Format: PC Publisher: Introversion Software Developer: in-house
Darwinia is obviously a love-letter to videogame culture, but it’s also a part of it. It doesn’t just doff its cap to a catalogue of adored classics, it undertakes to capture what made them great within its own mechanics. So your Death Squads are controlled exactly as your men in Cannon Fodder were, and hurling digital grenades into bleeping knots of the Virus has all the tactile appeal of that game’s gratifyingly simple massacres. The Virus itself bears obvious visual similarities to the antagonists of David Braben’s ’80s groundbreaker of the same name, but more importantly it also poses the same sinister threat: no one part of it is formidable, but the volume and voracity of the whole constantly threatens to overwhelm. And a less visual nod to Lemmings – the mechanic by which you command the otherwise aimless Darwinians by promoting a few to direct the rest – pulls the same miraculous trick of making you care for something simply because it refuses to be your puppet.
Not all of Darwinia’s subsystems and dynamics were derivative, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they were. The main attraction wasn’t these in themselves, but the larger-picture game you played, using each of them as tools to a story-related goal. They combined seamlessly and ingeniously, the outcome of each game feeding into the others like subroutines in the software code they represent. Execute a tightly controlled surgical strike with a fully upgraded, rocket-pelting Death Squad and you’ll secure a new Incubator to pump out more Darwinians, and thereby build up your more autonomous RTS-style army. Once you’ve bought those little green men lasers and pineapples of their own, directing a flood of them down the datastream of an inter-island satellite dish is so devastating to the slithering pink infection on the other hand that you hardly need bother with Squads any more. All progress lets your engineers capture more of the islands’ structures from the Virus, and each capture moves you a little closer to earning an upgrade for whatever part of your anti-viral toolbelt you’re choosing to level up. Darwinian Officers 2.0, for example, can lead your entire army at once, squelching out an odd vocodered rendition of the ‘left, left, left-right-left’ marching chant.
Though the elaborate equation of Darwinia closely tied a lot of satisfyingly hefty terms, it was always subservient to the level design. Each new sector of Darwinia – ‘A Virtual Theme Park’ – was comprised of a small constellation of craggy polygonal islands with a distinct and recognisable purpose, and the apparatus required for that defined the dynamics of the level. If you’ve ever wondered what the factories you’re shooting goons in actually make, or exactly what’s in these crates you’re hiding behind, you owe it to yourself to play Darwinia at least once in your life. It’s the game where everything does have a purpose, every structure and setting woven together into a coherent civilisation, one that functions together as a machine for producing and enhancing digital life. The machinations of that were sophisticated and enchanting in equal measure. Even the level-select screen turned out to be part of the Darwinian ecosystem – the tendrils of orange light leading down to each of the locations are the souls of slain Darwinians returning to their equivalent of heaven, to add their experiences to the great pool of knowledge in the sky.
This look back at Darwinia is the latest in our weekly run of retrospectives. There are plenty more here.
Only one of these curling datastreams is flowing downwards, away from the soul repository to the location it connects: Receiver. It’s an array of soul-collecting devices that pass reborn Darwinians to the master template to have the new, improved firmware stamped on their being. And it’s lit gently by hundreds of glowing orange diamonds drifting silently to Earth, dying where they land because the Virus controls the receiving apparatus. It’s only because every part of Darwinia’s surreal digital universe makes sense that you get tangible sense of the damage the Virus is doing to it, and at times the plight of these ten-pixel people is genuinely sad. We eventually discover that they brought the Virus upon themselves in an attempt to commune with God: their creator, Dr Sepulveda. Instead they communed with his hard drive, and inadvertently downloaded their own design documents. And while their blank square heads contemplated that existential bombshell, some infected spam made it into the downstream and the outbreak began.
Despite all the digital counter-culture reference points (call in an airstrike, by the way, and the payload is dropped off by a passing Space Invader), the most iconic image in Darwinia is original: the simple boxy stick figure of the Darwinian itself. Similarly, its contribution to that culture – the sublime art direction and its cohesive, all-pervading and emotional story – is more indelible than anything it borrows from its primitive ancestors.
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