Everyone is here to see Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
Most of us in the room are in our late 20s. Or early 30s. Some are pushing 40 I guess. It’s hard to tell. Elsewhere, on the fringes; a handful of youngsters. On some level The VHS flicker is familiar but it doesn’t belong to them. They recognise the in-jokes but it doesn’t resonate, doesn’t filter through the bloodstream in the same way. My Dad thinks he remembers the first time he saw a coloured television, but he doesn’t. Not really.
“Oh well,” says one young journalist, “I guess I get to live vicariously through someone else’s nostalgia.”
I was born in 1981 and I’m 31 years old. Television raised me. Transformers, He-Man. I’m 10 years old and Arnold Schwarzenegger is the template for the perfect fighting machine we all want to be when we grow up: A human being wearing 35 kilograms of muscle fibre like a chiselled fat suit. He probably couldn’t run two kilometres without keeling over in a pool of his own excreted bodily fluids, but we flex our skinny bodies in front of mirrors, begging to look precisely like him.
Nowadays we condescend to video game ‘dudebro’ culture like it’s a dark dirty secret, like terrible teenage poetry tucked away in the basement of video game history. I’m in two minds about it. Of course that culture has the potential to exclude people, but there’s room for all sorts and, like it or not, it’s part of our collective history. Video games spent the best part of 20 years as wish fulfilment for an entire generation of man-children who watched Die Hard one too many times and there’s not much we can do to change that. I’m not sure I’d necessarily want to; change the past, I mean. It’s part of my personal history too. Video games aren’t perfect and neither am I.
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon reminds me of that fact. According to the pre-prepared Ubisoft spiel Blood Dragon is a happy accident; an anti-corporate attempt to blow off some steam (Bennett). An attempt to relieve the internal tension built up during the difficult, often intense development of the original Far Cry 3. It’s telling: when the generation that was raised on Arnold and his chiseled fat suit were allowed a break from oppressive weight of expectation that comes with AAA development, Blood Dragon was the end result. Blood Dragon: the first result on a Google search that encompasses an entire generation of men who grew up watching the same shit, on different TVs, all over the entire western world.
It makes sense. One of my friends at this preview event tells me a story. Whilst working at a publisher who will not be named, he and a co-worker attempted to ward off the thick peals of boredom that come with marketing an endless trudge of sequels and spin offs. The end result? An in-depth pitch for a prospective video game: a Smash Bros. style fighter featuring every 80s star you could name: your Stallones, your Schwarzeneggers and to a lesser extent your Steven Seagals and your Jean Claude Van Dammes.
This is what happens when young men of a certain age let off some steam (Bennett).
I wonder if every studio has its Blood Dragon? It wouldn’t surprise me.
What is Blood Dragon? It’s a thin skin of irony stretched tight around the limber physique of Far Cry 3, a game that once proclaimed to satirise and subvert a culture it ultimately became part of. Did they really think this Boy Scout shit was gonna work?
It’s clever, but dumber than a bag of bricks; that’s the point. Bricks don’t hit back. It’s Bennett, letting off some steam. A clever parody. The revival of a culture that refuses to Die Hard.
Blood Dragon: a wild collage of of retro-styled visuals, dinosaurs and machismo. A collective childhood lived through media chucked into a wood chipper, filtered through a neon blender and sold back to us like Wizz Fizz. I’m not complaining. I’m not even sure if it’s a bad thing. It may be a good thing. Even if we didn’t ask for Blood Dragon we still want it.
Correction: I still want it. I think. But I remember these things: these movies, these moments, that decade. This is my childhood, conveniently shrink wrapped and packaged with the in-jokes I’ll enjoy.
I suppose everyone else will just have to live vicariously through my nostalgia.
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