Choplifter (1982) had the player fly a wobbly helicopter across a lurid purple landscape, looking for blobby white humanoids to pick up and rescue while trying to evade and gun down enemy planes and tanks. The Choplifter page on TV Tropes quotes the game’s framing narrative:
“In an international incident, the militaristic Bungeling Empire has kidnapped the 64 delegates to the United Nations Conference on Peace and Child Rearing. Exploiting an ancient treaty with the United States, you have disguised a helicopter as a sorting machine and smuggled it to a mail distribution center near the border where the hostages are being kept. An opportunity comes when one of the Bungeling's barracks suddenly catches fire, and the hostages run about frantically. As Bungeling planes and tanks approach, you rush to your chopper, seizing this brief opportunity for heroism...”
It was rather fantastical, a little ridiculous. There’s the gag of the set-up, the strange made-up place name. The game’s 8-bit visuals give you the sense that it’s maybe set on another planet. Sure, the game was made the year after the 1980 Iranian hostage fiasco – something the developer, Dan Gorlin, claimed not to have been conscious of when conceiving Choplifter’s premise – but (and perhaps this is easier to say with the distortion of time and distance) the otherworldliness of it makes it hard to now immediately connect the game with the idea that it’s commenting on, responding to or really in any way promoting the US military project.
So it’s interesting, I suppose, to consider the choices InXile – apparently in collaboration with Gorlin – made when remaking the game as Choplifter HD (2011). There’s the choice to set a lot of the scenarios in real places, having you respond to events that sound like remixes of, well, real contemporary events and lots of other contemporary military games. The first mission is prompted by: “A repressive Middle East regime has imprisoned all foreigners. As part of a UN force your mission is to fly into the chaos and rescue as many multinationals as possible. Fortunately, most of the military forces are engaged in controlling the population, so resistance should be light.” The second has you rescuing “stranded victims” from a village overrun by warlords in Indonesia, the seventh has you respond to “terrorists have taken over several buildings on our home soil.” There is, in other words, an intention to give the game an element of real-life simulatory fantasy, one that isn’t destabilised enough by, say, the surprise appearance of zombies in mission four, or the silly wink-and-nod bonus objective of having to rescue the same war reporter, “Scoop Sanderson”, over and over again, or the various missions which lack specific place-name details in their flavour text.
Additionally, we’re now accompanied by the voices of our helicopter pilot and co-pilot, who constantly cycle through a bunch of quips in full American-accented machismo trope-jargon to alert the player to the presence of enemies, such as:
“Another idiot who needs a lesson”
“oooh what a Big Gun he has”
“Truck, about to go BOOM”
“Bad guy with a bad-ass toy!”
“Jeep about to be scrap metal”
“Big-ass gun he’s obviously compensating for something”
“Boo-ya”
“Watch that jeep become junk”
“Who’s that woman I saw you with last night?” “You only saw the one?”
There’s also the look, a little jagged sure, but something approaching realism, 3D environments with details backgrounds drawn to evoke the various mission settings. You add all this up and it’s a clear intentional shift into positioning the player in the hot-seat of a contemporary American heroic power fantasy in such a way that’s meant to be cross-read into real-world events. This is the nexus of a narrative that the US and allies already sell to themselves about themselves – that they’re a global peacekeeper just stepping in to help others in times of crisis caused nebulously from nowhere, in far off places that just happen, for reasons unknown, to be tragically unstable. Given that it’s presented uncritically here and (barring some late-game injunction I never made it to) without any reference to the roles various components of western imperialism play in instigating these kinds of conflicts in the first place (CIA-backed coups, geocorporate-backed military governance and so on), it’s hard to get past the gross feeling that Choplifter HD is basically a playable propaganda leaflet.
What’s doubly weird is that, given how overt it is, none of the reviews of the game from 2011 seem to make note of this shift at all. Sure, many complain that the “comedic” pilot and co-pilot banter gets annoying quickly (agreed), or that the realist-leaning Unreal 3 engine assets don’t look that good (also agreed), or that the game is often difficult in a way that tends more toward unfairness and janky design than simply being mechanically challenging (definitely). But there’s little to say about how this remake is dressed in a tone-deaf, unselfconscious veneer of status quo American imperialism that’s much more pronounced than it ever was, ever could have been, in the 1982 Apple II original. Perhaps there was an acceptance of inevitability here about the games industry in 2011, that if you’re making a military-ish shooting game then OF COURSE it’s going to evoke these ideas of distinctly American heroism and righteousness, it’s hardly even a choice, no questions asked. Or perhaps there’s a feeling that this choice of presentation doesn’t matter, given it’s a sidescrolling arcade game, something you’re gonna play in fifteen-minute bursts, where the flavour-text for each mission makes little functional difference to the game-play.
But this was a set of choices that InXile made, regardless of whether these choices came about from a passive parroting of the hegemonic narrative, or whether they were made with certain conscious political and/or marketing intentions. Each of these choices might, in hindsight, seem like a sacrifice, given that they’ve all made the game worse – the gung-ho copter bros are unbearably irritating, the realist-aesthetic leads to a lot of visual clutter and indistinctness, and much of the flavour text is half-hearted and dull. Perhaps a more creative remake of Choplifter could have revived the original’s interesting arcade concept without making it into a bland and problematic power fantasy. I guess we’ll never know.
