army Moves
How the US military made Ed Rotberg miserable
Battlezone was infamously converted into a military training version of the game, known as the Bradley Trainer and coded by Rotberg himself – we’ll touch on that more in a second. It removed the ability to drive the tank, and added in more technical elements to firing your multiple weapons, using targeting systems and so on.
Approached by a group of retired generals, Atari was asked to retool Battlezone into something that could be used to train Bradley tank operators, feeling it would make training more effective. Ed agreed to create the prototype, being the only one intimately familiar with BZ’S code, on the condition he would be exempted from any future military contracts Atari might pursue.
“I was totally against the idea,” he says. “Any of us could have gone to work for the military if we had desired. This was a project that could only lead to Atari becoming a military contractor… I was loath to have that brought into Atari. Also, I’m pretty much a pacifist, and I had trouble dealing with creating something used to train people to kill more effectively.”
Unsurprisingly, Ed does not look back on the experience positively: “I lost three months of my life, working 16-18 hour days and only seeing my wife when I went to sleep each night and woke up each day. I don’t have fond memories of that time.”
to the series. Admittedly its limited multiplayer hamstrung the game from the get-go, but it did win a fair few fans at the turn of the millennium.
Following the critical success of the two PC Battlezone titles and the decent console spin-off, it made sense to see plenty more games with the moniker enter the fray, bringing with them as much invention and pure creativity as we’d seen from 1998 onwards. While it made sense, it didn’t actually happen.
Instead, the Battlezone licence was batted around a few placed, landing in the lap of the likes of Paradigm Entertainment, which produced a mediocre four-player arena tank battle game for the PSP, Stainless Games, which remade the original arcade game for Xbox 360 and impressed few, and Globex, which produced nothing – not even a title – before its game was cancelled. It seemed the Battlezone name was being kept on life support, a few sputterings and murmurs every now and then reminding people it was still drawing breath, but with no real fire behind its eyes.
Enter Rebellion, stage left, in 2013: “The opportunity arose,” Jason explains. “Atari – or what Atari have now become – were auctioning off some of their IP, including Battlezone. I was immediately interested, as Battlezone was a huge influence for myself and my brother Chris when we were growing up. So we travelled to New York and went to the top floor of a massively tall building, and we acquired the IP.” With plans in the very early stages at the studio to create a VR game, the acquisition of a game that brought one of the first Vr-like experiences to the masses focused the team in one direction. “Battlezone seemed to make perfect sense for that,” Jason says.
Released on PS4 in 2016 and PC the year after, Battlezone’s first true foray into VR was well-
received on the new generation of tech. While there were nods to features from the Nineties Activision versions, this was very much a reboot of the almost 40-year-old game – so much so a ‘classic mode’ was later patched in to give the game its vector graphic look. It wasn’t just players impressed with what Rebellion made from the license, either, with Ed himself happy with what was put together: “I am really impressed with Battlezone VR. I appreciate the creativity that went into it to make it not only much deeper than the original, but to still give a nod to the basic play from the original”.
around the same time, Rebellion made the decision to remaster Battlezone 98 for a modern audience – though the game had received support, even updates, for many years following its release, there was still seen to be a gap in the market for bringing an underappreciated gem in front of more eyes. Fortunately for the publisher, Mike and his new studio Big Boat Interactive was ready and available to work – once again – on the RTS/FPS hybrid.
“I got a note from Rebellion asking if we could meet at GDC to talk about Battlezone,” Mike explained, “I still wore my Battlezone T-shirt now and then, but it wasn’t a game I really put much thought into over the years, even though it was one of the best games I’d ever worked on. Well, they wanted to get the game onto Steam and since it was a little long in the tooth, I suggested we go in and redo all the art and do it right.” While Mike admitted he didn’t think the Kinglsey brothers would go for it, Rebellion’s owners agreed and put the Big Boat team to work on a full HD remaster.
Battlezone 98 Redux released in 2016 – before the VR version – to very positive user reviews, with players new and old praising the game’s ingenuity in combining genres and action as it did. Of course, the core mechanics remained pretty much untouched – you don’t mess with greatness, after all – but the wheels (or hover… tank… tracks) were set in motion for the second inevitable remaster. The second of the reduxes arrived March 2018 to a similarly rapturous applause from players – and, of course, it reignited more online spats about which of the two RTS games is the best, but then that’s just the internet for you.
Where Battlezone goes from here, we’re not entirely sure – but it’s almost a dead cert we won’t be left in limbo for another 18 years of ports and revisions before seeing another game in the series. The recent successes of Rebellion’s remasters and its brand-new game combined with the license now being owned by a company that genuinely loves it means the signs are very positive indeed.
“There are many foundational games which are overlooked, games that are fundamentally important to how we play games,” Jason muses. “Battlezone was one of those games – and the vector games in general – that I think were a kind of side-shoot of the general evolution of the medium. The idea of drawing vector lines was quite odd, and gaming went in a bit of a different direction, but as a result they created something very unique.
“The games industry as it stands now is this massive part of the creative industries, really, really important and arguably bigger than TV or film. There’s been a real generational shift towards games. I think, one day, we’ll look back at the early games like Battlezone, which in many ways was the first ever first-person shooter and the precursor to virtual reality, and realise just how they influential they were. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.”
“Battlezone was a huge influence for Myself and My Brother chris” Jason Kingsley