10 Years Ago is a recurring feature that looks at whatever the new hotness was around this time 3,652 days ago. Ostensibly it will look at the game’s impact both in past and present terms, but mostly it will just make you feel really old.
It’s hard to imagine a time when the world wasn’t glutted with terrible Army Men games. And yet, that’s exactly the world that Army Men 3D (released March 2, 1999) was born into. Army Men 3D was the game that made the series’ descent into crushing awfulness visible to all.
Army Men has been the poster boy of franchise overexertion and laziness since its 1998 debut, but that wasn’t always immediately apparent. While only the most generous of reviewers considered the first Army Men title to be even mediocre, there was no denying that the concept of little plastic green men fighting little plastic tan men was an interesting game space to explore.
But Army Men 3D didn’t explore it. Instead, it was a 3D remake of the 2D original—an incredibly brazen move, since that first game was less than a year old and generally disliked. This was the first real sign that 3DO didn’t actually have a plan for the Army Men series beyond driving revenue—and the product matched the intention.
Compared to it competition of the time, like the now classic Silent Hill or even the antiquated popcorn action title Syphon Filter, Army Men 3D is atrocious. Sarge stumbles clumsily towards his objectives, all the while fighting tan enemies against a light brown backdrop in the beige-colored fog. Death comes quickly and without remorse from opponents that will see you long before you see them. It’s a frustrating experience that somehow also managed to be accused of being too short, though it’s probably fair to say that the weekend it would take to beat Army Men 3D would be a weekend wasted.
Another curious negative about the Army Men series that is exemplified in Army Men 3D is how seriously the early games in the franchise took themselves. All of the actors in Army Men 3D are toys, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it beyond netting a more family-friendly image on store shelves: the environments are all realistic and the violence is at the level of any contemporary war game, and the silliness of the premise is never even alluded to. Just about everyone was disappointed by this at the time, to the point where the ending of Army Men 3D (which is embedded below to save everyone the trouble) attempted to solve the issue. Of course, it attempted to solve it with the bizarre band-aid explanation that there are portals between our world and the World War II-esque world of the Army Men. An even more bizarre devotion to canon ensured these portals remained a major part of the franchise throughout its many, many iterations.
Despite all of this, Army Men 3D marked the height of market success for the franchise and was almost certainly in the top 100 best-selling games of the PlayStation overall. The game’s sales made the franchise the flagship of 3DO, and the deluge of Army Men games began. And though it’s been a decade and 3DO is long dead, Army Men continues: almost nobody noticed, but the most recent title in the franchise released as recently as last October.
Army Men 3D proved that a strong concept can drive a company’s fortunes even if implementation is shoddy. It would not be much longer, however, before the next iterations in the series proved that taking too much advantage of a strong concept will drive a company into the ground.
Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri