10 videogames that redefine science fiction
There's not a lot of variety in the way videogames present science fiction. For various reasons, game designers prefer to stick with what people already know. This means Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Aliens. The reluctance to go to unfamiliar places has been part of why there's an oppressive sameness to videogaming in general, and sci-fi videogames in particular. Where is videogaming's sci-fi with a twist? Where are our Gattica, Dark City, Clockwork Orange, and Wall-E?
The answer is they're there if you look.
In fact, they're after the jump.
10) Multiwinia
You've never seen carnage quite like this before. Each map in Multiwinia is a battleground where the weapons are centipedes, spiders, ants, UFOs, plagues, firebombing, nuclear strikes, and meteors, plus the obligatory hundreds of pew-pew lasers. In this violent digital landscape, you'll see hints of some sort of civilization and culture: statues, temples, holy trees, and the masses of shuffling jostling multiwinians themselves. It helps if you've played Darwinia, the predecessor puzzle game that explained how this weird virtual reality came to be so violent. Believe it or not, the reason is spam email.
9) Outcast
In many ways, this 1999 game was before its time, using voxel technology (don't ask) for the landscapes and a fancy AI for the non-player characters as they went about their daily lives. It had a very Stargate sort of plot, with a scientist and some military accomplices going through a dimensional portal to explore the other side. Once there, they find a fully-realized world, complete with its own inhabitants, history, ecology, religion, and cultural groups. There was very little in this game that felt like it had been lifted from the usual sci-fi templates, and this was further reinforced by everything having a strange new name. Perhaps credit goes to the fact that the developers were Belgian, which is a bit like France, but a little funkier.
8) Myst and its sequels
More games need to borrow from Jules Verne. Myst's 19th Century brass and mahogany aesthetic still looks great. These bright bubble dimensions are the kind of places you want to go when you look at them: idyllic, quaint, and somehow slightly eerie with all those unexplained moving parts. I wonder what that crank does...?
7) StarTopia
If there's one thing missing from videogaming sci-fi, it's humor. StarTopia has the guts to refuse to take itself seriously, and the comedic chops to pull it off. It had a little bit of The Sims, a little bit of Silent Running, a little bit of Dungeon Keeper, a lot of different aliens with character, and everything very British and tongue-in-cheek. It's no coincidence that this space station sim from 2001 was dedicated to Douglas Adams.
6) Out of This World
This 1991 2D game told the story of a scientist accidentally beamed to another planet, where he has to evade predators, escape slavers, and ultimately work with a friendly alien. It was notable for how it didn't use any text to tell its story (think of it as the videogame version of Wall-E), but it was still remarkably cinematic, thanks to smooth animation and lush graphics of a fantastical alien world.
5) Rise of Legends
One part steampunk, one part straight-up Arabian Nights fantasy, and one part Stargate-inspired laser firing space cats. Some people considered it incomprehensible, but for those who took the time to see how the pieces fit together, Rise of Legends presented a unique and well thought-out blend of fantasy and sci-fi. The central conflict had to do with a space faring race corrupting the world with "dark glass", which fit nicely into the game's themes of fire, sand, and glass. Rise of Legends is also the best place to go if you're curious what a mech would look like if it had been designed by Leonardo da Vinci. The answer: utterly awesome!
4) Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri wasn't much to look at. It was a strategy game about a brown alien world covered in pink fungus. Yeah, pink. But it featured excellent writing, imaginative characters, and an intricate ecology. The premise was that representatives of Earth were sent to colonize a distant planet, but along the way, they broke up into squabbling factions. The game begins as they land separately and try to survive, prosper, and ultimately dominate, each in their own way. As far as videogames where the story world is intertwined with the gameplay, Alpha Centauri is among the best of any genre.
3) Tron 2.0
The world of TRON is a sort of cross between The Incredible Shrinking Man, that episode of Lost in Space when they turn miniature to go into the robot, and a snooty European fashion expo. It was the product of a dawning awareness in the 80s of computers, videogames, and computer-generated graphics. It featured vehicles by Syd Mead (who's much better known for his work in Blade Runner and Aliens) and costumes by Jean Giraud that have since become iconic. Oddly enough, TRON wasn't widely imitated. But Monolith's under-appreciated 2003 TRON 2.0 did a superlative job recreating the world of the movie.
2) The Fallout series
This isn't just your garden variety post-apocalypse. This is the post-apocalypse of an alternate history, in which the world was frozen in the 1950s long enough to develop fusion cars, robots, and cyberspace. But these fusion cars have sweeping Cadillac fins, these robots are clumsy retro hulks, and this cyberspace is sepia toned. And then along came a nuclear holocaust and ruined it all. The beauty of Fallout is that even though it takes place in the ruins, it still presents a vivid picture of the unique world before the bombs.
1) BioShock
BioShock is the story of an underwater city, built out of an ideology that has exiled itself from the real world, but gone horribly wrong. Social engineering has created a twisted art deco and fascist dystopia, populated by Big Daddies, Little Sisters, ravenous Adam-addled splicers, a twisted entertainer, a cowardly gangster, and a mysterious mastermind. Although the actual world is restricted and linear, it's one of the most thoroughly realized videogaming worlds, and a best-case example of what happens when talented designers decide to risk going someplace videogames don't go. There aren't many games that can so directly tie their influences to Ayn Rand, the Coen brothers, and Stanley Kubrick.
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10 videogames that redefine science fiction
