François Truffaut once claimed “there is no such thing as an anti-war film”. The French Director’s thinking was thus: no matter how the text or imagery of your flick plays out, war is inherently cool to look at, so the concept of war is promoted. Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, or Apocalypse Now all have too many bitchin’ helicopter fights to ever make someone walk away thinking war is bad. By the nature of a movie being designed to entertain, it is impossible to convey the message that the subject of that entertainment could be harmful.
So I kind of wonder if that is the explanation for American politics.
Today’s game certainly glorifies war. Total Carnage is the spiritual sequel to Smash TV. It is another twin-stick shooter, but instead of biting on The Running Man, your heroes are a pair of Rambos that are earning their First Blood credentials. There are three levels, approximately 106,238,560,456,392 soldiers to mow down, two or three distinct bosses, and at least one “escape an electric chair” challenge. Despite this being war (and not some frivolous gameshow), you are still expected to collect “prizes” all over the place, and run up a score that would make an emerald mine landlord blush. But, overall, this is just the usual action game of the early 90’s: dodge bullets, shoot everybody, get cooler guns, and work your way up to annihilating the big bad.
And speaking of that big bad, your final boss is Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler in one easily destructible package.
Total Carnage was released in arcades in 1992, and made it to a home console or two by the following year. The Gulf War Conflict between Iraq and the United States (+ a 42-country coalition that does not give Sweden nearly enough credit) was predominantly fought from 1990-1991. The “villain” of that conflict was Saddam Hussein, a dictator who was accused of using an Abu Ghraib Infant Formula Plant as a secret biological weapons production facility. It was eventually proven that this Infant Formula Plant was merely housing… discarded infant formula. But! In the fantasy world of Total Carnage, you are fighting a two-man war against Kookistan to defeat General Akhboob, who is using a Baby Milk Factory to hide the production of biological weapons. See! It was real in this world! And speaking of real-world parallels, here is Wolf Blitzer’s femsona to report on the news:
Total Carnage is supposed to take place in the far-flung future of 1999, but it is firmly a product of the early 90’s. Think about it: by the time we hit 2001, who could even fathom having another war in the Middle East? But here are all the players of Operation Desert Storm crystalized in the amber of a Midway video game. We must ready our burliest commandos and fight against the godless hordes that want to destroy our freedoms! Do it for America! And collect a billion little American Flag icons to prove your dedication!
And, in case you have never experienced Total Carnage, let’s be clear on one thing: Total Carnage does not take its setting seriously. You are rescuing hostages, but the “innocent reporters” are often bikini babes. You are exhibiting insane ferocity, but everything is Looney Tunes-level violence (albeit with a bit more blood). Jumping soldiers produce realistic frog croaks. General Akhboob speaks some nonsense language, except when he breaks into English to say, “You suck at this game!”
And, as previously alluded to/foreshadowed in the attract mode, General Akhboob is revealed during his final boss fight to be Adolf Hitler. Or, more specifically, the giant, mutated head of Adolf Hitler. That’s right, kiddies! It is time to explode Hitler’s face again! Enjoy!
So Total Carnage was not taken seriously. It was also followed by two “funny” games: Designer Mark Turmell would go on to make NBA Jam, the basketball title where shoving is allowed, and George Clinton, pioneer of funk, occasionally dunks a flaming basketball to uproarious applause. The second funny game was pioneered by one of the three artists on Total Carnage, John Tobias. That would be the infamous Midway release that dropped a few months after Total Carnage: Mortal Kombat.
One year after the release of Total Carnage and Mortal Kombat, there would be congressional hearings on videogames. And these congressmen did not see Mortal Kombat as funny.
The 1993–94 United States Senate hearings on video games (not to give the impression that this was a yearlong process: it started in December of 1993, and was wrapped up by Spring of 1994) looked at the whole of the billion-dollar videogame industry, and shrieked “won’t someone think of the children?!” But some games were more featured than others: Night Trap was an “interactive movie” that starred real actors in a (marginally) playable slasher flick where blood, murder, and sex was on the menu. It was tamer than Friday the 13th (the movie, not the game), but it was on the same system as Sonic the Hedgehog (who only murders teenagers extremely rarely). You could buy this horrorporn at a Toys “R” Us! Mortal Kombat needs no introduction, but it similarly used photo-realistic digitized images of people that occasionally had their spines ripped out. Let’s be clear here: Total Carnage had more blood and guts per second than Mortal Kombat, but MK looked more realistic, and that was considered the danger. Total Carnage was ignored, Mortal Kombat was going to corrupt our children. And the last featured game was Konami’s arcade cabinet Lethal Enforcers. Once again, this was a game with digitized, “realistic” graphics comingling with gallons of blood, and you could also make the argument that its general tone was going for a Night Trap-esque interactive movie situation. But the big difference here was that the genre was not horror, it was an action movie/police story. And, as the renegade cop on the beat that is probably going to lose his badge tomorrow, you are mowing down perps with a realistic handgun. It may be fluorescent blue/orange and attached to an arcade machine, but your weapon of choice in Lethal Enforcers is definitely a pistol. One quarter at a time, children are learning that using guns to kill people is fun! This has to stop!
Now, a little over thirty years later. I still immediately, viscerally respond, “Oh no!” Gun control in our country is a gigantic, festering wound on our national psyche. The lionization of guns as a solution to everything has led to more death than cancer, and the idea of children being involved makes it a thousand times worse. Moppets in arcades should not be taught that cops gunning down criminals are cool and fun! They need to put a stop to this Lethal Enforcers right now!
And it is right about when I agree with Joe Lieberman that I step back and acknowledge that something has gone terribly wrong.
I am a gamer. I am over forty years old, and literally all of my memories have prominent or vague associations with videogames. I remember fondly listening to my first business mentor, a man who likely never squashed a goomba in his life, and absorbing his decades of knowledge… while I was playing Pokémon Gold. It was a Monday night! I had to get that Moon Stone! For better or worse, I see myself as being intrinsically linked with videogames. And, of course, while I may objectively say “for better or worse”, I only know the life I have, which I like, so I am going to subjectively claim that videogames have made my life better. For further elaboration on this fact, please see any of my previous 713,000 words on the subject. And I am stating this plainly as evidence that if I utter “A politician born in 1942 should have control over what is available as a videogame”, I have likely been replaced by my evil, parasitic duplicate. Everything is wrong! But I believe in gun control, I believe police officers should not be portrayed as heroically homicidal, and I believe that media for children should not glorify weapons. Wait. Does that mean I am against the Teenage Mutant Ninja Hero Turtles, too? My entire world is collapsing!
Ugh! Need to step back from the ledge for a minute here. Yes, I have had these thoughts before. I think videogames are good. But that does not mean all videogames are good. Whether we are talking about gameplay or the impact one could have on a developing mind, there is a wide gulf between different games. Mother 3 and Beyond the Beyond are both from the same relative epoch and exist within the same genre, but have radically different qualities. Just like any other medium, there are good and bad pieces of art, and there are inevitably going to be different intended audiences. I have a kneejerk reaction to people that have no concept of the history of the medium making decisions about art (everything was supposedly incited by Lieberman and his chief of staff bitching about a kid’s Christmas list), but I cannot completely disagree with them. The ratings system that came out of these hearings is an important part of gaming (there was previously no way for a parent to immediately distinguish between the horrors of a copy of Night Trap or Nightmare Circus), and, give or take Walmart outlawing “Adult Only” games until the digital storefronts ate its lunch, those silly hearing were an overall success. Uninformed people did what was ultimately a good thing. There’s nuance here.
But it is so much easier to declare Joe Lieberman to be Mecha-Saddam-Hitler, and grab up our missiles to eliminate the menace threatening our treats…
War is interesting. A conflict between two sides is fun to watch. There cannot be a movie or videogame about war that does not, in some way, glorify war. I’m right there with you, Franç. But maybe we need to escape this “war” mentality. Maybe we need to get way the hell away from seeing our politicians as two warring sides, and start demanding nuance from our leaders. Less pithy soundbites, more actual policies. Trailblazers providing real solutions, not just clapping back. And when our leaders are simply (metaphorically) lobbing grenades and detonating convoys, we ignore them. Do not feed the beast. Do not make the war entertaining, because war is hell. And nobody wants to live in Hell.
Or we can just insert another quarter, and get blown up another 10,000 times. That could be fun, too.
FGC #714 Total Carnage
- System: Like Smash TV, you do not want to play this one without two joysticks. So modern-ish releases that serve up the arcade version with a pair of analogue sticks are ideal, but avoid all of Total Carnage’s arcade contemporary ports. Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Amiga, DOS, and… Christ, there was a Jaguar version? That had to be horrible.
- Number of players: Two player simultaneous. Any resemblance to Lance and Bill is a coincidence.
- What’s in a name: The two player characters are named Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem. I am happy they found each other.
Legacy of Compilations: All screenshots are from a playthrough on the Xbox X|S. I picked up a digital version of Midway Arcade Origins for a song back at the end of the Xbox 360 days, that purchase carried forward to the Xbox One, and now I have it on the modern Microsoft console I bought a couple years back. It has never been easier to play a thirty-year-old game!- Say something mean: I never know what to touch! If you get near a mine, you will explode into death. But if a timebomb is tossed onto the screen, you must touch it to disarm it. It is the only way to survive! And then there are xenomorph eggs, and you would expect the acid to burn your boy to a skeletal stump, but handling them before they hatch nets you points. Why would I ever naturally go near those things!? That’s how you get a tummy ache!
- Favorite Boss: Well, there are only, like, two. But Orcus the Green Meanie makes an impression. It is like if they made Mutoid Man, but… uh… slightly different. Look! It’s Mutoid Man again! Mutoid Man was always the best part of Smash TV, so we are doing alright here.
- A Shape of Things to Come: There are multiple portals designated as “shortcuts” that do not make the game shorter, but do include many ways to plump up your carnage score. Weirdly, this winds up being extremely reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country and any other future games that would use the “play the bonus stage to earn collectibles” gameplay that Rare loved so well. Total Carnage impacted 1999 in more ways than one.
- An End: Smash TV famously claimed you could enter the “Pleasure Dome” if you found enough keys, but did not actually implement the Pleasure Dome until later revisions (after arcade owners complained). Total Carnage includes a Pleasure Dome that works properly from the get-go… But it is also coded wrong, so it displays the “bad end” text, but with the “good end” image of bikini babes and Smash TV winners. So I am forced to believe no one at Midway actually beats their own games. This is why they don’t exist anymore.
- Goggle Bob Fact: I had to constantly confirm that I am transcribing “Total Carnage” and not “Maximum Carnage”. I can see one title slightly more prominently in my mind. It is also red.
- Did you know? Nothing could stay on the screen for longer than, like, three seconds back in the arcade days. This was not a hardware limitation, just everything had to move at lightspeed at the arcade to keep players engaged and pumping in quarters. So you will forgive the developers for sneaking hidden messages into plain sight.
There was no way this gag was ever intended to be on a system with a pause/screen capture feature.
- Would I play again: I will take Smash TV, thank you. Total Carnage is an excellent time capsule that does add some more gameplay options to Smash TV, but the “open” nature of this combat hurts the gameyness. Yes, I know that isn’t a word, spellcheck. I am trying to define something inexpressible here. Roll with it. Anyway, give me the individual room challenges of Smash TV any day.
What’s next? Random ROB has the week off for our monthly Smash Bros. Challenge, and it is time for Donkey Kong Bananza. Get your banana on, boys and girls! Please look forward to it!
That’s right, I am the Weasel Man