Has anyone here played Damage Incorporated? It was a MacSoft game designed by Richard Rouse in the mid-90s. It was essentially a Marathon mod/enhancement, with primitive squad commands. The idea was that you were a Marine sgt. leading a platoon of Marines on a super secret black op to kill various dangerous militia groups. You had to storm their compounds, recover documents, and that kind of thing. Richard Rouse didn't know anything about the military but he basically did research by watching a lot of war movies, especially Full Metal Jacket, and kind of projected his left-wing ideology a bit by making the big villian of his game a Vietnam Vet who felt that the only recourse to the unanswered questions of the Vietnam War was to rally militia groups and supply them with Vietnam-era Marine Corps weapons manufactured in Italy (!) so that they could cause the internal collapse of the United States.

When I put it that way it sounds pretty dumb, but it was an excellent Marathon-era first person shooter. The gameplay was complex for the time, there was excellent characterization of your Marines, each of whom had voice-recorded lines and a cartoony entertaning personality, and when they died they never came back so that you would feel sad. Certain Marines could also experience mental breakdown in combat which usually resulted in them getting killed and one of them would turn on you under certain circumstances; that character was always talking about "commies", which was dated at the time but now is more plausible because Rush Limbaugh et al are now going on about "commies" or "chicoms" again. It was possible to violate ROE and have the Colonel Grey chew you out afterwards on one of the missions. And the game made excellent use of hand painted visuals which are pretty timeless even as the actual Marathon era renders have become dated-looking.

The bottom line is that Rouse tried to make the game have both gameplay-based and thematic depth, and he mostly achieved the first, and he tried to achieve the latter by touching on themes of internal social division and the philosophical basis or lack thereof of Waco, which was kind of cool but also hilarious because Rouse basically was too left wing.




I think it's time for Damage Incorporated 2. Social and political divisions within the US are at an all time high so the basic underlying idea of profound ideological conflict between Americans is more current than it was in the mid-90s. Terrorism is on everyone's mind and it seems more plausible now than then that some kind of black ops strike could take place against a dug-in paramilitary militia group.

In the original game Rouse had a lame excuse why everyone was running around with the same weapons, and I think he also underestimated militia group members as being sterotypical hick shotgun-wielding palookas who lack advanced military skills. But in reality I would bet that a lot of militia members are former military, they probably train a lot and have grown up in a hunting and firearms culture, and most of them probably have AR15s just like the military instead of only shotguns. So you could still conserve game resources or whatever by having everyone have the same rifle and it would be realistic instead of contrived.

I could imagine a premise where the feds want to storm certain militia compounds, but SWAT says they're not really equipped to go in on a bunker/fortress/whatever, and the National Guard (not the Marines, of course) gets called in.

Then you could have the role playing elements where you've got a platoon of Guardsmen and they're from all over the US. Some of them might be uncomfortable about what they're doing, and then there'd be the guy from New York City who joined up for the college money and hates rural people. Each character could build up skills from use, which wasn't possible in the original game. There's a lot of ways you could develop the gameplay from there.

So, I actually want to write a physical letter to Richard Rouse suggesting the idea, but I'm not sure how to get in touch with him. I know that he's still involved with game design, though, so I thought maybe someone might know what company he works for and then I could send a letter to that company for him.

Surreal Software. I found this information from Richard Rouse III's web site, which I found by searching for (in quotes) the string "Richard Rouse", which yielded it as its first hit.

Shame on you for not searching first

Edit: though a little more searching suggests that the section of his site that indicates that is old and that he's since jumped ship to Midway.

~J

I had done some searching but my concern was always that the info was out of date. Actually, my spider trail lead to Kaos in New York City. Yesterday I'd sent an email inquiring to their general info address but who knows if I'll hear from them or not.

Thing is it's really hard to tell what's current and what isn't, so I was hoping someone might know something.