One of My Favorite Games Was an Accident
Gaming is riddled with well-documented stories about projects that were developed in hopes of being wildly lucrative only to disappoint upon release. Try as studios might, success is not something that can be simply willed into existence. Sometimes you need to come up with something new and possibly involving geometry to capture people’s attention.
Geometry Wars began as a game inside a game. It was included in 2003’s Project Gotham Racing 2 as an arcade cabinet your character had in their garage, a little minigame you could play in between races. It garnered a cult following, and a few years later PGR devs Bizarre Creations released Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on the burgeoning Xbox Live platform. An Easter Egg had hatched into a full-blown game.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved was a high-octane twin-stick shooter that paid homage to arcade classics Galaga and Asteroids, with a modern coat of paint that made it pop on our new-fangled HD televisions after we were finished watching Lost. I played it a little bit and admired the backstory and originality of it all, but it didn’t occupy hundreds of hours of my time or anything.
That was the sequel, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 that did that.
GW:RE2 took the concept of the original and ran in six different directions1, presenting a collection of game modes that all offered a twist on the original. The biggest addition to the core gameplay were Geoms, little green fuckers left behind by dead enemies that added a multiplier to your score. Collecting Geoms was the key to high scores. And being a throwback to the best arcade games of all time meant that the score is all that matters. There is no beating this game, there is only the score.
The game modes are all somewhere between good and incredible. Evolved is essentially the first game, where players try to get the highest score they can before dying three times. Deadline gives players infinite lives and three minutes to rack up a high score. Waves is just what it sounds like, like a mix of Galaga and those Crank movies.
Pacifism is the one for me, though. Brilliant not only in its simplicity but in its rejecting of what makes all the other modes so fun; you can’t shoot anymore. The twin-stick shooter is now an only-child wanderer, and you’re merely tasked with flying around and avoiding enemies, leaving your other hand free to eat, vape, or write newsletters.
There’s one more crucial element to the game. These little gates, which are two triangles connected by a line2 that you can fly through and trigger a little explosion. Those little explosions are your only method of getting kills and staying alive amidst the growing number of enemies that are coming for you. There is no longer a variety of geometric shapes (and the occasional snake) coming for you. It’s just the dumbest enemies in the game, the lowly blue squares.
They’re like zombies, posing little threat on their own, but suddenly you turn around and are outnumbered and start to feel like a lonely little ship in a big scary world. As I mentioned before, these are score-based games, so trying to stay alive and “beat” it is futile. All you can do is try to top your high score. I got a billion one time. It was a Top Three moment in my life. Here’s a video of someone getting 5 billion. It’s cinema.
I got way into playing Pacifism on the Xbox 360 when GW2 came out. It was the kind of game I’d throw on to play for a little bit before I dove into some more proper game, but then I’d look up and it would be three hours later and I’d say, “Well, no sense in booting up Red Dead Redemption this late into the night. Better just play Pacifism for two more hours.” This went on for a long time.
Early on in the Pacifist stage of my life, I adopted the strategy of “Try to be like Barry Sanders out there.” My favorite athlete of all time was not only electric to watch, keeping busted plays alive as the running back for my beloved and woeful Detroit Lions, but he was also quite often on his own out there, as his highlights often prove. This wasn’t a guy running behind an elite squad of blockers, this was a guy that always looked outnumbered and yet would maneuver his way out of certain death-by-tackling again and again.
Here’s one of my favorite clips of him. Look how he blows by #75 on the Cowboys because he thinks the play has ended.
Channeling Barry Sanders gives me the confidence to try wild shit when I play Geometry Wars. Sometimes when I think I’m toast, I fly out of harm’s way like a classic Barry run. It never lasts, and the next wave just comes in stronger, but no other game makes me feel like more of a hotshot than Pacifism.
In that respect, I also feel a little bit like Han Solo during the asteroid belt scene in The Empire Strikes Back. I know the odds are against me, but I have no other recourse. Although, maybe the tragic ending guaranteed to all Geometry Wars runs means that a more apt comparison would be to the doomed characters of Rogue One. There is a space war happening, after all, and pacifism will only get you so far.
Sketching the Elephant T-shirt available here.
There’s also a Geometry Wars 3, which kept all of the previous game’s modes intact and added a campaign. It’s a lot of fun and easier to find today than 2. Can’t go wrong with either.
This is the closest thing to geometry I can find in these games, for what it’s worth.