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8-Bit Desert Storms to 3D Calls of Duty: How the US Gamifies War in Iraq

Storm Over the Desert might've sucked, but you could still fight Giant Saddams with a tank.
Image: Screenshot of Storm Over the Desert. YouTube.

At this point, nobody harbors any illusions that years of American intervention in Iraq has been anything but a tragic, complicated mess. The unspeakable violence and complex sectarian feuds tearing the nation apart right now attests to that. It's enough to make one long for the days of a 'simpler' Iraq war, with good guys and bad guys and 8-bit graphics depicting tanks crushing Saddam's army in Desert Storm.

Yes, not only did a reductionist media boil down the first Gulf War into a grudge match between Stormin’ General Norman Schwarzkopf’s US Army and Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, one video game oversimplified it even further: a 2-D portly dictator in the image of Saddam being schooled by brave little American tanks.

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Produced by Active Enterprises, Action 52 was released in the fall of 1991 as a part of a multicart unlicensed cartridge game, carrying 52 mini-games for the original Nintendo System. Another version arrived in 1993 for the Sega Genesis. At $200 a pop, critics slammed the game for its price, along with the fact that it really sucked.

Among the 52 game delights that came out to a mere $4 each was The Cheetahmen and the war epic Storm Over the Desertwhich depicted the first Gulf War. Beginning with a cartoon stare-down between a stern looking Schwarzkopf and a Saddam Hussein lookalike, the player assumes control of a grainy recreation of what can only be assumed as a US M1 Abrams tank fighting its way around a static square game space.

Screenshot of a YouTube video of Storm Over the Desert. Notice the portly Saddam and hot-pink tanks.

Judging by YouTube video captures of gameplay, the point of Storm Over the Desert is for your little tank to battle with the Iraqi army over a landscape that ranges from a lush green glade, to Iraqi encampments in the desert. Hot pink tanks pursue you as noticeably pot-bellied Saddams in military garb march up and down as the player dodges enemy fire. Ant-like humans representing Iraqi troops march throughout the desert, which can be either rolled over or blown up with tank rounds while the giant Saddams are consumed into your tank. Levels barely change as you advance from the desert to bizarre brownish location after the next. The game is basically an Iraq war themed Frogger.

Storm Over the Desert is a cultural time capsule and horrible recreation of a war that consumed the American popular consciousness of the day. With CNN broadcasting the war 24 hours a day, showcasing laser-guided missiles launched from American fighters and the infamous Stormin' Norman news conference, the war became a caricatured version of its actual events in popular media. Storm Over the Desert, seems to embody that cultural paradigm perfectly: Saddam is reduced to a cartoon mockery (at best), the Americans win with impunity, while the battlefield is a mostly featureless yellow and brown, cut and dry, representation of Iraq.

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That being said, game graphics at the time didn’t exactly knock your socks off, especially when you compare Storm Over the Desert with another contemporary Gulf War recreation called Operation Desert Storm. In the Bungie Software game from 1991, you’re both tested on Middle-Eastern trivia and fight in a mini-tank with an even worse game space than Storm Over the Desert.

From the same year, there was also Operation Secret Storm where you played as Secret Agent George (an allusion to the former CIA chief and Gulf War President, George HW Bush), fighting his way through Iraq to kill 'Saddam Insane.' Operation Secret Storm graphics were more akin to the Mario games of the era and noticeably better than the other two.

A screenshot from Operation Desert Storm. If you're wondering that brown thing is a tank. Youtube

All of the the games are doubly ironic when you consider the first Gulf War was often itself described as resembling a video game, thanks to the high tech methods the US Army used to live broadcast the operation to viewers all over the world. Weapons like the laser-guided missiles showcased by CNN were disorienting to viewers at the time, who likened the images to digital landscapes and video games. Even Nintendo is aware of the link between gaming and the Gulf War: a burned-up but still-working Game Boy that once belonged to a soldier who survived a bombing is on display at the Nintendo store in New York City.

Though the first Gulf War was considered a video game war, the sequel nobody asked for—the Iraq war of the 2000s—actually became several video games, all playing with similar themes set out by games like Storm Over the Desert. While original Gulf War games reduce a complex war and its actors to faceless automatons and giant mustached dictators, new first-person shooter games based on the War on Terror made enemies more realistic and fully killable. AK-47 wielding terrorists with fully shootable heads became the modern equivalent of giant, pudgy Saddams. In 2002, there was even a Gulf War game called Conflict: Desert Storm; it was one of the first tactical shooter games for the Xbox.

Take your pick of Call of Duty or Splinter Cell, where players assume the reality of fictional American operators fighting through locales in Iraq and elsewhere—the key trope in modern video games on the War On Terror is American military prowess. In fact, Atomic Games developed and nearly released a game called Six Days in Fallujah that would have followed US Marines around in the most infamous battle the US Army fought in Iraq. Eventually, however, Konami shelved it after veterans groups criticized Atomic's insensitive portrayal of horrific events.

Ultimately, just about every modern Iraqi conflict has had a distinctly American video game recreations, from the Gulf War to the occupation of Iraq. For now, it's yet to be seen if that tradition will continue. But here's to betting someone will make a game about the ISIS crisis. Especially considering what happened back in 2010: Electronic Arts rolled out a playable Taliban (later dubbed "Opposing Force") character in Medal of Honor.

Colin Snyder contributed additional reporting to this piece.