone died.

Balance of Power was released in 1985 and is well regarded for its strategic approach to Mutually Assured Destruction. A turn-based strategy game, it tasked you with improving the U.S.A.’s international standing while holding firm against the Soviets and avoiding a nuclear war.

The flipside to all this was schoolyard level antagonism. Nintendo’s original arcade version of Punch Out featured a Russian character named Vodka Drunkenski (later changed to Soda Popinski), and Konami’s Rush ‘N Attack made very thinly veiled analogies to stabbing a bunch of Soviets while running around Siberia.

Making up the numbers were titles like Strider (future Russia has robot apes), SDI (here come the nukes), and Red Storm Rising (because submarines can also launch nukes).

It’s the ‘90s, it’s Hammer time…

What the public didn’t fully comprehend during all this sabre rattling was that the Soviet Union was slowly crumbling internally. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 the economy was collapsing and the Soviet Union could no longer afford to maintain its ‘superpower’ status. Before the decade was over it would all come crashing down, and in 1991 the Soviet Union was formerly dissolved.

While the world celebrated, the U.S. military faced a unique problem. Where exactly should they point their nuclear arsenal? And what about all the money that was being funnelled into military research labs? With no enemy to fight, it was suddenly very hard to justify the spend.

As Corey Mead explains in his book, War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict, “Beginning in 1960 and ending in the 1990s, the armed forces took the lead in financing, sponsoring, and inventing the specific technology used in video games.”

This collaboration between the US government and the games industry has been referred to as the ‘military entertainment complex’, and when the Soviet Union disappeared so too did the flow of money, and the sort of games that it inspired.

This left the door open for a new global outlook and a new generation of games. Arriving to take up the mantle was Nintendo and its family friendly, bright and breezy mascots. And as the 80s started to slip over the horizon, the micro-computers that had defined the decade took a back seat to Mario and a far brighter vision of the future.

As David Hussey points out, “With the end of the Cold War in sight, video games took notice. Mario and Link took the industry in a completely different direction… video games became cartoony and fun.”

The military entertainment complex

The new millennium was scheduled for January 1, 2000, but you could also argue that it kicked off for real on September 11, 2001 – the day the twin towers fell.

The events that transpired that autumn morning would leave permanent scars on the American psyche. They would also rouse the country’s military entertainment complex from its decade long slumber, and give it a renewed sense of purpose.

Forgoing the old ‘us vs. them’, two armies on a battlefield approach to warfare, the new millennium brought creeping paranoia about terrorist sleeper cells, nukes in suitcases, and ill-fated adventures in the Middle East.

This new threat was far more nuanced than drunken Russians accidentally pressing ‘the button’, and the video games that arrived in its wake spun a new story for kids too young to remember the Soviets. All of a sudden historic World War 2 scenarios and arena shooters went out the window, replaced with contemporary political settings, modern warfare, and a new generation of consoles with the processing power to recreate these conflicts.

None of this was a coincidence, or some sort of happy accident. After all, video games reflect the era in which they’re created, and the ‘War on Terror’ has become the defining struggle of the new millennium. Plus there’s all the money that the U.S. military was pumping into the games industry.

Writing for The Atlantic, Hamza Shaban argued that, “The military has used video games at every organisational level for a broad array of purposes. It’s had three big aims in this: to recruit soldiers, to train them, and to treat their psychological disorders.” His article, Playing War: How the Military Uses Video Games, continued, “The military offers funding and technical expertise to game and computer developers and in exchange they give it proprietary technology and technical consulting.”

This was first realised on a commercial scale with the release of America’s Army in 2002. A military training simulator that blurs the lines between entertainment and indoctrination, it has been played by over 13 million people across various incarnations and updates.

Building on that crossover potential, Full Spectrum Warrior became a poster child for the renewed links between the military and entertainment industry when it was released in 2004. A partnership between the U.S. Army’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and Sony Imageworks / Pandemic Games, the game grew out of a research topic first instigated by the military in the late 90s – ‘Could commercial gaming platforms be leveraged for training?’

Originally a military training simulator in which players had to position two squads in military zones, it was overhauled and reworked for a commercial releases on PS2, Xbox, and PC. Ignoring typical video game convention, you’re never actually in control of a firearm, the most you can do is issue an ‘engagement’ command to your squad.

The flipside to that coin was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which adopted a far more bombastic take on war in the new millennium. In doing so it introduced a generation of gamers to the new geopolitical reality – covert black-ops, undefined enemies, terrorist cells, and little regard for national sovereignty, or traditional rules of engagement.

While it’s easy to dismiss all this as mere entertainment, Marcus Schulzke believes it has deeper implications. In his essay, Video Games and the Simulation of International Conflict, he writes that, “Audience participation in [films, books, music] is usually limited… By contrast, video games force players to become participants in simulated events. Players of war games become virtual members of armed forces engaged in simulated combat and they progress through games by securing victory for their side. This tends to embed players firmly in a particular perspective, thereby privileging that perspective over others.”

It’s a belief shared by Nikolay Murashkin, a Russian scholar of international relations. “Kids are shaped by stereotypes and preconceived notions. In the worst case, the opponent becomes dehumanised, which encourages a machine-like thinking where the shock of killing a person is softened by weasel words like ‘termination’.”

Welcome to Modern Warfare

While first person shooters remain the preferred means of selling military engagement, modern warfare is increasingly blurring the lines between video games and reality. In 2016 Iranian TV mistakenly broadcast Medal of Honor in-game footage as the real thing. Both Russia and Egypt did the same in 2015.

This shouldn’t come as a huge shock, since war itself is starting to resemble a video game. As Shaban notes in his article for The Atlantic, “Predator drones are piloted by soldiers using monitors and computer controls. As war itself turns to simulation, when buttons replace triggers and blades, who is morally responsible for wrongful death or even ‘successful targeted strikes’?”

There are no easy answers to those questions, and few games have acknowledged them. But as Stuart Brown summarises, “Technology and war are inseparable entwined. The information age was built on cold war technology…”

Those Cold War kids have grown up now. But so has the military technology being used in convert operations around the world. And where we once had Raid over Moscow and Rush ‘N Attack, there’s now Call of Duty, Battlefront, and Spec-Ops to shape, reinforce, and narrate the global political sphere to a new generation of armchair soldiers.

How we ultimately look back on this era, and these games remains to be seen. But just like their 1980s counterparts, today’s war games provide a unique snapshot of the times, and our collective hopes and fears.

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