Retronauts - 614: Video Games and the Nuclear Apocalypse

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Nadia Oxford, Jaz Rignall, and Jeremy Parish look back at gaming's best (and scariest) depictions of nuclear apocalypse. ...is it 'Into this station" or "onto this station?" Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Twillerie. This week on Retronauts, not great, not terrible. Welcome, Wasteland Survivors, to this week's episode of Retronauts. I'm her host, Nadia Oxford, Queen of the Trained Vermin. I'm here to talk about my deep childhood trauma and how it connects to video games with two very esteemed gentlemen. Jeremy Parrish and Jazz, two very respected, I guess we were coworkers and still are. So I'm really glad for us. I'm really glad we're all reunited here.

Say hi, everyone. Hello. Hello. I'm jazz. It's me, Jeremy. Pipboy Parish. Pipboy Parish. That has a really nice ring to it.

Yeah. So how jazz has been a while since we've talked, I'm glad to hear from you again. Yeah, it's like a little US game sort of reunion. And it's a while. It'll be, I mean, it's over 10 years since we started that thing, right? So. And we're at that age where, you know,

it doesn't seem like very long ago, even though to most people it will be like, you know, a lifetime for most. But yeah. Yeah. Time is kind of a smear in my brain right now. I started doing all this in 2004 with OneUp.com, and I barely remember any of it. Parrish, do you remember OneUp at all.

I do. It was, you know, 10 years of my life, so I hope I remember some of it. But yeah, this is going to be nice because Retronauts, unlike OneUp and U.S. Gamer, there's not going to be some executive telling us to chase after SEO and to hell with content. So it's exciting. Yeah, we won't have to pivot to Naruto. like I was asked to do when I used to write about manga. I don't even like Naruto.

But anyway, we are all old. Let's just kind of get it all out there. So we kind of remember, like we have lingering trauma from the 80s, because that was a time of Cold War. And there was very much the possibility that a nuke could drop on us, and that was reflected in much of our media, including video games. This is the topic of this discussion right here. So you guys, let's start with you at Parrish. Are you like kind of like fascinated by that lingering hellish potential of our mass extinction? Did it kind of like consume your childhood at all?

So, you know, by the time I was really sort of interacting with the universe and aware of the world, you know, it was well into the Reagan administration and Gorbachev had come to power in the Soviet Union. And he was very interested in, I think very invested in de-escalating. So really, my childhood was kind of both the West and the East backpedaling, you know, kind of walking away from the tensions and terrors of the 60s and 70s. So I really kind of missed the worst of it. And, you know, I think it's a sign that a lot of the media that I was exposed to and saw when I was growing up with stuff like Red Dawn and America with a K, starring Chris Christopherson, where it was kind of, we'd kind of entered the point of catharsis. Like, we all kind of realized nuclear Armageddon is not. not going to happen. So now we can fictionalize it and have fun stories about it. So yeah, I think

I kind of caught the tail end of it and it just wasn't as scary as it was for, say, my parents' generation. Yeah, yeah. My mom remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis and all of that. Jazz, you're a little bit older than, well, myself for sure. What about, like, what do you remember about all this? Yeah, I was going to say, basically, I'm kind of like sandwiched between the Cuban, missile crisis and where Jeremy is. So, and let me just say, I was the kid of parents who were so convinced that Armageddon was about to happen. My dad gave up his architect, very high-flying architect's job just outside London and moved

the family to the middle of nowhere in Wales to a tiny little farmstead that was kind of self-sufficient. So that if the shit really did happen, we would stand a chance of survival. So therefore, you know, my kind of view on life was ever so slightly colored by my parents' conviction. So, yeah, as far as I was concerned, growing up as a teenager, we were all going to die in a neutral Holocaust. I mean, I used to draw pictures and stuff at school and things, like sort of like semi-political posters and stuff that I was into, like anti-nukes and CND and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I was very big into that. And, yeah, completely convinced we were all going to die. Wow.

When did you kind of walk back that fear? If ever. But the thing is, it's like when it defines each other, I watched that classic, most notorious film threads on the BBC when it aired. And, you know, as I was going to, I was probably, about 15, 60, I can't remember exactly what year it was, but, you know, definitely formative stuff. And, you know, watching that, it was just like, oh, right, this is going to happen to us. It was almost like watching the documentary on the future. So, so, yeah, it was, so, you know,

definitely got that really massive hit sort of mid-teens. But I think, like, like Jeremy is saying, you know, by the, I remember when the wall came down and, you know, 1990 or so, and, you know, it was like, all right, there's, there's not somebody. in Russia, with their finger on the button, it sort of became less of a threat and gradually began to subside. But really, it was peak, probably mid-80s. And that was crazy. It was just probably like sort of the 50s here in a way. I don't know whether that was true of here too, but yeah, massive fear. So do you like know how to race sheep and stuff like that? damn straight yeah

I had a pet lamb as a kid and we had chickens and ducks and and vegetables and yeah all of that yeah I grew up on a little farm it's great as a kid to grow up on a farm loved it but it was like growing up on the 50s or something but yeah we were then you had to rejoin society yeah that was difficult

well at least you had arcade games yeah that was my way back into society by the coin slot. Really? You just kind of like rejoined society by kind of like hunting down arcade games creeping up to them,

putting a coin in the slot and gently fondling them. You've seen war games, right? That was based on Jazz's childhood. Yeah. Okay, I absolutely believe that. I hope he got royalties. Matthew Broderick as Jazz Rignall.

Yeah, myself. I was born in 1980 and like a lot of Canadians, I was kind of exposed to the emergency broadcast system tests like jazz, I gave you a kind of a sample of what it sounded like. It was a horrible discordant sound, and it was always like a test, but it's still scared the shit out of me because it's a terrible sound. And the funny thing about it is that you'd usually catch it if you were watching American stations. Canadian stations didn't really have a kind of warning signal.

In fact, we only just got a unified warning system. It's actually kind of ridiculous. but yeah my parents kind of carelessly told me that oh yeah it's uh you know it's in case we get blown up because they weren't very sensitive about that about wording that kind of thing so behold the birth of my trauma and by extension my long-lived fascination with nuclear culture we talked about threads which is an absolutely terrifying movie i cannot watch it all the way through again i watched it all the way through once and it's just uh whenever someone says from sheffield I'm like, oh, the place that's all melted and burnt, how are you doing? I actually, I'm not familiar with that one.

Jazz, I thought you were going to say when the wind blows was the classic of terror that you watch. That one's just like an hour and a half of making you sad and hopeless. Yeah, I mean, I read that book when I was a kid. It was like just the hits just kept on coming during that era. Because, of course, they showed the American version of. threads where everyone gets blown up. That was on TV too. And then, you know, in England, we didn't have that warning thing that you had in Canada, because that was far too sophisticated. What we have were these very twee pamphlets, you know, that would sort of, often with conflicting

information that you actually saw in when the wind blows, which is, you know, do you open your windows to stop them being blown in with a nuclear blast? Or do you close them and paint them white to defect the blast, you know? And so there were these sort of pamphlets and things that would sort of, you know, sort of the duck and cover stuff of the era. Protect and survive. Right. And they were just, you know, they were hopeless, but at the same time, you know, I would read them and just kind of go, so this is telling me what's going to happen.

You know, I'm going to be just like set on fire and everything's going to be completely fucked up. And so it didn't make you feel better. It was almost like a marketing pamphlet for like Armageddon. It's like, this is what you're going to be dealing with. So it was just there was that. And then we also had a lot of. of sort of public information films.

And actually, I mean, you're probably aware of this, but you know the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song, Two Tribes. At the beginning, there's like that announcer. Well, they were really clever. That announcer is the same guy that actually did all of the government films. So what they did, but that guy did the government films, and they brought him into the studio and kind of re-recorded all of this stuff with him just sort of saying really bad things.

So, of course, you know, like the official British voice of sort of, nuclear protect and survive became almost like a meme saying these horrendous things that would later used on the song. So it was kind of, it was sort of funny. And it was, but also even, you know, what we're talking about, the two tribes. I mean, that was, that's a song about nuclear Armageddon, right? So it was just embedded in everything because it was just a sort of overarching fear that any given time, and it had been true for the last sort of, in a previous 20 years, but Walker go off and you just never knew

the opening riff for two tries that is which game am I thinking of Dracula? Rondo of Blood takes that directly for like the first level of the game so I just thought that was pretty fantastic

yeah it's a why wouldn't you if you're going to steal steal from the best but I was it's funny because I if I had stuck to Canadian station and watched Canadian Sesame Street like I probably was supposed to

and not American Sesame Street, I wouldn't have been exposed to the horrible sounds. You would think it'd be smart enough to kind of put that through my head, but I wasn't at the time. And yes, there was a Canadian Sesame Street has separate puppets, it has French, it's pretty cool, actually.

So when two tribes go to war, one is all that you can't score. When two tribes go to war, one is all that you can't score. So what is your favorite nuclear disaster or related movie? Let's just, I just want to know. Let's start with you, Parrish. Put me on the spot. There's a lot to choose from my notes. Actually, you know, we did an episode on it very recently, The Hunt for Red October, which isn't actually about a nuclear holocaust, but it's basically a Cuban missile crisis sort of situation, diplomacy and covert action trying to head off the very real incipient threat of a nuclear Armageddon.

Yeah, we just did an episode on that. And it's a, you know, the book was good, but that was kind of peak John McTiernan era and like Predator and Die Hard. It's just, you know, not an ounce of fat on that film. Every moment of it has import in some way. It's just very tightly crafted, very sharp and witty and tense. So, yeah, it's a good one. Sean Connery, right? Is he in that one?

Absolutely. Oh, okay. Yeah, then I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, that was a lot better than I thought it was going to be actually. I thought it was going to be like a sort of the old Cold War Tosh, you know, sort of like Red Dawn, you know. And so like which Rocky movie was it? It was basically an allegory where I think there was Rocky four. Yeah.

I was going to have guest three. I couldn't remember. I used to hate that shit. But, you know, bum back all over. It's like that. That was really good. Yeah. For me, it's hard to pick.

I really love When the Wind Blows, has a David Bowie song, has a music by Roger Waters. It's just really freaky, fantastic direction. I remember just catching it with my dad one day. We were flipping through channels, watching TV, like a nice family, and we see these old people dying of radiation poisoning. And I think that's where I really understood what radiation poisoning was and what it could do to you. And it's incredibly depressing when you realize that all these precautions, the ones you talked about jazz, like, you know, sleep in these, in these sacks or whatever, have your identification near you. That's just so people could be identified after they, after they died, if anyone was left to identify you.

Like, one of the most striking images in that movie is when they go outside and, of course, everything looks like shit, everything's covered in poison. And you see a bird just dying on the ground, which I think Chernobyl used the same imagery, as it turns out, which is a great miniseries. So, yeah, that's kind of terrifying. And that kind of leads into video games, because, of course, if we were talking about nuclear Armageddon in books and movies and, of course, music, we were certainly talking about it in video games because video games are art, and art is political. And I don't know exactly, if you can remind me, jazz, what your gaming history was like over there, especially if you were living in, like, Stardue Valley at the time. I don't know. yeah so basically i played arcade games that we because we you know dirt poor on a farm arcade games easy way to play games uh event ended up getting a computer

and that's when i started playing computer games and uh by the mid 80s i was uh reviewing games commodore games and um and actually one of the very it was the second issue of uh zap 64 which was the Commodore Mag I was working on at the time, that actually had a nuclear Armageddon cover, ripped straight from my fertile imagination. I mean, basically, this game came in by a company called PSS. And it was just kind of like, it was sort of a fairly straightforward sort of war game,

mainly screen, sort of tech screens, but some graphics. But the premise was that you had to sort of manage this conflict between Russia and the States without pressing the button. So, and that was along the short bit, but it was actually, it was very fun game, very, very tense. And, you know, if you did use an equal option, that was it. It was game over. So it was sort of like the sort of anti-mad, mutually assured destruction game that was just very cleverly done. The image is cleverly.

And the other thing, you know, which, I mean, for this was a 1985. which is sort of augmented reality is when you decided to launch your codes for the newts for the first time, you actually had a number, phone number to call in the instruction manual and you listened to a recorded message that would tell you the password,

which I think was something like midnight sun, I think that was it, and then you typed that in and off your nukes would go and it was game over. But it was just like very, I remember doing that for the first time and hearing this message, and it was all, you know,

had like, you know, aerode, air raids going in the background and stuff, and this is a sort of stern voice telling you to launch the nukes. It's just very, very cool, you know. That's terrifying. And terrifying at the same time. Partly, you know, that's sort of what we wanted to depict on the cover, which should people not know, was a, was kind of like a soldier in a radiation suit. It was just like a very close-up of his face.

and in his sort of glass eye things. You could see the reflection of the mushroom cloud, but unfortunately half his face was sort of being melted by the explosion. So it was sort of, you know, it's exposing bits of his skull. So horrific. We actually had some complaints from parents, and I think a couple of news agents actually put it on their top shelf because the image was so disturbing.

But it did make one heck of a cover, that's for sure. I love that. It sounds like the scandal we had in North America with the Simon's Quest cover and the dude holding Dracula severed head on the second issue, I think it was, of Nintendo Power. Parents were not happy. Those second issues, tell you what, every time. Second issue. That's right. The sophomore stretch. So actually, that's not the only game, I guess, to put a phone number in there, is it?

It's I think Roger Rabbit, was it, had a phone number that you were supposed to call? As did Toki-Miki High School, what's her face? The Nintendo game about the Idol Singer, I just was just talking about this. Oh, wow. No, not Tokomaki Memorial. Tokomaki High School. I can't believe I just totally blinked on this, but it was developed by Squarespaceoft and Nintendo. And it was about an actual idol singer, and she goes to your school.

And there were, like, phone numbers in there that you could actually call. I am a shame that you don't remember the name of this idol game. Miho Nakayama, that's her name. There we go. Okay, your honor is redeemed. Congratulations. What year was that, Jazz? Do you remember?

You said 85 or? The theater Europe was the game I'm talking about. On the Commodore 64, that was 1985, yeah, mid-1985. So they'd probably been developed, you know, developed it earlier in the year. But, you know, again, yeah, mid-Eight-old. 80s, peak concerns, and, you know, we had a video game cover that kind of really did speak to the absolute nightmares that we were thinking would come real.

So the fact that the UK was kind of late to that party versus the US, was that like Thatcher banging the drum of danger and horror and scariness to drum up support and, you know, push forward policies? Yes, surprisingly, the conservatives using fearmongering, it just never happens, does it? No, it doesn't happen. So weird. It doesn't happen in Canada. I'll let you know of that. Worries. Twillery wants to complete every man's wardrobe with comfortable quality garments that are as easy on the wallet as they are to care for.

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happens. And I remember him telling him. telling me, like, you know, he was listening to the radio expecting any time that the talks are broken down on war was being declared and sort of just how terrifying that was. And I think that, you know, if out of all of the things during that era, that was probably the worst thing to live through, because that really was the brink, right? That was. Yeah. There were mistakes and errors that we didn't know about until later where we nearly got annihilated. But as far as I know, that was like the closest we came or everyone else came when they were born to like staring down nuclear annihilation. I think I remember

hearing my mother tell me that my grandmother had said like she would have killed herself and the kids if like a nuclear bomb had gone off. It was a very, very dark time. I'm glad I wasn't there for it. I had my own problem. My own neuroses. Thank you very much. I think that means maybe missile command is might be the earliest game about nuclear war. I just don't know if there's something on the computer that's text-based. You know, there's probably something on Plato or Decton from the 70s that has been forgotten to antiquity. But in terms of commercial releases, you know, mass appeal games that anyone could play for 25 cents, definitely missile command. Yeah. Yeah. That was that was huge one. I forget my most of it. Whether it was 17,

I can't remember. It was like very close to the turn of the decade either way. But I remember walking to the arcade and seeing that for the first time, and it's like you immediately got what it was because it's sort of abstract a little bit when you first look at it, these lines coming down the screen and stuff. But then you come and go like, you know, the demo mode said cities at the bottom and like instantly, Bing, oh right, these are missiles. And I'm, you know, I'm using a defense shield, you know, to stop them. And it was such a clever idea and there's not been much like it since in a way because it sort of is, you know, it did its thing and you sort of can't do it much any other way, you know, sort of you're sending missiles out.

There's that sort of delay between launching the missile and it appearing somewhere so you have to guess ahead and be ahead of the missile to make sure that, you know, when it gets there, it lands and, you know, the satisfaction of getting a perfect shot where the, where the pixel of the missile of the missile, would match the pixel of where the explosion happened. And there's a feeling about, like, satisfied. Like, I completely nailed that, that missile, like, from halfway across the screen. That's a really fun game. And I'm a man, if I play the shit out of it. When you think about it, you can't win. It just keeps coming and coming.

And, you know, it's, as they say, the only winning move is not to play. But I was familiar with the Atari 2600 version, which I think had the, nuclear politics toned down and said it was a battle between planets, I think it was, but the arcade version, I was actually playing it at Midwest Gaming Classic, just a couple thing a month ago. And when you think about it, you know, there's so much talk these days about, oh, keep politics out of my video games. And this was the first political video game because when you lose, it says, not game over, it says the end, as in everything's dead. That's it. We're all gone.

is basically a statement saying nuclear war will kill us all, which is political. So there you go. You got your politics and your games. And the lead programmer, Dave Thierer, I think that's how it pronounces his last name. He apparently had nightmares programming this game. As you can imagine, he said, I would dream that I was hiking in the mountains above the Bay area with fabulous views of the San Francisco Bay. In the dream, I'd see missile streaks coming in, and I'd know that the blast would hit me

while hiking there on the mountain. and that was an interview in 2013 from a Polygon. And yeah, I could understand that. That would, God, imagine programming such a simple-looking game and having terrible nightmares from it. Like, it's that effective. It is quite a chilling game. It's, I find the arcade version is a lot harder than the Atari version.

The Thur also programmed, sorry, Tempest. And supposedly, that game was inspired by a nightmare of, like, things coming out a well to get him. Cool. So I feel like that guy really leaned into the nightmare imagery in his video games. Hopefully it was all very cathartic for him, and he ended up later in life feeling all good about himself. Actually, I didn't know this when I was looking up the information. Rob Fullop, who programmed the Atari 2600 version, he was compensated for his work with a Safeway coupon for a turkey.

Uh, he quit. Yeah. Yeah, Atari was not, uh, not the most generous company back then. No, there's a reason why Activision bloomed out of Atari and then horror bloomed out of Activision. So, uh, great bookend for like current video game history. It starts with someone quitting because they were given a fucking turkey for making a proper game and ends with thousands of people laying off for making a really good game.

So it's like, it sucks through all ages, isn't it really? Well, there's a turkey at either end because, uh, Bobby Codick got a massive golden parachute. There you are. Flying Cherokee. God, I wish it didn't open. There's something so ache-wood about getting a turkey for programming a video game. It's got to be a story arc with Ray or something like that. I'm not sure who wrote this.

The next game I want to talk about 1982 Battle Arcade, nuke the swear word. I don't know what the swear word is. The Internet Archive, say, like they, they have a URL that says nuke the baddies. Let's go with that. Oh, so it's a B word. Okay, I understand. A game where you try to wipe out as many people

as possible with a bomb. Wow, that's the opposite of the terrifying message in missile command. This is just nuke the bastards. Let's say it. Yeah. But yeah, this was programmed by Jay Fenton for the Bally Astrocade, or I guess the Bally Arcade. And, you know,

it's kind of a satirical game. game. Kevin Bunch, if he were here, he could tell you more about it. But it was really basically gamifying mass murder to make a point. Like you, the game consists of, you know, kind of a missile command like landscape. And there's a little plane that flies overhead. And at a certain point, you like at any point, you can drop a bomb, but you want to drop it at the optimal time to destroy as many people as possible. So the game consists of a single action. You drop a bomb.

There's a big square explosion that wipes out a chunk of the city. It tells you what percent of the city you've wiped out and how many people you've killed. And that's the game. And it's not meant to glorify that. It's basically meant to be a stark statement of, you know, here's how many people you just murdered. with this one action. So it's like that line about how one murder is a, one death is a tragedy and a million is statistic.

But that is actually when you mention that, I feel like you can see it in my head like I have seen it before. But I have never played it. Jazz, have you played it? No, this is completely new for me. So that's really interesting to hear about it. I will look it up. Well, there's a link right there at archive.org.

So they've preserved it. You can play it online. playing it consists of hitting the play button and then pressing a single button at a you know whenever you choose so it's pretty easy this is the simplification

Nintendo dreamed of when they made the week Zaxon I did not know that was a post-apocalyptic game or an apocalyptic game or no I added that because I feel like it ties in with the nuclear terror themes of the era because your goal in Zaxon

you know you're flying through these cool landscapes, blowing up, you know, gun emplacements, avoiding missiles that are, you know, like air-to-ground missiles or ground-to-air missiles. But then at the end of kind of the fortress you fly through, there's a giant robot that is armed with a ballistic missile. And you need to blow up the robot before it can launch the missile. So basically, the way I read that was, you know, Basically, there's an enemy who's going to be launching nuclear strikes on the earth with this giant robot, so you've got to stop it. Super Zaxon has a dragon. I feel like the metaphor is somewhat missed, but the robot, it's more obvious.

Robot is more obvious, dragon less so. I played Zaxon on the Commodore 64, actually, had a pretty good adaptation. Theater Europe on the C-64, did you write the sound jazz? Yeah, that's the one I talked about with the... that made the cover of issue too. And actually, thinking of the same era, it's not a nuclear game per se, but actually impossible mission,

you play a secret agent who has to go into Elvin Atombender's Lair. And I can't remember too much about it, but I'm pretty sure that you're actually finding codes into his room so you can stop him from launching nukes. I'm pretty sure that's the plot. So, again, nuclear threat and terror, you know, once again underpins video game plot. I am looking at the cover that you mentioned earlier.

You posted it in our notes. And yeah, that is horrifying. Congratulations. That is basically what merely makes it for me is the fact that, yes, the solver is in a radiation suit. And yes, he is kind of seeing the reflection of the motion cloud in his half his helmet. now and the other half is not only is it like kind of a skeletal melty thing but he's kind of got his mouth open in a scream of terror or agony or probably both it's just like so why did you bother to wear a radiation suit it absolutely did yeah yeah you know what it's it's funny that

um that image came from from probably three years earlier when i'd for art class i was kind of into this political poster theme and I'd drawn a picture of one of my friends actually was standing and you could see the sort of the Welsh mountains behind him and then a bunch of nuclear explosions behind him

and the idea was that Wales had established itself as a nuclear free zone and this poster was supposed to be kind of making that same point which is it doesn't fucking matter if you draw a line on a mat if a nuke goes off you're dead wherever you are and so that yes

That same message was really part of that. And I remember discussing that image with artist Ollie Frey that, you know, just the genius artist that I worked with. And he was just, he owned the company and was just so good. And as I talked to him, it just like, it just became this horrible more and more sort of,

because he's so detailed and he was really into the idea of the image. And he just, you know, it was just like that was the end result. And quite a shocking image for a magazine cover, really. But quite a good one. That is pretty awesome. Yeah, that's like a heavy metal 2000.

Cover. Yes, exactly. It's like you get in the 90s with the cover variant boom. Someone's face melting off. But yeah, actually. It's interesting you mentioned how it doesn't matter where you are when a nuke goes off. Like, that fallout, it's not going to knock on anyone's door. It's going to go or it's going to go. And that was, if you listen to the old Protect and Survive stuff that we were talking about earlier,

like one of the points they try to make to you very chillingly is do not go anywhere. It doesn't matter where you go. You can't run to the countryside. It's not going to matter. I don't think your parents listen to that bit of advice, jazz. But honestly, I could understand why the country was still more appealing than the city. Yes. The idea was living at the bottom of a valley would be safer than living anywhere else. But in fair play, I mean, where we were, it was probably about as far away as you could get, at least in Europe, from a direct hit. But yeah, if the radiation didn't get us, it will be the marauding mutant zombies a few days later that would kill the sword. That's definitely how mutation works. I didn't realize the protect and survive was a thing.

and now I understand what that song by Jeth Rital is about. Yes, yeah, exactly. No, I don't think Protections Survive. I don't know if it was ever released officially. Like, it was kind of like, okay, nuclear war is coming. Take these pamphlets, I guess, and good luck. But they did release, like, all the stuff that the British government did for nuclear warnings. Like, it's all public domain now, and it's all very terrifying, very properly British.

Like, it had a very British apocalypse in mind. Everyone was going to help their neighbor. It was going to be great. It wasn't going to be, like, threads whatsoever with the marauding and the rape and the killing and the rats. Good Lord. There was a war games game, ironically, if you can call that irony. I did not play that. Jazz or Parrish.

Have you played the titular war game? I have not. No, nothing. Yeah, it's 1983. I was three years old. I was probably chewing on plastic or styrofoam. It is a EMI war game

for the early AP computers based on the movie clunky old shite I'm guessing that was you who wrote that jazz but tried to capture the nuclear war element

of the movie it's been a long time since I've seen war games I just remember it being really good really fun yeah that was great

I've watched that in the theatre at the time and yeah it was just sort of on one summer and I saw the name of it and was like

oh that sounds interesting and then when I thought it was like about computer and hackers and video games. Like, oh, an actual movie about video games. That's so cool. And yeah, it was great.

Matthew Burroughs, just the right character and the right message and, you know, some very cool sequences in it, too. But, you know, I sort of had that sort of slightly into the future aspect of it, but today as well that sort of made it, made it interesting and very enjoyable. So, yeah, you know, I think there were a couple of spin-off games that, Both sort of really simple strategy games based on, I think you're sort of supposed to be playing the computer, Joshua, right? The computer's name at war games, I think that was, but when you look at the screenchard, because I just looked at the screenshots early, it's just like, I have no idea what I'm looking at. It's all wobbly and old and crap.

None of these look like tick-tac-toe, which I, you know, I feel like that would have been the easiest adaptation. You call it war games and it's just tic-tac-toe. Oh, well, missed opportunity. Or a nice game of chess. And after all, it was probably only about 18 months after, like, every video game was Tick-Taxo anyway. This one has nuclear themes, though. One thing I forgot to kind of slip in here was, before I forget, is a civilization, of course, if you screw up or whatever with Gandhi and he goes into the minuses, he goes crazy, and nukes the world. Yeah, the famous buffer underrun.

Yeah. If you make Gandhi too peaceful, then the number on his aggression drops into the negatives, which means it drops into like the top of the scale and it goes to max. So he just like pushes the button and nukes everyone. Yeah, you say hello and he nukes you. He's very easy to piss off. But double dragon. Now this is interesting because of 1987's with the arcade, we have Jimmy and Bimmy, as we know them. They fight their way across a post-apocalyptic NYC.

Now, the NES home port kind of dropped the nuclear war aspect angle, but the original Japanese lore, apparently, that Billy and Jimmy states they ran a chain of popular dojoes until nuclear war killed most of their clientele. So then people started going around punching and kidnapping girlfriends, so they just kind of went out and did their thing. It certainly has the aesthetic of a post-apocalyptic city, especially the cover art for the NES double dragon two. which is classic and has everyone's wearing cutoff stuff. So that's how you know it's a nuclear wasteland. That's how you protected against radiation. I mean, if you look at the Japanese box art for Double Dragon, it is drawn in the style of TetsuHara of Fist of the North Star.

Like, it is clearly referencing Fist of the North Star. And I don't think we can really talk about Japanese games about the post-apocalypse and, you know, nuclear fallout. sort of thing without kind of addressing, you know, the very ugly elephant of the room, which is that if you look at games about nuclear war from the West, it's a very different perspective than Japanese games about nuclear war. Yeah. All these games we've talked about with the coming from the U.S. side of things and the European

side of things are very much about preventing it about, you know, like kind of managing, mitigating, strategizing, like, it's a thing that could happen. You want to stop it, try to stave it off as long as possible. You don't get games like that from Japan. What you do get are games that are set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. You know, someplace games that are about like, oh, well, nuclear Armageddon has happened. Now we have to live with it. And, you know, just given the fact that obviously Japan is the only country ever to have nuclear weapons dropped on it in a, the capacity of warfare. That really comes through in their media and how they handle nuclear Armageddon and nuclear conflict compared to the West. And, you know, they started kind of using media over there as

catharsis, beginning with Godzilla in like 1950, just kind of processing the trauma that they experienced firsthand through media. But I can't think of any Japanese-developed games that are about staving off the nuclear Holocaust. It's always about like it happened or it's going to happen, like it's, you know, just a story event and you have to deal with it. And I, you know, that's a very interesting cultural, psychological difference in how that concept is presented across the, you know, the two different.

cultures and societies. Anyway, double dragon. No, that's a very good observation. Some of the games we'll talk about here later, like SMT and whatnot, are definitely kind of embedded in that idea of nuclear war has happened, or we have to deal with the fallout and the after effects. Barefoot, again. I'm still getting over the fact that I didn't know anything about this double dragon

sort of post-nuclear conflict thing. That was totally new to me. guess I just assumed that that's what New York looked like all the time. It was very much like that in the 70s, but. But yeah, that's really interesting. Totally makes sense now, of course. Like, why not? But, yeah, those guys really had bad luck with their women.

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole line of games developed in Japan that are very heavily referencing the concept of Fist of the North Star. You know, martial arts, conflict, gang warfare in a post-nuclear wasteland that is familiar locations that have been blasted to hell. And, you know, Fifth of the North Star, when I read the manga last year, a couple of years ago, the new translations from Viz, I was like, oh, all of this takes place in Japan. Like, it's all set on the island of Honshu. Like, this is Tokyo and Osaka and Kyoto and Yokohama, et cetera. I'd never realized that before. I just assumed it was like, you know, Utah or something. But no, like, it's, it's the sandblasted wasteland that used to be Japan.

And that's very interesting. That was, that kind of caught me off guard. Kind of reminds me of the drifting classroom as well, which also has that very terrifying post-nuclear imagery. I mentioned Barefoot Gen, which is just a really impactful manga and movie. The movie sequence with the bombing is absolutely just terrifying. I was going to say you've also got, wow, just totally blanked out. Akira, which isn't actually a nuclear bomb, but the story, both the manga and the movie, began with a new kind of weapon being detonated in Tokyo and just wiping Tokyo out.

It turns out that's something completely not nuclear at all. But, yeah, like, you can't read things like that, watch things like that, without kind of understanding the sort of historic background, the real world history that comes, you know, that kind of builds on that. And when you do understand that sort of thing, characters like Akira's colonel who seems like this hard-ass jerk, you kind of understand him a little better. And you're like, oh, you know, I sort of see why he is a giant asshole because he's trying to prevent this wrong from happening. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't heard the manga, but of course, the movie is great. Oh, the manga's great because the movie's only like half the story.

And it goes some places in the back half, kind of like Nausica, which also, you know, got the seven days of fire and the giants and all that. So again, just a big old metaphor right there. And the toxic pollen, basically being like fallout. And Jazz, you mentioned you lived in a valley, Nuska, Valley of the Wind. That was what kept them safe, was the wind always blew a certain way. Plus, there's also Grave of the Fireflies, right? Which is, you know, like it makes when the wind blows looks like a comedy movie. I mean, that one really did mess me up.

It was so sad. Yeah, I almost mentioned that when Nadia asked about movies, but it's so bleak. I can't consider that a favorite. It's one of those, it's like Schindler's List or, you know, something along those lines where you watch it. and you're like, well, I've seen that, and now I don't ever have to watch it again because it's part of me now. Exactly. Yeah. I cannot bear to watch Graver the Fire of Lives again. I, uh, fantastic movie, but dear God, you can handle it once, and that's about it. I can't see a tin of candy without feeling sad. Exactly. I see candy, like the hard candy to him, like, ah, stupid, stupid me.

It's a... ...and... ...a... I don't know what I'm going to be able to be. A Parrish, I think you were one who wrote down Trojan. I think that was also a post-apocalyptic. Yeah, I mean, that was one of those just like double dragon. Go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty much what it was. It was kind of like that, a scrolling belt beat him up, but you had a sword and a shield instead of your fists. And that kind of blew my mind because I don't think I fully really grasped the aura that, as you said, Parrish, like Japan really used for their media at the time, their post-spaclic media. And I'm like, there's knights, but it's in a city. That is, are you allowed to do that? That is wild. I was kind of a weird kid.

But yeah, that was a, I like that game, actually. I like Jojin. I like the music. Yeah, it's great. It's, you know, it's, it was designed by the same guy who, uh, created Kung Fu. So it's like, it's the middle step between his work on Kung Fu and his work on street fighter. So, um, you get that like high, low, low.

blocking, attacking, the kind of give and take. So it does focus a lot on that solo combat. But it definitely has the most Fist of the North Star-like setting, for sure. Mm-hmm. For sure. Did you ever play Trojan Jazz? If I did, it must have got a name change and you get it. Or something.

I don't know. I can't remember it, but it sounds so similar to other games I've played. Sounds like a condom, frankly. If they changed it, I would know why. I think Trojan got its name because the creator, Piston Takeshi, his previous game was Kung Fu. In Japan, that was called Spartan X. So his next game, of course, was Trojan. Oh.

Fun facts that I made up, but I feel like makes sense. I feel like there could be a through line there. So thank you for that enlightenment. Balance of Power, early Chris Crawford Wargame, take control of the U.S. and govern for eight years without controlling a nuclear war. That sounds very difficult. Yeah, it was one of those classic, you know, early to mid-80s war games. It was just all numbers and stats and, you know, the occasional screen or graph, you know.

So not something that I would have been remotely interested in playing. I mean, that was a great thing about Theatre Europe. It kind of took the old sort of war game format and kind of made it fun a little bit more sort of risk-like in its sort of simplicity and dice rolling rather than, oh, I've got a hexagon with a plus four, and I'm moving it once, you know, just like, Jesus. So, so, yeah, it was kind of a bit more like that. But, you know, on the way to what would eventually become sort of proper fun strategy games, like, probably like Sib and that sort of thing.

Did you write down, I'm assuming you did, because it's an Amiga game, Midwinter, 1989? Yes, that's one of those sort of like, you know, sort of very, vaguely remember it, but at the same time as it's like, when you actually look at what it is, it's like, holy shit, this is like a modern game, only back when it could only do three frames a second and was kind of,

you know, a bit crap, but it's like a sort of first person action RPG, you're running around and it, sort of an environment that was midwinter, because it was actually something we haven't talked about, the nuclear winter.

The bombs are going to go off and cover the earth with smoke and we're all going to freeze to there. if you don't roast alive. Fun thing, you know, you either burn alive or freeze to death, no happy middle ground. Oh, you can also die of radiation poisoning. Or starvation. Or starvation.

Yeah. Take your choice and have a lot of fun. But either way, yes, this winter game, you know, you sort of plotted about as sort of a little bit sort of bio-shocky in a way, I guess it predated that and sort of system shock and that sort of thing. and you had sort of different vehicles. I'm sure I had vehicles or stuff you can fly around in. But yeah, it was like it was a sort of fun game

and you had an environment that you did things and did little quests and stuff. Very ahead of its time. And it's actually created by a guy called Mike Singleton who created the Lords of Midnight sort of closer to the beginning of the 80s, which was this crazy sort of Lords of the Ring-esque strategy game that had like 12,000 screens or something.

They all looked the same. But actually, you know, you were sort of going around an environment. So it was sort of a combo between a text adventure, sort of a strategy game, and sort of an open world. But you could, you know, back when they couldn't do an open world, so it was sort of generated via sort of bits of, you know, a mountain here, some people here, and all the screens were different. So it represented different locations. So that was a cool game. this was another, you know, really, really clever game.

But a guy that would have, you know, had he lived these days, we were probably knocking out amazing, you know, open world games with all sorts of stuff going on. And SDI, is that strategic defensive initiative, Sega, 1988, arcade, Insano Shooter, kind of like Missile Command turned up to 11. How do you do that? Missile Command's already at 11.

Yeah, this was more sort of, I guess, you know, sort of mid to late 80s, that's when, you know, the Reagan Star Wars thing. You know, you've invested all that money in, like, the missile shield that was going to save us all, and for some, you know, multi-billion dollar boondoggle eventually, I should imagine, but where all the money went, who knows. But, yes, they were supposed to have built anti-missile missiles, right? So this was kind of, like, you know, based on that concept, which is you fire missiles

at missiles coming down the screen or across the screen. And I think both SDI and actually missile defense really might actually be the same game or they're very very similar because that's also by Sega. Global defense is the home version of SDI. I think when it came home, I think SDI, Star Wars was already looking like a very obvious boondoggle and maybe they didn't feel like dealing with the political ramifications. You know, this was also the era of Konami creating a game called Contra. I think they just said, hey, why don't we not call it SDI for the American Home version? Let's call it Global Defense. But it is the same thing.

It's like if Gradius were Missile Command, that's kind of what you have. Yep, spot on. Yeah, so it's a side-scrolling game, and you have, you control a satellite, and you can move the satellite around, but you can also independently target where it fires. So you can aim and. kind of throw explosions all around the screen to blow up incoming missiles and satellites and things. And you're trying to just basically blow up everything that you're flying past so that it doesn't, you know, go and wipe out humanity or whatever. And it's almost like a sort of like a proto bullet hell game, right? I'm sure I remember playing it back in the day and it was just like

tons of ship flying at you and he's sort of blowing up all this stuff. So it uses a trackball just like missile command. It's just that instead of being, you know, controlling a stationary missile base at the bottom of the screen, you're controlling a satellite that can move around, you know, through the screen. And you have kind of free control over how it moves. So you have to avoid incoming enemy attacks while also taking out, you know, the missiles that you're flying past by targeting them with a separate targeting system. And it's a little complicated on the master system because, you know, you've got a single D-pad. So I think there might be a mode where you can use both D-pads, but that's not really that elegant either. So it's tricky,

but it is an interesting concept. It definitely plays better in arcades than at the home console. Yeah, it's almost like Centipede, because that was trackball and fire. And I knew you were kind of, you know, stuck to the bottom, like, fifth of the screen or whatever, even lower than that. But, but yeah, that way you can move around everywhere. Yeah, it was a... Sort of bits of Robotron almost, bits of missile command, bits of centipies. Kind of interesting way to do a shooter. And ripped from the headlines. Right.

I feel like you covered the game Parrish in your master's system retrospective. Yes, those were the links that I added to the notes. But there is also Missile Defense 3D, which is a different game. That one was developed in the U.S. by... Basically, what would become Sega Technical Institute, it was a Mark Cerney game, and it made use of the Sega 3D glasses, which aren't really necessary to play it. But basically, it's a multi-phase game where you have different perspectives and you're trying to blow up, you know, just a string of ICBMs that are coming. So there's like an overhead perspective where they're

flying through like an Antarctic canyon and you have to take them out. And then there's like an orbital phase and then there's the phase where you're like in the city and the missiles are coming in and you have to destroy them all because if you let a single one through the game ends and it gives you this little moralizing bit of text at the end like

that's all it took one nuke and it's all over so it's like thank you for hammering that home in such a subtle way thank you Marks. Yeah very subtle the unobriders to use subtext and they're all cowards. It was eight bit you know The subtext, there's not a lot of room for it on an apit system.

That is very true. This is the North Star, we talked about it a little bit. It was released here for the master system as Black Belt. And the thing that amuses me most about that is, of course, I swapped out the sprites so that the main character looks more like a generic American idea of a karate dude. And instead of like the background of the ruined city, which would have been interesting to keep, they have this massive stadium, I suppose, where he's just, walking for miles and there's people stuffed in the stands watching him beat his shit out of these people instead of walking through an apocalyptic city, which at least makes sense. It's a weird style choice.

Is that like late in the game? Because early on, you're just kind of walking in front of there's like a city in the background on the opposite side of a bay. But it's not a ruined city. It's just a city city. Maybe I'm thinking of something else then. I just remember something like that where maybe it was the same game, maybe a certain level, but just people watching it was actually kind of creepy in a number.

nightmarish way when you have one of those disturbing dreams that you can't forget about when you wake up. Yeah, Fist of the North Star was actually, of all the anime and manga properties to be localized, that was the most pervasive property to make it to the U.S. in the 80s. Weirdly enough, I don't know. Like, Americans just, or publishers just thought Americans would love Fist of the North Star. So we got Black Belt for Master's System. That was the first one. Then The second Fist of the North Star game for NES or for Famicom came here as Fist of the North Star for NES. And then we got a bad fighting game for Game Boy called Ten Big Brawls for King of the Universe. And around the same time Sega Genesis got Last Battle, which was just a rebranded Fistin' North Star, which didn't go as far to redraw everything as Black Belt did.

Black Belt was a top-to-bottom, just redesign, re-skin of Fister and the North Star. They changed up some of the battle mechanics. The original master system, Mark III game in Japan, was programmed by, you know, that one guy that we don't talk about because he's in jail. Oh, yeah, yeah, Eugene Naka. He, he, oh, sorry, did I mention his name? Oops. Yeah, anyway, he programmed it, and it's a really slick. game. Like, very, very impressive. But it's a real pain in the ass to play, because if you don't know

the story arcs, you don't know how to beat the bosses. Like the very first mini boss, the big heavy guy, Hart, I think is his name. You have to hit him just a certain kind of, like in a certain sequence. Otherwise, he just shrugs off your attacks. This is like the first mini boss, not even the first full boss for the first stage. And if you don't know the proper sequence, which is, you know, based on external media, not intrinsic to the game itself. That's as far as you get. So kind of a swing and a miss there, but something was definitely lost when it was translated into Black Belt. Like, you don't get the death speeches for the villains at the end.

Like, I have no regrets in this life before turning into stone, that kind of thing. But we did a full Fist in the North Star episode, so I don't have to belabor the point. Did you, I feel like North America, like I almost feel like, I almost feel like, like Fist of the North Star was so many, for so many people, was our first mature, quote, unquote, anime. And back then we watched because, oh, my God, sex and violence, not because, oh, my God, there's actually a message here. Well, it was one of the first manga to be localized into the U.S. There were just a handful, like, Camui, Area 88, Crying Freeman, maybe, My, the Psychic Girl, and Fist in the North Star was Galgo 13 also. Like all of these games kind of, these properties kind of hit like 86, 87, 88.

And that was one of the first ones that they really put a lot of energy and effort into. You know, I gave Diamond, like the run of Viz Comics. Yeah, original Fist in the North Star localizations in the floppy pamphlet paperback form. Because I know they're a big fan of Fist in the North Star. So I thought, you know, this seems like an appropriate gift now that I'm done with these. But, yeah, like, that was, that's, you know, kind of, kind of the legacy there was one of the very first properties to be properly localized into manga form. But again, it's kind of weird because some games made it as Fista the North Star and some games did not. So I'm sure it's all licensing, but it's just a weird sidebar that really is kind of getting away from the main topic here.

So my apologies. That's okay. I'm always tough for talking about Fist of the North Star. Did you have it up, like, was it like common up there or over there, jazz, to Fis of the North Star? Funnily enough, it was the first manga movie that I watched when manga the, I think they were an American company, right? They were. Actually, Manga Entertainment, I think, was based in the UK. Oh, okay.

Well, either way, I remember them sending me like a box of, they called me up and sort of said, you know, we're looking at your mags and, you know, we've got these Japanese movies and we kind of think that people will be interested in them your readers particularly can we send you a box fee to have a look and we're like sure you know send them over so I remember watching Fist of the North Star and going

holy shit I hadn't seen anything like that before yeah so I watched that one and then the next one was Akira which was just like oh my God you know this is unbelievable so it makes no sense but wow it's so beautiful absolutely and you know being into

sort of Japanese culture at that point because consoles had just come in everything about Japan was cool that was really good and then the third one was bloody Legend of the Overfiend which I just was not prepared for full on tentacle, you name

it, it was happening and so we were like yeah, if it's an North Star and Akira sure, that Legend of the Overfiend are you sure you meant to actually send that to us because it doesn't look right But anyway, I kept that so I could show it to absolutely

anybody that ever came into my house because it was such an outrage. Yeah, I really was like, you know. Would you like some tea and some tentacles? Yeah. But yeah, that was pretty good. But yeah, first of an all star, you know, I mean, that went out immediately

and became very successful. And kind of at that period, Street Fighter had just come in and there's a Street Fighter manga movie. So, of course, everybody wanted to watch that. So, yeah, probably, what, three or four years after the States

and so we were probably getting that localisation sort of just coming back into the country and that's what we got and it was really, really, really cool. Also very interesting about Black Belt

because having played that probably two years before I saw Fist of the North Star I had absolutely no idea of its origins and something I want to yeah stuff is making sense like oh right, yeah

that game was so fucking weird in some places, because I think that was like probably the third master system game I actually bought after it was launched in the UK and what, 1987, maybe? I think it came here in late 86 or early 87, and I think Vista and the North Star started being localized as a manga in 87 or 88. So, yeah, it does predate it a little bit, I believe. It still doesn't explain why they changed the last battle's name from Vista the North Star, but who knows?

Bionicam. Bionic Commando in the arcades, I had no idea. I know it was a different game, but I didn't know involved any kind of nuclear weapons. That's pretty cool. So it's kind of implicit, but the final stage of Bionic Commando in the arcades, which it's like four stages, you're working your way with your bionic arm up an ICBM silo. And you can see the missile in the background. And you have to reach the top and there's a control system and you blow that up. And that's like the graphic for that. They adapted that

into the core, the computer cores at the end of every stage in the NES game. And then once you blow up the computer core, it's like, congratulations, you've completed your mission, but there's still one more task. So then you kind of work your way up through an escape hatch and you run over and like the enemy general is running around back and forth between a crumbling statue of himself and you have to kill him. And then once you kill him, the game properly ends. And it's like, you did it. You killed the bad guy. Good job. But peace is only temporary. Now play the second loop that's even harder. So there you go. You have one Japanese game that's kind of about preventing a nuclear war.

There is, yeah. And, you know, elevator action returns or elevator action two, which came in the 90s, kind of after the nuclear Cold War scares. It ends very much like that, where there is a missile launch that you have to stop. And if you don't get to the computer and shut it down in time, it's a hard game over. Like, you can no longer continue. It's just like, whoop, you blew it. So, you know, Mark Serney is like, ah, it's all it tastes. That's all it takes, dude. By on Commando, 2009, a sad face game, as I wrote here.

But it does involve a nuclear attack, which is used as like kind of a way to bar the player from going to certain areas. No wonder Nathan Spencer is angry. What a great era for Capcom. Yeah, I kind of just like, I was just standing doing whatever. I'm like, oh, crap, that's right. There was that game with the wife and the arm. The wife is the arm. My God.

What? That was an interesting time because. for a minute it looked like Bionicamanda was going to come back and it was going to be a lot of fun and then it just died on the vine, probably for the best. Wasteland. Now, this is a big one. I actually did not know that this was on the Apple II, first and foremost. Jess, did you play it on the Apple two? Was that a UA computer? I'm sorry.

They were there, but like all Apple products, you know, the equivalent of about £5,000. So, you know, these days. So, no, basically, nobody, I knew had one. So, But I was kind of aware of the game. I remember sort of seeing it. I was, you know, at that point, still sort of reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction when I was commuting and things like that. So I remember reading about it and kind of going, oh, that looks pretty good. But I don't think I ended up playing it until, there was like a version in the early 90s, right?

I know there was a remake, but I don't know how it was. Or a spiritual successor or something like that. Right, yeah. I did not play it personally. The Apple 2 was my first computer, but I was not smart enough for Wasteland. I was mostly playing Carmen San Diego. But it's interplay's precursor to fallout.

So it's kind of a big deal. You are a member of the Desert Rangers. You keep peace and then post-apocalyptic South Western wasteland. There's strife and big lizards and angry androids and all the stuff that Fallout is famous for. So it will get there. But Parr, should you play Wasteland at all? all? No, it's very interesting to me, but it was way before I had access to computers, so

never touched it. I did try playing Wasteland too a bit, but I made the mistake of playing it on Switch, and I just don't feel like that's the best way to do that. No, probably not. One thing you did play, though, Crystalis, that's for the NES 1990. It's a S&K's own little weird action RPG that takes place 100 years after a nuclear cataclysm. The hero was a weird little guy, who wears a bandanas, that's how you know he's like from the shattered future of the 80s. The opening cinema, which highlights like all the mutated animals running around against that like backdrop of a meager town and the bones and stuff, it's pretty great still. And in retrospect, Crystalis is a collection of Miyazaki tropes, especially when he's straight up fight an Alm in a toxic forest. That's pretty rad overall.

It's a great game. It's a basically the best east rip-off that there ever was. Yes, that's a good way to describe it. It's a very good ease rip-off. There are lots of bad East rip-offs, by the way. Don't play them. Oh, yeah, for sure. But this is a good one.

I never did, and I'm glad it's actually to know it's called E's because I always called it Wise. Everyone calls it Wise. There's 10 games, everyone calls it Wise. Probably because we started calling it Wise when we first covered it in, at least in the UK in like 1990, whenever it actually even earlier than that, 89 maybe. Well, the first version that came to the US for Master System on the label, the title was not YS. It was Y apostrophe

S. So, of course, everyone was like, oh, it's wise. That makes sense. That was Sega. They blew it and they ruined it for everyone. Years, years to unlearn the damage they did to us. I would actually love to see a good remake

or sequel to Crystalis by SNK. You probably don't remember this parish, but one of the first things I wrote for the Toasty Frog Zine back in, what was that, 2001. Thank you. Yeah, I wrote like a comparison between Crystallus and the Chrysalids by the John Winham book, which is also about a nuclear apocalypse. And God forgive us for not mentioning that. But

there's no connection between the two. I just kind of sought something and tied it together as I want to do. Sure, sure. I mean, that's all of really like every English class assignment you ever had. It's totally, totally fine. Fair game. I read No, I didn't read Crystallus for school My brother did But did you ever read The Crystallids

I did not Yeah I was like such a John Wyndham Feend as a kid I mean Day of the Triffids Massive Death of Grass I think that was one of his

Chockey was really good I mean that was absolutely like as a kid to read that like an alien in someone's head and talking to them I was like holy crap But, yeah, John William did that cozy apocalypse. I think I went off about that at U.S. Gamer, like that whole genre of sort of apocalypse survival,

you know, small groups of people find it, well, not a necessary better life, but kind of figuring out how to deal with stuff when the worst happens. And so I guess they were kind of in a way sort of felt something I could relate to living on a remote farm in the middle of way. and sort of surviving as the rest of the world fell apart. Jefferson Airplane wrote a song about the Chrysalis. Chronic Creation that's about the book. It's a pretty good song. Soon you'll take the stability you strive for.

In the only way that it's granted, you know, play some wonder fossils of our time. Shinn-Megami Tensei, 1992, Super Famicom. Hey, this game gives me real Persona-5 vibes I wrote because I'm an asshole. Massively popular follow-up to 1987's Digital DeGate digital devil saga, Magamaitense. A scientist opens a portal to the demon world and things get out of hand so quickly.

The Norse God Thor, acting for the American government, nukes Tokyo to contain the threat. I have no idea why this game was not localized. Can you imagine 1992 Nintendo? Where would they start? Yeah. I mean, Shinemagamei Tensei, too, opens with you, like, walking through a maze and there's crucified Jesus just hanging out. And I think also you talk to Stephen Hawking, so it's, you, you know, you know,

Yeah, they were... You know, the entire series, we're going to do a Magamei Tensei podcast sometime this year. But the series got a start based on a series of light novels, which are not actually good. They're kind of horrible and misanthropic. And, you know, with Shin Magame Tensei, they really broke away from the books and just started developing their own storyline. But there does seem to be this sort of loose continuity between the core numbered Shin-Megame Tensei games that kind of evolves over time. And it's sort of contradictory, but also sort of not. I haven't played enough of them to really, to kind of really understand how it all works.

But I do enjoy those games. I really need to play SMT-5 and three. I like five. And one and two. I really like Shin-Magame Tensei-4. that's the one that I've played. Okay. I played Strange Journey Redux. I really liked that.

I think that was my first SMT game. SMT5 was good on the Switch. I might go ahead and play the remake when it comes out. Great soundtrack. I'm more of a persona gal. I know that's like such a basic thing to say, but I like it all. Fet on you. One thing I do love about SMT, though, is the monster and demon designs are so creative.

of like they really take from each culture and make something that makes sense within the context of the legends. Like, you don't see good representations of, like, Jewish myth very often, but they do some great ones. Yeah, they cover all, like the entire spectrum of mythology from, you know, like ancient Sumerian to kind of modern day American, you know, things like the moth man and the. The moth man. He's a popular one. Oh, there's, what is it? It's like the, something in New Jersey. I can't remember what it's called.

Jersey Devil, is it? Not the Jersey Devil, it's something else. But it's like that kind of that, that northeast corridor area. They, you know, they duck into some of that stuff too. Yeah, but the, the Mothman is a good one. Wendigo, okay. When I think Wendigo, I think Pet Cemetery. Yeah, it's more a Canadian thing, I believe.

Just sort of the indigenous tribes, yeah. The things that wander between the border of America and Canada in the frostiest parts. Yes, Windigo and Bob Mackie. He moved to nice. That's true, yeah. He's just in Canada now. Yeah, not me.

I'm in Toronto. That's for all the Wissaside, because the lakes moderate the temperature, so I'm good. Jazz, are you a Shin-McGamintense fan? I don't know if you give me that vibe. No, it's one of my big gaming blind spots. It's like, you know, whenever I hear about the series,

it's like, wow, I'm always fascinating. to hear what it's about, what's in it, what it does. I just, you know, it's not the kind of gameplay that I can, you know, I enjoy particularly or want to try necessarily. I've sort of had to go. But, yeah, like, it's, like, there's a whole bunch of games sort of similar to that that are just so fascinating and just pack full of stuff. And it's just like, I love to hear about it because, you know,

I'm not going to discover them through playing. But I'm glad they're there and I always want to hear. SMT games in general tend to start with a disaster that wipes out humanity, except for a select few, and it's God and devils fighting over, okay, who gets to make the new world? How do you play a role in that? And I think there might be others that use nuclear apocalypse, but it's definitely in Shumagamehensei. Parrish, you added, Secretamana. Now, that's a very interesting one to me. So it's very implicit.

it. It doesn't actually state it. But have you played Secret of Mana? Secret of Mana? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, when you get to, when you're going to see the sage and you kind of go through like the subway system, it's full of zombies. And then you sort of climb this structure with all these televisions and stuff. If you interact with the TVs and the recordings, you'll get these messages that are clearly, I don't know if this was invented at localization, but they're clearly. clearly referencing modern American culture, and there are, like, snippets that basically say, oh, it's like, the end is coming, you know, the attack has begun or something like that. So, you know, you're kind of living in a world where something bad happened, and it talks about the Mana Fortress and things like that, but it's kind of implied that this is all, you know, post-apocalyptic and the world has regenerated. So kind of getting into that Nausica thing again. Yeah, for sure.

I know the specific part you're talking about when you go up to the TVs and you listen to the recordings, they call them videos. They don't know what it means, but that's what they call them. And there is mention of one city firing missiles at another. And what's interesting about Secret of Mana is that the mana slash Sikindatetsu universe has a connected universe, and it has like mention of certain towns and certain places that you don't hear about or see. sea is secret of mana, but those towns are mentioned in the videos as part of the war, as I recall. So, yes, as I understand it, going by what you're talking about and remembering myself, I think there was a nuclear war, and that's when the mana beast, as the legend goes,

like, annihilated everything and everyone until the hero, whoever he was, restored balance with the sword and stop the world from being completely annihilated. So I'll buy it. I'll take it. Jazz, have you played Secret of Mata? No, I don't believe I have. Again, it was one of those sort of, it was released at a time when I was sort of,

I was reen a lot of JRP's in the sort of the early 90s because I was the only one available to kind of do it in a way. But I kind of soon realized I just wasn't that great at them. So we began to sort of farm them out so people that just enjoyed that kind of game. So, as a consequence, I missed a whole bunch of stuff during that era just because I was so focused on the more action-oriented stuff. That makes sense, yeah. I mostly asked because I think Lusina Gaya was one of the more popular games in Europe that actually got there.

And maybe that wasn't the UK, maybe it was just like Germany. That was definitely very, very popular. I mean, it was sort of interesting time, you know, sort of, you know, you had the English arcade advantage. You know, so that was sort of pre-Metroyd, pre-Carsylvania, the sort of the ultimate stuff, you know, a lot of them were flick screens and things like that. Then you had Zelda come along and we're sort of as a European, you kind of looked at that and kind of went, oh, it feels almost like an RPG, but it's also like an arcade adventure. And then, and then it took that next step to the kind of like the traditional JRP. and at that point people began

I think it's not necessarily split but people began to kind of realize like oh right there's this extra step of very sophisticated RPGs that kind of take the action out they have the exploration of arcade adventures and stuff like Zelda but you've got all this plot

and story and sort of the combat is a bit more numbers oriented and there was definitely a group of people that kind of looked to that and just went oh this is fantastic and I think you know, they weren't necessarily super popular, but the people that loved them really, really loved them and kind of created that sort of like, yeah, there's definitely a very hardcore base there, and which took a while to really get going. But that sort of early group of people really did help establish JLPGs because they really wanted them so bad because they feel to hold that at that point, nothing was there to fill. No, absolutely.

I don't know if illusion of Gaia got over there, but it did as illusion of time. That's right. Okay. Yeah. So it came over there as illusion of time. It's one of my favorite games of all time. I love Quintet. I miss him so much. I did an episode on Quintet. Please go back and listen to them. The comet that is the quote-unquote villain of Illusion of Gaia is implied to be a weapon capable of sending civilization backwards. And it's not clear what it is. I don't know if. I don't know if that's because of their writing or because of localization or both, but it could be we're talking about Star Wars, a rogue nuclear weapon that launches from time to time and sends people backwards and mutates them. There is mention of that of civilization being destroyed and having to be rebuilt. This game is weird. I don't have an answer for you, but that's why it's one of my favorites, I suppose. And Parrish, you wrote down Krono Trigger because I suppose Lavas could definitely be considered a something equivalent.

kind of nuclear attack. Yeah, I mean, this is obviously not a pure nuclear war, but the world that you visit, the ruined future that you visit, where Lavos has risen from beneath the earth and launched these energy beams that wipe out the entire planet, destroy the surface. Like, it's very much a Mad Max kind of future where there's bandits on the highways, and human civilization has been reduced to little clusters. of people who, you know, bunker down, they don't have food. They subsist on these energy machines that leave them feeling hungry. And at the end, like a tiny little sprout grows. And everyone's like, wow, hope. That sounds amazing. I love that. So it's, you know, kind of a post-Cold War

take on the nuclear apocalypse. It's a different form of apocalypse. But it's very much kind of in that genre, that vein. Yeah. The nuclear winter we talked about earlier is kind of really depicted in the future that you go to. I don't know if it's snow or rain that's constantly falling. Could be ash. It could be ash. And once in a while you get like this flicker of thunder and lightning. It is rare, but it's there. It's pretty scary. So, yeah, that's a very interesting tonal shift that you go through in Krono Trigger. I remember my brother was watching me play. And he's like, why did the music turn to Pink Floyd? So that's just like the kind of place it is. Did Chrono Trigger?

No, it did not make it to Europe. That was infamous because Terra Enigma made it. That's correct. Yeah, so if you're not a JRP person, I guess I shouldn't bother asking if we played it. But yeah, it is actually Eric from the Axe of the Blood God, the podcast I'm on, and he's one of the co-hosts. And he just recently played Chrone Trigger for the first time. He livestreamed it on our YouTube channel. And yeah, he loves it.

So he's a, there you go. a younger millennial who absolutely adores Chrono Trigger and considers it one of the best games of all time because it is. It's true. Yeah, I certainly know plenty of people that just love it a bit. Very beloved game by some, it seems.

It's a great story, like we're talking about the final fantasy 6, but it has its moments. I suppose Final Fantasy 6 in its own kind of fictional way the light of judgment can be considered Yeah, I almost put that down because the world does end in that one And then you have to kind of pick up the pieces But it was far enough away from nuclear weapons

And I said, eh Yeah, yeah But everything's right properly fucked So pardon the F word there Big one You get one, but one more and we're no longer PG-13 And you can't refer to sex

when you say it, because that's a hard hour. That, okay, right. It can only be a swear. It can't be a reference. Yeah. Oh, man. I know the rules. I have been recited.

They've been recited. Adjective, not verb. That's it. There you go. That's a good point. That's a good way to put it. Fallout, 1997 for the PC. I wrote, when Interplay went to EA and asked for the right to wasteland back,

EA said, what's a wasteland? So Interplay went and made this franchise that nobody likes instead. Now, Microsoft, Bethesda owns it. Who knows if Microsoft will do something insane, like kill it off, because we're living in hell world right now, speaking in nuclear fallout. But Fallout is really, really hot right now because of the TV show, and Microsoft really needed that win really badly. I will be honest with you, I'm not a huge Fallout fan. You would think I love the series because of how much I'm into this nuclear apocalypse crap, but I just, I don't hate it, but I've just never been able to really get into it. The TV show or the actual game?

Both. Oh, wow. Oh, I like the TV show a lot. I love the TV show. Oh, yeah. To me, it was like, it felt like, because I grew up reading 2000 AD, and one of the things in 2000 AD was you had Judge Dreyer do as the Super Dupil-Lorman. And in that world of the post-apocalyptic future, you had the cursed earth,

which was, again, the consequences of a nuclear war just literally filled with rampaging zombies. And having kind of grew up on that, which has this. kind of horrible, obscenely awful characters and a sick, twisted sense of humour, the TV show was just like, holy shit, they just bought the curse of the earth to life.

And this is just like Judge Shred because, you know, everything going on there just felt very much like that. So, of course, I loved it. But I didn't really like the game that much, not quite my thing. You know, cool game for sure, just not something I want to play. But yeah, the TV show for me

was like, fantastic. I'll give it another chance, probably. I watched the first episode, and I'm like, oh, okay, well... Oh, what it starts as is definitely not what it finishes as. That's good to know, yeah. I will give it another chance. I don't know why. Fallout 4, I think, was as close as I came to really liking a Fallout game,

which is obscene for someone to say, I know, but I loved the fact that I started the game, and it started with a radstorm, which is like the thunderstorm that, is radioactive and has a really strange, haunting sound to it. And I was in the open, and I could hear my rads going up. Like, I was being exposed, and I'm, like, desperate. Where do I find shelter?

What do I do? And just that kind of panic. I love that kind of thing in a game. But I just can never stick to it. I'm a Fallout deprived, I suppose. Yeah, I've never been assigned to review a Fallout game, and therefore I've never played a Fallout game. I did try to play the original back in the day.

but, you know, I am working graphic design and so forth and have always used a Macintosh, and the Mac port of Fallout was famously rough. It had an issue with the save files where saving the game would take longer and longer to complete until it was taking like 20 minutes. And there was like some, yes, there was some sort of weird memory leakers.

something. And it was just like it got to a point where after a few hours, it started to become a real chore to play. So I never got around to finishing it. But I like the concept of it. You know, that sort of retro futuristic, corny 1950s thing they've got going on. They integrated that really well into the TV series where there is a faction that is just super, gee, golly whiz. But it still works in the context of the universe. And a big part of the story is kind of reconciling that sheltered vault denizen and kind of, you know, questioning the morality of their entire existence. It was, it was, it was very impressive that they managed to kind of weave serious post-apocalyptic

narrative with also that level of goofiness. It's a very deft balancing act that I was very impressed by. It makes me want to go back and actually play the series, but who the hell has time for 100-hour RPGs. I certainly don't. I did preview Fall at 76. I heard the event was going to be at the Greenbriar, the bunker where they were going to put the president of in case of a nuclear attack. And I'm just like, holy shit, I got to preview this game. I got to see this place. So yeah, I went. I toured the vault where they closed the door behind you and it's just this huge ass bang and it's like, oh, well, I guess I'm stuck here. So that was fun. And fall at 76

right now is actually having a bit of a resurrection because people want to play fallout because of the show and that's the one no one played yeah people are playing it now I wouldn't say it's been a realm reborn but it's uh getting a little bit of extra life and uh call of duty I'm not a call of duty person are you a call a duty person either of you me you bet yeah I love that series running around shooting people in the head how could I not enjoy that Especially when they're actual people. My brother is the kind of person who waits to Christmas Day so he can log on and hedge-shot all the nobs,

all the 15-year-olds, getting their... Yeah, I've had conversations with my boss that I actually play cod with, you know, sort of occasionally and about, like, Sunday afternoons is Massacre Day, you know, if you log on Sunday. It's like all the Sunday drivers, you know, there's the Sunday cod players, and you just absolutely just shoot into pieces.

They all came back from church It's kind of settled down to have a good A good game and you just like headshot them It's like the same brother My niece had a birthday party at Laser Tag And he just got in there and headshot every single child And he just has his name at the top of the At the top of the stakes

Like next to like all the eight year old It was a fun day But yeah I am not a cod player But I will say the nuke scene for modern warfare Call it before Modern Warfare, that is incredible. That is just... That really was cool, yeah, sort of as part of the campaign and playing that through.

Because to me, that really was... I've sort of played cod games before, and I was sort of, you know, I enjoyed it. But that was when they really got a lot of things, right, they got the multiplayer right, and the campaign really kind of did feel quite meaty, it sort of made sense, and it really did have some terrific moments

before they sort of kept, escalating it because they felt they needed to so it sort of didn't feel like forced it just felt like shocking and naturally evolved it's sort of integrated in the story in a way that sort of just pushed a narrative and it was a yeah really really good moment and sort of struggling there and you know it very very well visually articulated the fact that you're sort of sitting there and sort of dying essentially it was a very very cool thing probably the the most realistic sort of post-nuclear detonation seen in video games up until that point.

I would say so. There's the scene where you're crawling, I guess, dying either of injuries or radiation poisoning or all of it. And you can kind of hear the radio crackling saying like it's like a killer amount of radge for a seven mile radius. And you just know there's no way you're going to crawl at that.

And eventually, yeah, you just die. So you hear a heartbeat. Quite chilling. It's a very sobering part of the game, sort of, I remember seeing it and it sort of, you know, not exactly sort of brought it back, but it was just sort of like, really good callbacks

to sort of like, wow, if I'd seen that as a kid, that would have, you know, sort of again, sort of fed into what I was seeing in my head, you know, for the nightmares that we were seeing. So, yeah, very effectively done. Did you write down DefCon, 2007 Windows, or was that you perish?

No, that was UK developers. That was not me. What is DefCon? is that it's a nuclear war sim? Yeah, it was just kind of like a modern simple take on sort of, it's like a nuclear war sim and it had, you know, modern graphics and stuff, but they were all sort of done in that sort of, you know, war games, sort of computer graphic representation of the world

with dotted lines and things, you know, showing the missiles and things. So it sort of issued the sort of the more visceral, visceral sort of visual look and feel for, sort of something that was a bit more sort of strategic and theoretical in a chilling way. So quite a clever game. I don't think there's one of those ones I actually found as we started looking for these games. I'd never seen it or played it. But when I looked at it, it was like, oh, actually, that's quite cool.

It's quite clever. You should play it. Give it a try. Yeah. It's probably for free on Gog as well. Oh, is it? That's good to know. Yeah.

There you go. Go get it. Parrish, I'm sure you wrote this. Etrine Odyssey. Spoilers. It is Nossica. I did not know that. I don't know if I care about spoilers because it's such a story slim game. It is a nearly 20-year-old game at this point. So people got mad at me back in the old days of retronauts for spoiling this. All bets are off at this point. Yeah. You're playing the sword and sorcery fantasy. You build your guild. You go exploring into the depths of the root system beneath the world tree seeking mysteries and treasures. and that sort of thing. And eventually you get to the fifth stratum

of the labyrinth, and it's called Los Shinjuku. And it is, you know, the ruins of a Japanese city are like going through broken up skyscrapers and, you know, crossing through sky bridges

and things like that. And it turns out the entire system is basically regenerating the world after a nuclear holocaust. So there's like the chosen ones who are going to repopulate the world

after everything's said and done. And then the losers like you are just, you know, kind of biting time. It's really just straight up, Nausica. The losers like you who are not going to reproduce are just going to slum around the roots. So that's where it starts is like the roots of the world tree. Because I know four was, I think, the first one I played, and you were climbing the tree. Well, there's different trees around the Igresil. Igresil system.

Always a tough word to say. There are different world trees. place throughout the world as part of this purification system. Right. So that is Nasca, absolutely. Oh, that's pretty cool, though. Like, uh, I love Veteran Odyssey, but I always get distracted before I can really finish it or finish a game. I like the newer ones because they have an easier mode. So if you don't have time to really like build up your team, you can just be like, ah, it's fine. And kind of sort of coast through

the game. I mean, there's still, you know, it'll still put up challenges, but you don't have to grind for levels and experience for quite as long. FOE, FOE. FOE. this kind of came to me. It's a very inspired choice, I think. And it is retro. It is 10 years old. Final Fantasy 14, a Realm Reborn,

where Eorzia, the world or the continent where you play a Realm Reborn, is literally newt by Bahamets who hatched from Meteor in a once-in-a-lifetime game reboot that luckily for Square Enix really worked out well.

I will not spoil the story, but basically everyone knows the the tale by now about how Final Fantasy 14 was such a mess when it launched. It had to be annihilated and started over again. So Bahamut has really good reason to be pissed off and he comes out in a meteor and he just unleashes,

I think it's Terraflare, which flare magic in Final Fantasy is, it was called nuke back in the day. And it is even now implied that it's not really fire magic, It's something different. It doesn't necessarily say nuclear, but that implication is there. And when Bahamut just destroys the Orsia, you can really tell what the, what, like, what is referencing. And I think even Smash Brothers ultimate kind of referenced that opening movie and their opening movie.

But it's actually interesting because Bahamas attack, once you go into the game and start playing it, it kind of leaves these areas that are corrupted by ether imbalances and stuff like that. basically the effects are sort of like, they can be like radiation poisoning, where there are those kind of hot spots that can make you sick or whatever, or people are sick, or there's a story thing going on. So I just want to also say that Bahamut uses Terraflare to level aorta. Donald Duck can cast Zeta flare, therefore he is more powerful than the creature that nearly destroyed Final Fantasy 14. Thank you. This has been a great discussion.

That's the power of not wearing pants. That sounded more like Satan. I'm sorry. Pats. I don't even know what the hell that was. That is it for this week's episode of Retronauts. We hope you found this conversation sizzling hot. If you like this kind of content, please support us at patreon.

Retronauts.com, where you can sign up at all times of different tiers for all kinds of cool extras. $3 a month gets you access to episodes a week in advance and free. $5 a month, you get to exclusive episodes per month. And at the magical 64 tier, you get to pick a Retronos topic once every six months within reason. Have you ever rejected someone and said like, you know, you can't do this thing about Cloud's pants or whatever? No, but I mean, there's been back and forth saying, Why don't we try something different? Let's send this down a bit.

I am Nadia Oxford. I also co-host the Axis of Blood God podcast at patreon.com for us slash Blood God Pod. Please support us. We would love to have your support. You can follow me at Nadia Oxford on Twitter and Blue Sky. I'm trying to get off Twitter. It's a den of Nazis now.

I don't think I should be there anymore. But I do post on Blue Sky. And I don't copy and paste that often. You get separate fresh tweets or whatever skits on Blue Sky. If you follow me. So why don't you go ahead and promote yourself jazz Because I haven't talked to you in the longest So you get to go first

Thank you Yeah, you can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky Jazz Rignal J-A-Z-1Z Rignal And I do copy-paste Across both But we'll eventually move to Blue Sky When it's ready

And everybody's there at the moment I'm kind of straddling the two But we'll be more than happy to leave the hellhole. Yeah, you post a lot of like old mags and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, all sort of largely, you know, 20, 30, 35 years ago, stuff, you know, and magazine reviews and stuff. So often fun, you know, lots of good conversations there.

Very good stuff, very good stuff. Paris, what about you? I mean, I already said most of your stuff there. Yeah, you can find me at Blue Sky, just Blue Sky. Like, I'll occasionally put like a video link or something. on Twitter just because it's 30,000 followers and I'm like, yeah, I could use the extra

views, but yeah, I don't really post there. It's all Blue Sky. And hey, look, they're going to have DMs and custom videos and jiffs and anti-harassment features. They got rid of Jack Dorsey, so really what's not to like about Blue Sky? You can also find me on YouTube

and here at Retronauts and, of course, at Limited Run Games. and I think that's it, yes, sometimes at events, but mostly just wishing I could be asleep. Yeah, we'll be at a few events this summer. I will be at Long Island. Yes, and if there are family emergencies that force me to rush home from an event this summer, I'm just going to say, sorry, family, you're on your own, figure it out. Call 911. Call 911. That's what they're doing. therefore. Well,

that's it for now. So until next time, remember that all you need to protect yourself against nuclear fallout is a jean jacket, denim pants, and of course, a bandana. So will you please say hello to the folks that I know, tell them I won't be long. They'll be happy to know

that as you saw me go, I was singing this song We'll meet again Don't know where, don't know where But I know we'll meet again Some sunny day Thank you. Thank you.