Today I Learned

A few things about America's Army:

It may (I am 90%, but not 100% sure of this) have been the first PC, online, FPS to feature ragdoll physics for dead players.

It employed a... rather baffling way of doing team conflicts:

You are always on Team America, and the opposing team is always Team Generic Terrorists. (With 80s/90s movie era costumes for the bad guys, dependent on map location)

What this results in is... you have your M4. You are shooting at bad guys with AK74su's. But... from the opposing team's POV, its the same.

So, if you kill someone... you can now pick up an AK74su. Even though from their POV they dropped an M4.

And so on, with rough equivalents as an SVD and an M110, an RPK and an M249.

These 'picked up' weapons would basically morph into having the ballistics of the Eastern Bloc weapon at the point they were picked up.

Very weird, I've never seen another game do that.

The game also had a good number of training courses, many of which were initially bugged as all hell.

I remember the SERE course failing me consistently, showing that I had been detected by guards who are apparently able to see through boulders or 30 feet of a hill (the camera would show you how you were spotted like a 'deathcam' and it was quite obvious it was often total bs).

Also, in certain training missions it was possible to shoot your instructor.

This would result in you being sent to the brig: Log in to your account, and for a week, all you get is a view from inside a prison cell, no game menus or options at all, rofl.

Oh, final thing: I am pretty sure this was the first online PC FPS that modelled that M203 projectiles must travel a certain distance before the explosive charge will detonate, so taking out someone with an M203 round to the face, non explosively, became a way to humiliate people, as you either had to be pretty skilled to do it , or your opponent had to have very poor situational awareness.

So, I worked on this. I built their in game support system (irc backed!), wrote a bunch of the web auth code, and accidentally once deleted the production user database from the secondary site (whew, disabled and re-replicated from primary).

It was a lot of fun and got me a trip to E3 back when it was the big thing.

It was an interesting concept because no matter what, you would play the american side and fight the terrorists. (you would look like a terrorist to the other team)

It was a legitimately good completely free multiplayer FPS game. I was into it for a while ages ago, and it was quite fun.

I genuinely doubt it actually inspired a remotely meaningful number of people to actually join the army, though.

It was extremely popular. I played it a lot. Many players were international because, you know, it was free.

It was great anti-miliarty propaganda. I mean I died several times per hour.

It was actually pretty good. I remember having to pass an ingame training course to use the medic class. I still vaguely remember how to apply a tourniquet lol

I recall playing the tutorial. Never went online. Dial up sucked. Interesting tidbit, if you shoot your drill instructor at the range you're dropped into a prison cell at Fort Leavenworth. All you can do from that point is listen to somebody whistling and drag a tin cup across your cell bars.

Didn't expect so much hate for this game... In terms of simulations, in 2002, the original game was light years ahead of its time. They did a lot of things right that it took the more popular mil sims years to get correct. I'd go as far as to argue it is one of the most realistic squad-based tactical shooters of all time.

The special forces test was hard.

For the written test. there's parts where you would be shown a helicopter for 100 milliseconds then have to remember the configuration, number of rotors, ordinance... Or you see a tank for a split second and have to correctly identify the barrel measurements and other little details.

The stealth mission was difficult too. I managed to be a medic and a ranger but not special forces.

There was a guy who saved someone in a car crash and he said he learned what to do medically in the moment from this game.

I heard on a podcast a long time ago that the Army considered it one of their most successful recruiting tools. Not because it brought in more recruits, but because fewer recruits dropped out, apparently because playing the game led to fewer surprises after joining.

This was legit very popular for a while. It was even common in e-sports.

I think this one is the one where a player used the first aid knowledge learnt in game to save someone's life irl?

Oh man, was it version 2.1 or 2.4 that was the best? I think it was the one where urban assault was released. So many hrs playing until 3.0. There was a test to be able to play medic in the game. It taught basic first aid.

I played it for a while. It was ok for the time, when there weren't many pseudorealistic tactical FPS games.

Its still around IIRC, been through like 5 versions now. If you're in the military you can use your .mil address and be marked in game as actual military for better or worse lol.

The most surprising part of the whole thing? It was actually a really fuckin solid game. (The original, can't speak for whatever version is out now.)

People were in an uproar over "indoctrination" by the game. If your child can be convinced to join the army by playing that game... maybe it's for the best.

then they realized pouring money into actual game studios with more cost-effective

Super fuckin dystopian

You never played as the “bad guys”. You and your team on your screen were always American, 100% of the time. The terrorists you were fighting saw a presentation on their own screen that you were the godless terrorists, and they were the heroic Americans. No one was ever the bad guys. Except, some “other” in some distant place. But not you.

We had heated arguments at one place I worked when AA wanted to hire us for some short contract. The one side of the argument was, guys, they literally just want us to set up and configure one web service for them. I don’t think we’re gonna wind up killing anyone from the global south in the course of setting up that server. The other side, which I remember verbatim, came in the form of a heated retort:

“Would you set up a blah blah blah server for the NAZIS?”

AA2 and AA3 were legitimately great games.

🎶Yvan eht nioj🎶

Now they just pay Activision to do that on their behalf with CoD.

Had big vans parked on the UT Campus lawn paid for with Pentagon money, where you could play the game right next to a real live military recruiter.

I like to think about this while I'm looking at videos of Palestinian student protesters getting maced, tackled, and dragged away by campus security.

The training/intro sergeant sounded just like one of my actual sergeants.

Played this a lot. My favorite map is bridge.

The first iteration had a rules of war/ethics type system where as well as K/D ratios etc. it gave you a rank for how well you obeyed the rules of war. I remember I number of articles talking about how abysmally low all the scores were.

The game was such a realistic representation of the US army that players could just war crime to their hearts content with no repercussions.

It had a reporting system. If you reported someone for camping, the vote would be turned against you and if people agreed you were kicked. 😂