Retro reviews, vintage hardware, classic PC builds, and modern ways to keep old games alive.
For the Fourth. Not the most patriotic games, the most American ones. And half of them were built by people who only knew the place from the movies.
Every Fourth of July I end up thinking about the same strange thing: how much of the America in my head, the one I grew up on, came from media built somewhere else.
Half of the most flag-waving, eagle-screaming, blow-it-all-up games ever made were not made here at all. They were made in Japan. In Scotland. In the Netherlands. Built by people who had mostly never set foot in the country they were putting on screen, and somehow they nailed it harder than we ever did. The deeper you dig into this list, the more foreign it gets, and that is not a bug in the argument. That is the argument. So lets get this started. ‘MURICA.
You play the President. In a mech. Fighting a coup.
Metal Wolf Chaos (FromSoftware, 2004) let you climb into an armed walking mech as the President of the United States, shout LET'S PARTY, and stop a coup led by your own Vice President. It came out only in Japan. The single most American game ever made was considered too niche to sell to Americans. That is the whole joke, and the whole point.
The President has been kidnapped by ninjas, and the cabinet asks if you are a bad enough dude to get him back. That is the whole plot, and it is perfect. A Japanese studio decided America was a place where the commander in chief gets grabbed by ninjas and rescued by two guys in tank tops. They were not wrong.
The one actually made here, by an American education company, to teach American kids about the most American thing there is: dragging a wagon west because somebody said there was land. Manifest destiny with a hunting minigame. Generations of us learned about our own country by fording rivers and dying of dysentery, during class.
Neon 1986 Miami built out of Scarface and Miami Vice, all pastel suits and a radio that is an entire decade on tap. America as a fever dream of excess and ambition and bad decisions. And here is the kicker that earns the slot: the most American series in games is built in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Homegrown, in Texas, and it shows. Sunglasses, one-liners, and a musclehead stomping through LA and Vegas, treating everything in his path as either a target or a punchline. Every line lifted from an 80s movie, every level neon American excess. A monument to a very specific American swagger, and on the Fourth that is a feature.
The Reagan-era action movie in cartridge form. Two commandos modeled on Rambo and the Terminator drop into the jungle to shoot an entire alien-backed army by themselves, dying in one hit and loving it. No plot worth following, just two guys, infinite bullets, and the Spread Gun. That it was dreamed up in Tokyo only makes it more perfect.
America exported a dream of its future, and then Interplay nuked it. Atomic-age chrome and smiling families and duck-and-cover cheer, preserved perfectly by the apocalypse that ended them. The most American idea imaginable: the promise that the good times would last forever. On a holiday we celebrate with controlled explosions, nothing fits better.
A World War II shoot-em-up in which you fly an American plane against the Japanese fleet at Midway, built by Capcom, in Japan. They made the game where you beat them, sold it back to us in arcades, and we fed it quarters by the roll. Something so strange, so capitalist, and so American about the whole arrangement that the deal alone earns it the slot.
A Detroit cop is gunned down, and the corporation that runs the city rebuilds him to protect its investment. American policing, privatized and resurrected. The game marches him through crime-soaked streets in a heavy mechanical stomp. And the idea itself came from Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch director making fun of America from the outside. Nobody American built RoboCop. He is still the most American cop who ever lived.
The four-player cabinet bolted to the wall of every pizza place in the country. An American comic that became an American cartoon that sold an ocean of American toys, and the definitive game version was built by Konami, in Japan. New York, pizza, Cowabunga, four kids feeding it dollars. Childhood, the mall, a summer afternoon in 1990, assembled in Tokyo.
Pure American consumer id in a yellow cab. Get a fare to Pizza Hut, or KFC, or Tower Records, as recklessly as humanly possible, while The Offspring screams out of the radio. The map is literally built out of American chain stores, which is one of the most honest things a game has ever said about the place. And it was made by Sega, in Japan, which by now should surprise exactly no one.
The most damning, most loving pictures of America keep getting painted by people who live somewhere else. That is the entire thesis of this list.
NARC, a Reagan-era war-on-drugs arcade shooter, is about as 1988 as a game gets and only just lost its slot. Double Dragon invented the beat-em-up in a gang-ruled city. Red Dead Redemption is the American myth itself, and fell off only because Rockstar was already here with GTA. And do not forget the strangest lane of all: the fast-food advergame, from the Burger King Xbox games to Avoid the Noid, a DOS platformer that existed to move Domino’s pizzas.
Broforce (2015) is basically this entire article turned into one game: every American action hero side by side, blowing up an island to a fireworks finale. And a nod to Dave, POCG’s cofounder, who took one look at this list and just said Red Alert. He is not wrong, and this whole site started life as a Command and Conquer fan page, so consider it noted.
So light something on fire, safely, and load one of these up. Half of them were made by people who only knew America from the movies, and they still understood the assembly better than most of us do. Happy Fourth.
