No More Heroes
We discuss our perception of the game hero and their fallibility through the years
Not the game, but it ties in here somewhere as I’m looking at ‘heroes’ in games, mainly protagonists. Games take a few cues from movies when they create their ‘hero’. Pretty much every silent war machine from the 80’s-90’s had some form of Schwarzenegger built into their coding. In particular, his character ‘John Matrix’ from Commando. In fact Commando seems more apt for a game looking back at it. I mean the guy is practically a one-man army who is 80% muscle and 20% one-liner quips after he’s just painted the walls with some guys head.
The Commando analogy has all the traits of game, simple story, meat-head protagonist and lots of guns. The character has as much substance as processed cheesed but he does what is required, which is to entertain...through mass carnage. The same can be said from the leads in games like Doom, Wolfenstein and others on sale at that time. They act as a medium to kill aliens, Nazi’s and the Dog from Paperboy. Thanks to the latter my natural instinct when seeing any small dog is to wail on it with a rolled up newspaper. They only need to connect with us through killing things, we don’t really care if your daughter’s been kidnapped or aliens are coming to mind-rape us. Just point me to the BFG.
However, if you look at protagonists from other games in the 80’s there weren’t many pushing the boundaries in character development. Even in the first Final Fantasy the leads were silent pixelated people called Warrior and Blue Mage. Things slowly started to change but it was still very much kept in the RPG genre. Protagonists in other genres where guns or fighting were concerned still leaned towards the silent, burly psychopath whose mind focused only on guns, ammo and medical packs.
I think when we moved into the realms of 3d the idea of the game hero started to change. As graphics became three-dimensional companies attempted to create characters that had more substance.
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