Must’ve Run All Day: Replaying 'State of Emergency'
22 years ago, Rockstar followed Grand Theft Auto III with one of the original endless runners
Rockstar changed everything with Grand Theft Auto III. With the possible exception of Nintendo, I had never in my life given one shit about what a video game company was working on or releasing next. I just gobbled up whatever sounded good. But when it was time to follow up the open-world game that redefined three-dimensional gaming, I bought into the State of Emergency hype in a big way.
The game is set inside of a massive, constant riot. Not only ambitious and original, it made total thematic sense following GTAIII with a zoomed-in look at the chaos threatening to infiltrate our consumerist society. Or something. I don’t know. It’s pretty hectic. Everybody’s running all over the damn place.
Though we were all hoping for something that reminded us of GTA, State of Emergency ultimately is a brawler, having more in common with Double Dragon and Die Hard Arcade than the streets of Liberty City. Sure, there are guns galore, and you can keep beating someone’s corpse well beyond the point that they stop breathing, but the immersion is gone, the world filled with possibilities. Instead, you spend the game’s opening hours running around the same mall, trying to remember where the up and down escalators are.
Why are you running around the mall all day? That’s because you’ve joined The Resistance against The Corporation, the bluntly named corporation that is enslaving society with its uh, you know, government stuff. Oppression and all that. I don’t think the game ever makes it clear. If it does, it was after 100 or so identical missions, so forgive me if I didn’t get that far. I can only spend so much time at a mall, real or fake, before I feel the urgent need to split and not look back.
The game's opening voiceover makes it clear up front that we’re dealing with a generic tale of near-future dystopia. It’s like The Purge or Civil War, only with constant sprinting on both sides.
Since the collapse of the federal government and the global economic crisis, The Corporation has been building a brighter future for its citizens based on principles of order, loyalty, and civic obedience. The Corporation has created a nation all citizens can feel proud of.
The opening cutscene shows a man getting bludgeoned in the street while this narration plays. The message is clear; this Corporation is up to no good.
You join the fight against them at the mall one day. The process is a lot like if you wanted to work at an Orange Julius. Just go in there and make a good impression. Unlike the Orange Julius stand that drug tested me one time, The Resistance puts you to work right away, mostly hurting people and escorting allies across the mall safely. At one point you find a list of Corporate informants and you go have conversations with them about why they shouldn’t work with The Corporation.
Nah, I’m just kidding. You beat them to death!
There are some missions where you’re trying to catch up with and take on specific rioters. Those are nearly impossible. It’s like bludgeoning a needle in a haystack with a chair you took from the food court. Despite my grumbling, I don’t want to pretend that it wasn’t impressive to boot up the game 20 years ago and see dozens of people rioting. It ruled then and it makes a strong impression now.
Like most elements of this game, that charm wears off pretty quickly, though. It’s not really a riot, it’s just people running. Every fifth guy has a TV or something over his head. But they’re all just doing laps I think. Remember in The Sandlot, how they just played a single never-ending game of baseball all summer? That’s what the riot is like here. A big Black Friday that goes on forever. Or at least until the mall closes every night.
By the way, are these stores open? They’re making announcements on the PA, so I guess the mall is still open during all this. Do they close at night? Do elderly people still show up and walk around the mall in the morning? I bet The Resistance lets the walkers take the mall in the mornings. That’d be the decent thing for revolutionaries to do. Then maybe they get in there around noon and start rioting.
For what it’s worth, there are other levels after the mall, where you’re running around in the city streets and whatnot. For the second time in my life, I lost interest in this game long before I reached any of that stuff. But it’s there if you want it.
On paper, State of Emergency was an ambitious follow-up to the anarchic style of GTAIII. Upon execution, however, when you remove the exploration, narrative, driving, and atmosphere from Grand Theft Auto, all you have left is running and punching.
I don’t know about you guys, but every time I play a Grand Theft Auto game, they show me how to do hand-to-hand fighting and I get through the tutorial and never do it again. I’ll shoot a guy point-blank with a bazooka and send us both to hell before I box him.
Rockstar released a lot of games that felt spiritually similar to GTA but innovated and impressed enough to stand on their own: Red Dead Redemption, Bully, Manhunt, The Warriors.
State of Emergency wasn’t one of them.
While it sold well enough to warrant a sequel, the game didn’t leave much lasting impact, certainly not when compared to those others I mentioned.
Returning to Grand Theft Auto shortly after this game worked out just fine for Rockstar, as Vice City and San Andreas remain among the series’ finest achievements. Perhaps lessons learned from SoE influenced the development of those games as Rockstar never again traded depth for ‘tude after this.
State of Emergency offers almost no depth, but perhaps it does deserve a legacy as a game that sprinted its ass off so that future Rockstar games could run.