TNL Game Club Round #3: Mercenary
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For this edition of TNL Game Club, I’ve chosen to highlight Mercenary, an incredibly ambitious 3D action-adventure game originally released for the Atari 800. I’ve selected this game for a few reasons. First, it’s an influential, important, and visionary game that pioneered design concepts that wouldn’t become mainstream until nearly twenty years later. Second, although it was a successful game for its time, it remains relatively unknown outside of the UK. Lastly, it was chosen because pixel-perfect ports of the entire series are available in a single 1.2 megabyte executable that is free, legal, and will run on just about any PC, making it available to just about everyone who would want to play it.
Mercenary is certainly dated. There is no mission log, in-game map, arrows pointing toward a destination, or any of the usual trappings that have made open world games accessible to a wide audience. Its landscape is a skeleton of wireframe boxes that require more than a little imagination to become a bustling metropolis. But as a piece of game design, it stands the test of time, rewarding exploration and creative thinking rather than discovering arcane solutions to its puzzles.
Maps, hints, and other materials originally included in the box can be found here. You may find it helpful to print them out so you can jot down notes. For those that need a little more nudging, you can find a few different walkthroughs here, however you choose to approach the game.
Background
In 1984, David Braben and Ian Bell unleashed Elite, a space sim with an open, expansive 3D universe that completely changed the way many approached game design. It had no end, nor any set objective, but an entire galaxy of possibilities, allowing players to trade, loot, rob or battle their way around the universe. This was not a game that drew influence from the arcade games that dominated the market, but an attempt to create a real simulated universe that could react to the player.
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The release of Elite sparked a surge of interest in the third dimension, and throughout the mid-80s, British game reviewers would use it as the rule by which seemingly all 3D games were measured. In late 1985, as Elite was just making its way to new platforms, Novagen released Mercenary, a game that took post-Elite game design in a new direction, and was in many ways the first union of open-world 3D sandbox game design with action-adventure gameplay.
One of Elite’s key selling points was the size of its universe, a procedurally generated expanse of over 2,000 non-descript planets. Mercenary showed, as countless games have since, that less can be more. Novagen’s magnum opus begins in a field of stars, suggesting limitless possibilities, but soon one of these worlds grows larger and larger as your craft plummets to the planet’s surface. When you emerge from the wreckage, you find the craft buried halfway in the ground, unsalvageable.
For the rest of the game, you are stranded in a single city, but Paul Woakes shows that freedom and possibility are about much more than physical expanse, they’re about choice and consequence.
Your first problem, upon emerging from the crash is one that should now be familiar, and it begins with a decision. The city is too large to navigate on foot and you need a ride. There’s a craft nearby, which you can purchase, and ride away free of consequence, having spent more than half of your savings. Alternately, you can simply steal it, and deal with the authorities as they chase after you. While Mercenary may play very little like Grand Theft Auto, it explored many of the same concepts more than a decade earlier.
You soon learn that there are two warring factions on Targ, the Palyar and the Mechanoids, each offering various jobs, not unlike the rival gangs in today’s sandbox adventures. Some of these involve direct hostility toward the other, so players have to choose who they will ultimately ally themselves with. This is a game of consequences.
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Mercenary is unique among 3D games of its era in that it manages to be genuinely open, while still having distinct puzzles, objectives, a story, and an end. Elite and its spawn usually sacrificed deliberate design for freedom, and games like Domark’s Freescape titles offered clever puzzles but little freedom in how to solve them. It’s Mercenary’s ability to juggle these elements that makes it so exceptional. Although the mechanics are simple and limited – you can fly around, shoot, walk, pick up objects, and place them down elsewhere – you were free to try different things, solve problems through violence, cooperation, or exploration.
In the years that followed, Mercenary became something of a critical benchmark, frequently referenced in reviews of other 3D games as a high water mark. It was Novagen’s biggest commercial success, and Woakes began working on a sequel not long after, in addition to developing a few unrelated games. This time, the game would launch on 16-bit consoles (eventually Novagen cancelled the 8-bit versions altogether), allowing for a much more complicated universe.
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