Hagionaut: Jagged Alliance

A beloved 1990s franchise being snapped up by a big publisher and handed over to a new studio for a remake is hardly unique. But when an IP goes through half a dozen developers and publishers on three continents, gets cancelled, reborn, reimagined, crowds

DEVELOPERS MAD LABS, SIR- TECH, I- DEAL, CLIFFHANGER, COREPLAY, BIGMOON, MIST LAND SOUTH, AKELLA, F3GAMES, FULL CONTROL, AND THEN CLIFFHANGER AGAIN.

PERSONALITIES IAN CURRIE, LINDA CURRIE, SHAUN LYNG, AND A LONG LIST OF BANKRUPTS WHO THOUGHT THEY COULD MAKE SOME MONEY OUT OF THIS IP SOMEHOW. RELEASED 1995-2018 NUTSHELL UNIQUE MIX OF 4X, RPG AND TACTICAL TURN- BASED MERCENARY COMBAT, WITH REAL GUNS AND ALWAYS A RIDICULOUS STORYLINE. FOR INSTANCE, IN THE ORIGINAL GAME YOU’RE KILLING PEOPLE OVER CONTROL OF MUTATED TREES THAT PRODUCE A MIRACLE SAP. BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THE GAMEPLAY IS TRANSCENDENTAL.

As a PC gamer, you understand why the question “how many games are in the Jagged Alliance series” doesn’t have a simple answer. IPs flip back and forth between publishers all the time, because PC gaming is an industry that’s 1% megahit, 99% living on the razor’s edge of insolvency. Any franchise that looks like it has even the tiniest bit of legacy with gamers gets bought up and flogged, even if the actual game has nothing to do with the original. See also: Prey.

Jagged Alliance though is something unique. While it wasn’t the only turn-based tactical squad game of the mid-to-late 1990s, it had a free-flowing strategic layer unlike anything else, and incredible depth.

By the time the original developers were ready to let their baby grow wings and fly away, JA had a core fanbase and the respect of critics, publishers, and gamers alike. It was almost ideally set up to spawn a franchise at least as big as X-Com.

But it didn’t. Instead, Jagged Alliance became almost a sort of poison chalice, but one that publishers kept drinking from because it had to be profitable somehow, come on you guys, it’s Jagged Alliance!

Here’s what actually happened.

OPENING SHOTS

PC gaming in 1995 was all about definitive adventure games (Full Throttle), deep-geek turn-based strategy (Mechwarrior 2) and pushing the limits of 3D (Descent). Then into the middle of all this dropped Jagged Alliance - a turn-based tactical game from Canadian developer Sir-Tech, with a structure that wasn’t quite like anything else. Okay, the turn-based combat was familiar enough, with action points and so forth. But the strategic layer - which allowed the player to secure the island nation of Metavira sector-by-sector - meant there were no missions, as such. NPCs would pop up and offer objectives, but the player was free to ignore them.

More importantly, there was a massive roster of mercenary soldiers to choose from, each with unique stats and “funny” personalities. The player also had to manage a population of guards - to keep conquered sectors from falling into enemy hands - and tappers. Tappers were workers who... uh... harvested medically magical sap from trees that had been mutated by US nuclear testing.

In any case, JA sold well for its time, at least enough to give Sir-Tech the confidence to develop a sequel in 1999. Jagged Alliance 2 was one of those rare things - a game that was true to the original but just gave the player more.

Now using the increasingly popular isometric perspective, JA2 added NPC dialogue trees, interactions between mercenaries and morale, a semi-destructible environment, and a slightly less ridiculous backstory involving a democratically-elected King.

All pretty straightforward so far. So how did JA go from this 90s innovation success story to a confusing mess? Ah well that’s its secret - by the time JA2 came out, it was already a confusing mess.

YOU MADE THIS? WE MADE THIS!

What’s confusing about Jagged Alliance 2 is that it wasn’t the second game in the series, it was the third.

Sir-Tech had developed Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games in 1996, which was a missionbased, more-than-an-expansion-pack-lessthan-a-true-sequel to Jagged Alliance. It was the first Jagged Alliance game that Sir-Tech developed.

Wait, didn’t I say Sir-Tech had developed the original? Well, technically yes. Certainly, the core creative team of Ian Currie, Linda Currie, and Shaun Lyng were responsible for JA, JA:DG, and JA2. But they did most of their work on the original game as Mad Labs Software, which was brought into Sir-Tech before the game was released.

Exactly who published Jagged Alliance 2 is surprisingly difficult to figure out. It seems

Sir-Tech (the US publisher) had gone bust even before JA2 was released but had transferred the game rights to Sir-Tech Canada, which was apparently a development studio. Got that? They organised to get JA2 published by TalonSoft, but the expansion, Unfinished Business, was published by Interplay, because TalonSoft had already gone bust. Or maybe it went bust later.

At or about this point, in the early 2000s, Montreal publisher Strategy First Inc took on the Jagged Alliance IP. The circumstances are unclear but the result is plain: SFI would spend the next decade trying to work out a way of replicating the critical and (modest) commercial success of Jagged Alliance 2.

Spoilers: they didn’t.

ENTER THE RUSSIANS

One way to reboot a franchise just three years after its last successful game is to hire some or all of the original creative team and hope they can take it to the next level. Another way is to flail around the globe looking for someone to make you something you can call Jagged Alliance. SFI went for the latter. Big time.

First they did a weird deal with a modder named Serge “WildFire” Popoff and i-Deal games to produce a tweaked-up rerelease of JA2 called, naturally, Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire. This came out in 2004 but then i-Deal games accused SFI of not paying them.

Rather than pay i-Deal and keep going, SFI instead engaged Cypriot publisher Game Factory Interactive, who in turn contracted with Russian developer MiST Land South to make Jagged Alliance 3D (which would be Jagged Alliance 2, but in 3D) and Jagged Alliance 3.

Unfortunately, GFI then went somewhat off-commission, and tried to get SFI to accept a game with no strategic layer and a missionbased story. SFI might have been convinced, but then GFI said the game would have real-time combat instead of turn-based, and Strategy First vetoed this decision and things got a bit nasty and the end result was an end to the relationship and no JA3D. SFT moved on, and that was that for GFI until 2008, when they put out a game called Hired Guns: the Jagged Edge. Subtle.

Before that though, back in 2006, Strategy First had decided to try outsourcing the game again, and naturally chose a Russian mob called Akella, because of the good experience working with Russians the first time.

Jagged Alliance 3 stayed with Akella until 2010, when SFI presumably said to hell with it, and boxed up the IP and sold it to a German outfit called bitComposer.

So Jagged Alliance entered its second decade as a mess of failed remakes, leaving a trail of angry Russians behind it. And there was no way bitComposer was going to betray a legacy like that. So they published another mediocre remake of JA2 called Jagged Alliance: Back in Action, flailed around with some expansion packs, and then went bankrupt in 2015 and sold the IP to THQ Nordic who, despite all evidence to the contrary, called the purchase a “no brainer”.

I can’t really figure how, in 2013 while bitComposer was sinking but before THQ Nordic bought the IP, Danish developer Full Control was able to crowdsource Jagged Alliance: Flashback. But it did. They stripped even more gameplay and mechanics from JA2, the fans hated the game, and so, logically, THQ Nordic waited five years and released Jagged Alliance: Rage - which (ignoring JA Classics, the Nintendo DS version, and how i-Deal games somehow released an updated version of JA: Wildfire by itself) brings us up to date on the state of the IP that just won’t die.

Developed by Cliffhanger (who had done Jagged Alliance: Online back in 2012, wait did I mention that one? Whoops), JA: Rage has finally done justice to the series and all the fans love it to bits. Nah just kidding, they hate it too. So in the 24 years since JA2 created a new kind of tactical turn-based PC game, nobody has done anything to justify the franchise’s survival. Yet live on it does, because even after all this time, everyone still agrees that Jagged Alliance 3 is going to be awesome. ANTHONY FORDHAM