At the time I bought my first SNES (around 1994), I’d been a PC gamer for a while and disconnected with console gaming. But a friend had a co-worker who was selling their daughter’s SNES with a copy of SimCity and Super Mario World for $36, and since I was curious (and actually just wanted to help out my friend’s co-worker), I bought it and was immediately in love with the console. I was taken back to the time of the console’s launch when I would play endlessly with my fellow teenagers, amazed by games like F-Zero.
So after a couple of months with SimCity, the NAMCO release, Battle Cars, was an easy selection for my first new game purchase. In essence, it is F-Zero with vehicular combat and story scenes that act as interstitials between each race. Speaking of race, these are often laden with racial stereotypes, which believe it or not somehow made it into the 21st century, despite the extreme woke-ness of the population.
Imagine my delight when I read the manual for the first time a few weeks ago and found a deep lore behind the game. Don’t strain your eyes by reading it from the image below, as I have transcribed it for your reading pleasure, but it involves climate change, nuclear weapons and such.
I did not make this up.
“The excess of the industrial revolution was doomed to haunt the earth. As the 20th century faded into the 21st, the planet’s largest economies were focused on the service industry. Over population and few environmental quality regulations created an exodus of traditional industry to less developed nations. Fuelled with cheap labor, factories churned out consumer products with obsolete “dirty” machines purchased from the former industrial giants. Each year billions of metric tons of pollution were dumped into the biosphere. Global warning increased exponentially.
As the 21st century progressed the greenhouse effect began to take its ugly toll. The polar ice caps melted at an ever increasing rate. International tensions rose with the water level at a time when the world had never been better armed. The end of the cold war over a hundred years earlier saw huge arsenals of weapons capable of mass destruction. As coastal cities sank under the oceans, people demanded action. Politically the easiest solution was to point fingers and launch attacks against “environmental terrorists”. Between global warning and global warfare the earth was forever changed.
The start of the 22nd century saw a true new world order. Survivors of the devastation lived in city states. Technologically sophisticated and jaded by years of war the people demanded a new sport for their new age… Battle Cars… technology…aggression…Battle Cars. Afforded the same popularity earlier cultures had given artists or pop musicians, battle Car drivers are heroes. The only rule is to win.”
Beautiful. If you wrote this, please contact us, I’d love to interview you for the Game Under podcast.
Phil Fogg