The Making Of: Army Men
Army Men began with the simplest of twists, setting a game in the world of the iconic green, plastic toys. Bending genre expectations, it would go on to become one of the most enduring franchises in gaming history
Trip Hawkins and Keith Bullen return to this satirical top-down action game that spawned countless sequels
In the late Nineties, with its focus entirely on software, The 3DO Company brought the iconic Army Men toy soldiers to life. The result was an intense world, where soldiers break to pieces under hails of bullets and scream in agony, melting into piles of goo – everything sprinkled with just a hint of tonguein-cheek satire.
It began in 1996, when Electronic Arts art designer Keith Bullen was hired by 3DO to art direct a project, vaguely titled War Sports – similar in spirit to the 3DO console’s popular vehicular shooter, Return Fire.
However, it was to focus more on the squad deployment mechanics of the early Mega Drive RTS game,
Herzog Zwei. Further adding to the brief, the marketing department wanted the game to land an ‘E
For Everyone’ rating on the ERSB system, incidentally invented by 3DO’S founder, Trip Hawkins.
Keith recalls, “I remember various marketing meetings when ideas like green blood and making the soldiers robots were brought up as ways to get the game a friendly rating. I didn’t like any of these ideas.” After months of brainstorming, Keith had a eureka moment. He thought back to his childhood, to the dirt pile behind his backyard. Images flooded back, him and his brother setting up little green soldiers and taking turns to throw rocks, trying to knock over each other’s armies.
Miniature soldiers were among the oldest toys in existence, and
few had proven as enduring as the Army Men – unpainted plastic soldiers sold by the bucketload.
From the iconic Louis Marx playsets of the Fifties to 1995’s Toy Story, the toys remained a veritable rite of passage for kids. Keith would build his title around Army Men – a stroke of genius, adding enough charm and accessibility to draw in casual gamers, put off by the violence and machismo of typical war games.
Keith was soon made lead designer. “Once the soldiers became plastic, we had to come up with a universe with real terrains and plastic soldiers,” he says “We wanted the world to feel serious to the Army Men characters’ point of view but fun and nostalgic for the player.”
Drawing upon his own experiences, Keith carefully studied the physicality of the toys, and how they interacted with their environments. “We paid close attention to the physics in the animations. It was very important to me that the plastic pieces reacted to the world as if they were made of the same light plastic as the original figures.”
Despite the strong concept, the design process was not always a smooth one. Starting out as one of six developers on the War
Sports project, Keith was now leading a team of ten – a number that would soon double as he was made creative director. “It was very challenging convincing the team to adopt my new gameplay ideas. Since this was my first game design, my vision was often challenged by other team members who were satisfied with the previous direction of the product. It took several months to finally get everyone on board.”
One of the toughest sells of all was to the company’s directors, and early attempts to pitch the plastic Army Men concept were shot down – dismissed as “too young”, and that “RTS fans would be turned off by ordering toys around”. The company was in a state of flux, and the staff was frequently playing a game of musical cubicles. While this annoyed
My vision was often challenged by other team members Keith Bullen
Keith at first, desperate to win over his detractors, he decided to use the environment to his advantage. “I positioned my computer screen so that it’d be seen by the most people passing by,” he remembers. “I then bought a 3D model of a generic
Army Man and brought in some classic toy green and tan Army
Men to use as pose references,” he says. “For several weeks, many people from every department in the company would stop to discuss the posed 3D model on my screen and we would talk about our experiences with Army Men, which would always lead to how cool it would be to play a game with green plastic Army Men. Soon after, the momentum switched from the product being perceived as too juvenile to being an awesome nostalgic experience.”
Asides from mirroring the physics of the real-life figurines, the game incorporated some of the toys’ most iconic units – riflemen and bazooka bearers. However, it also provided an opportunity to take things to the next stage. “I really liked melting soldiers, and the way they would shatter into pieces when they were killed,” says Keith. “We destroyed many plastic Army Men in the 3DO parking lot for the sake of realistic plastic physics. I remember how excited I was when I first saw the flamethrower weapon burning a group of trees in the alpine and watching the fire spread to other trees. The enhanced fear of fire when you are made of plastic was a theme we relied on throughout the series.”
The story begins with a newsreel, which Keith calls “the most satirical element in the game”. In the clip, we see the totalitarian expansionist Tans prepare to engulf the Greens, who, in turn, begin to mobilise their
armies. “We watched many hours of authentic old reels before we came up with our version. The Tan leader gesturing like Mussolini was one of my favourite segments.” While Army Men began as a
RTS, it soon incorporated a range of mechanics and influences. Players would control Sarge, a Green war hero. “I’ve always preferred arcade-like action games over strategy games,” says Keith, “so I redesigned the game around the central character of Sarge, who the player would be able to control, as in games like Ikari Warriors.”
At its core, it became a topdown shooter, with a set of objectives, ranging from rescue missions to robbing banks. As the game progressed, so too did its complexity. “Vehicles were a main feature in Return Fire, so we gave Sarge the ability to jump in and out vehicles like one of my favourite coin-op games, Front Line.” Sarge could also call in air strikes, and even lead squads of Greens, bringing a touch of RTS back into the fold. Army Men incorporated a range of movements, such as kneeling, lying down and rolling, to accommodate differing playstyles. “I introduced the duck-andcover mechanic as a way to slow the gameplay down so that the users wouldn’t charge through the levels, mowing down enemies. The gameplay became » Army Men features elaborate maps, densely packed with enemies, objectives and, most importantly, weapons. more about tactics, rather than strategy,” remembers Keith.
Once again, this idea was not popular with everyone. “Using different-sized objects as cover for different Army Men stances wasn’t very popular with the programmers,” says Keith. “It was going to be lots of work for a game feature that wasn’t used in the popular games of the time. It took several months to get this mechanic right, but I think it worked well. My inspiration for this feature was the PC game Crusader: No Remorse.”
Among the game’s biggest fans, patrons and driving forces was
3DO’S founder, Trip Hawkins, who was quick to embrace the Army
Men concept. “Toy soldiers were my dominant play pattern as a child and I’d always invented strong storylines and adventures around them,” he says. “Besides all the World War soldiers, I had Swoppets from the Wars Of The Roses, Roman centurions, and others – including cowboys, of course.
“I’ve always loved casual military themes that combine strategy and action, so Return Fire was one of my favourites on the 3DO platform,” Trip continues. “That game was really about destroying bigger targets like buildings, tanks and gun turrets, but I was inspired by the humorous way that useless and pointless ant-sized men would come out of burning buildings and try to run away, or even swim away from the island. It inspired me to do something more central with humour in the genre and a stronger narrative.”
Rather than simply a means to securing a soft age rating, the plastic concept, Trip asserts, was a natural platform for the story, characters, narrative arc and humour. “We were focused on the US market, and were unaware that many European countries actually banned military toys, including toy soldiers, and wouldn’t carry the Army Men games – nobody cared about them, because they’d not grown up with those toys.”
Despite the softened edges, violence, he elaborates, is a “natural aspect of warfare”, and “military realism” played a crucial role in the Army
Men formula. “Creatively, we also wanted to have fun repeating some of the famous play patterns from childhood, since most of us experimented with our toy soldiers by melting them, cutting them up, recombining parts in new ways and other things. As kids we were just playing and experimenting and they’re just bits of plastic, but in our storyline it became irresistible, dark humour. It allowed us to cast our villains with a bit of sadism, that is still funny because,” he pauses, “they’re just toys.”
Taking just a year to produce, even with the numerous restarts, once the team nailed the Army Men concept, Trip said it was destined for success. “This is what we live for in game development and publishing, to do something we really believe in and love, and to find a commercial audience that feels the same way about it.”
After crossing three terrains – desert, alpine and bayou – Sarge ends the campaign by crossing over into the real world, a Twilight
Zone-style ending, which fed directly into the sequel, Army Men II.
The ensuing franchise would go on to sell more than 7 million copies across every platform from the Dreamcast to mobile, generating $300 million along the way – among the bestselling of all time.
Having laid the groundwork, Keith says he had no idea the title would be as popular as it was. “I never would have imagined that it would spawn 23 sequels and spin-offs,” he says. Though he did not work on the sequels, instead moving the title to Playstation with Army Men
3D, he believes the original was a true game-changer.
“I think Army Men was revolutionary in the way it crosses several game genres successfully. It’s always been difficult to put a generic label on what class of game it is most like. Some of the reviews called it quirky or odd because of its unique game style. I considered these type of critiques a compliment. My goal was to create a game that I would want to play and not a clone of a game I had played before.”
i’ve always loved casual military themes that combine strategy and action Trip Hawkins