TITLE
How Mercenaries and Gun Culture Shaped One of the Best Strategy Games Ever Made
AUTHOR
Darius Kazemi
PUBLICATION
Motherboard: Tech By Vice
YEAR
2014
ARTICLE TYPE
Book Excerpt
FROM THE ARTICLE
Soldiers for hire have been part of human warfare since at least the Classical Greek era, but historical soldiers for hire are a far cry from the mercenaries we see in modern pop culture. Pop culture mercenaries are freewheeling, independent special-ops combatants. In the 1980s and 90s they were Vietnam vets; more recently they’re Desert Storm vets. The pop culture mercenary brings to mind colorful characters like Firefly’s Jayne Cobb, The A-Team’s B. A. Baracus, or perhaps one of the action hero has-beens of The Expendables.This is in stark contrast to real-life mercenary forces. Beginning in the mid-1990s, these groups have taken to calling themselves “private military companies” or “civilian contractors.” They apply neoliberal economic theory to the military: In a 2007 Congressional hearing, Erik Prince, founder of the infamous Blackwater USA, said, “We are trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service.”
Real mercenaries are terrifying private-sector military consultants, while fantasy mercenaries are modern-day swashbuckling scoundrels. We can trace this fantasy back to cowboy- and pirate-themed pulp adventures, and surely further back than that. But the direct progenitor of our image of the modern mercenary is Soldier of Fortune (SOF) magazine.
GAMES MENTIONED
Jagged Alliance 2
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Chris Camfield
Ian Currie
Shaun Lyng
TOPICS MENTIONED
Violence
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive
EXCERPTED FROM
Boss Fights Books – Jagged Alliance 2