Vietnam Was Hell, Not A Series Of Green Corridors

Vietnam is a war that still looms large in the American psyche, both in terms of its impact in modern history and its portrayal in popular culture. Yet for all the protests, rock n’ roll and classic films that came out of the war, good Vietnam video games are hard to find.

This is mostly because what made the war, what defined the nature of the conflict, wasn’t something you could easily replicate in a game. Open wars, fought on battlefields between identifiable combatants, are easy. That’s why there are so many shooters and strategy games based on the Second World War. Those wars had regions of control, and rules, and those are the kind of things you need for a video game.

Vietnam did not. It was a war fought everywhere and nowhere. There were no front lines, enemies were tough to distinguish from friends (or at least the innocent). What defined it, then, was not a clash of arms, two sides meeting in open battle. It was the jungle, the mystery, the confusion.

Games have found it tough to replicate this, most – Black Ops most recently – simply using it as a backdrop for just another corridor shooter, which captures neither the accuracy or the feel of the war. There’s one game, though, that did. And it managed this back in 1993.