It's 1997 again, and I'm hooked on a 'Jagged Alliance'

The creative, complex video games of today allow us to build and create, to learn to work together and collaborate and cooperate with others. — FREDRICK TENDONG/Unsplash

I love video games. That’s not to say I play every video game that comes out. I go months or even years without playing anything but when I do find a game I like – I’m hooked. Jagged Alliance was that game for me.

This would be in about 1997. Jagged Alliance was a turn-based tactical strategy game in which you lead a squad of mercenaries to liberate a country. If it sounds like the plot from a bad movie, that was the point.

The thing that made Jagged Alliance different then was that the mercenaries each had their own personalities. They reacted to things differently, they liked other mercs or hated them, and the best part: a lot of the personalities were based on 1980s and 1990s action movie characters.

There was a one based on Arnold Schwarzenegger, others were movie archetypes: the naïve young doctor who becomes a merc to help the world, the doting British mother who also happens to be an elite sharpshooter, the stoic camouflage commando aptly named Shadow who speaks in short, gruff sentences. The game was strategic and quirky and I loved it.

Much to my parents’ chagrin. They saw me, their university-age son, spending tons of time playing video games, mostly this game, and probably thought, “What is going on in his head?”

My parents come from the generation that viewed TV as bad (although they watched a ton of it themselves!) and video games as even worse. To be fair to them a lot of the video games up to that point in history were mostly simplistic affairs where mashing buttons a lot usually got the job done. So clearly my parents didn’t see any value in gaming.

Jagged Alliance broke away from that kind of gaming. The play was thoughtful. The characters hilarious and the repeat value in playing was to explore new characters and see how they reacted to everything.

By the time Jagged Alliance 2 was released in 1999, I was hooked. And so inspired by the game that I started modding it. To gamers these days, modifying an existing game isn’t that groundbreaking. Games are designed to be modded now as game developers have realised it extends the lifetime of their games.

That’s exactly what modding did for Jagged Alliance 2. I went in depth, creating new maps and a whole new campaign. I even created new mercenaries, adding to what was already the best part of the game. I voiced a few of them, and I got my best friend and my father to voice other characters. Working with my father on it was incredibly fun because he was such a terrible voice actor. It was a ton of work, but I loved it.

And it was rewarding! My mod was well received by the small community of Jagged Alliance fans and suddenly I was respected on the online message boards. I had set out to make a game I wanted to play and ended up with that and a feeling of accomplishment from others who enjoyed what I had created. It was win-win. It taught me I could make something good that people liked.

Then sadly, the company that made Jagged Alliance went out of business and though more terrific fan-made mods were released it was only a matter of time before the fan base dwindled. The fun from modding and playing Jagged Alliance was over. Its time had passed.

As video games have matured from the juvenile button-mashing stage to the complex worlds they offer now, it’s clear that gaming is not necessarily a bad thing. It allows us to build and create, and the games are so complex that we must work together and collaborate and cooperate with others to succeed.

But my parents were, of course, correct to be concerned for me because gaming can be bad. Play too many games, disappear into too many virtual worlds, and your real-world life suffers. But the same can be said of everything. Too much of anything is usually a bad thing.

As a generation that grew up with video games, I’m not alone in expressing a deep love for the games that influenced us growing up – just as great films or books have influenced people, games do the same. So when this year, 24 years after that first sequel to Jagged Alliance was released, Jagged Alliance 3 suddenly came out (it was sudden for me because I wasn’t paying attention).

I immediately played it, of course. The game play I’d loved two decades ago was back and even better, and so were all the quirky mercenaries in all their wacky glory. That first night I played, I couldn’t stop grinning, as I was transported back years while basking in nostalgia.

It’s funny how things affect us. A silly video game can take me back in time. I’m grateful for that.

Now I’ve got to figure out how to mod this thing.

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Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.