Kazemi - Jagged Alliance 2

I discovered Jagged Alliance a year late.

It was a checkout line impulse purchase at Electronics Boutique, found in a battered, unloved box lying with the rest of the commercial refuse of the bargain bin. I was there to buy something else, something I cant even remember today. I grabbed Jagged Alliance 2 for $10, based on a half-remembered review in Computer Gaming World and a gripping description of room-to-room fighting in a third-world hospital.

It remains perhaps the best bargain bin purchase of my life. Jagged Alliance 2 blotted out everything else for the next few months, and I became like a crazy man, telling my friends at school about this amazing game that nobody had ever heard of.

But like a lot of great works, Jagged Alliance 2 hangs in there while so many other games fade away. Fans like me loaned copies to their friends and watched as they fell down the same rabbit hole. Id get phone calls: Rob Rob Rob! You would not believe what just happened in my game. Remember I told you about the Russian sniper rifle I got? And then Id get a blow-by-blow reenactment of a desperate, heroic battle at a dictators SAM site.

Each encounter with Jagged Alliance 2 is like a snowflake. In one game, the battle for a mining town is a bitter, World War II style streetfight. In another, its a nighttime commando mission in which enemy soldiers are quietly dispatched with throwing knives and machetes. In another, its a dark comedy, with the squads resident klutz dropping a grenade at his own feet, somehow surviving, then accidentally head-shotting the medic who is running to help him. Its an Im not even angryIm just surprised kind of game.

Only a year or so after its release, Jagged Alliance 2 felt like a quintessential they dont make em like they used to fetish object. Many of its contemporaries marked the industrys transition into 3D gaming: Th i ef , Half-Life , and Grim Fandango seemed to signal a new era, and Jagged Alliance 2 was all-too-plainly a product of the past.

So yes, Jagged Alliance 2 felt like an anachronism seconds after the shrink-wrap came off the box. But why was it so different from its peers, at once behind the times and yet years ahead of them? Why was it such a strange blend of influences, like Frederick Forsyth by way of Borat? And why hasnt there been anything like it since?

The turn-based tactical genre almost vanished within a few years of Jagged Alliance 2 , and the few games that attempted to carry the torch came dismally close to extinguishing it altogether. Luckily, Jagged Alliance 2 was far more than a variation on a genres themes. It was a game of enormous possibilities, a mid-90s RPG, a wargame, an adventure, and it remains one of the best treatments of insurgency warfare in gaming.

But understanding a games origins requires understanding a whole host of factors that are only tangentially related to what the creative team did, including the technical limitations they labored under, the business model that funded their work, the sales environment the game would be entering, and the personalities of the teams individual members. Game development is a messy, compromised process.

Fortunately, Jagged Alliance 2 has the perfect guide in Darius Kazemi. This book reflects not just his comprehensive knowledge of the game itself, but also his understanding of the developers craft. This is not a book your typical game critic could have written, and few practicing developers would have the time, inclination, or ability to tell Jagged Alliance 2 s story so clearly or comprehensively.

While Kazemi is a connoisseur of the game, hes not filtering its story through rose-tinted lenses. He does not treat Jagged Alliance 2 as a singular moment of creative magic, but as a product whose greatest achievements were also contingent on a variety of unique factors.

Its fitting that this story is a complicated one: Jagged Alliance 2 is not a game of elegant simplicity. It is a defiantly complicated game, one so gigantic that it seems like it should collapse under its own weight and yet it doesnt.

They dont make them like Jagged Alliance 2 anymore. They never did.

Rob Zacny

Summer, 2014