General Chaos was the product of a couple of ex-Midway developers, and creators of some of their most iconoclastic hits, Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman. They were the creators of Rampage, one of the standouts of the Silver Age of arcades, and the basis of a certain popular movie. They tend to dwell in the shadow of the likes of Ed Boon and John Tobias, creators of Mortal Kombat, and Mark Turmell of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Yet there’s a strong argument that could be made that NBA Jam wouldn’t have existed without the similar-in-play Arch Rivals from the same company, which was from Colin and Nauman.

In addition to Arch Rivals and Rampage, Colin and Nauman worked on Spy Hunder, Xenophobe and Pigskin 621 AD, before leaving Midway and striking out on their own under the banner of Game Refuge. And that’s where they made General Chaos for the Genesis, published by Electronic Arts. And hey, Game Refuge still exists, while Midway is currently a locked cabinet full of IP somewhere in a basement of either Warner Bros. Entertainment, or the company currently called “Light & Wonder,” (I don’t know Pete I don’t think I buy it) but contains such multitudes as “Scientific Games,” “Autotote Corporation,” “Shuffle Master,” “WMS Industries,” “Bally,” or even other totemic brands that once saw better days. These days they mostly sell to casinos, may they speedily pass on their way to hell.

General Chaos isn’t one of their best known titles, but it has a certain something. It’s a cartoony, comedic take on deadly warfare. The Kickstarter calls it a predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, and there is some of that there certainly, but truthfully General Chaos is something entirely unique. It’s an intrinsically two-sided battlefield action combat game where the warzone is made of single screens, and where each player controls a team of five soliders with different abilities (with one exception I’ll mention in a bit). In action it feels a bit like Mattel’s classic tank combat games Armor Battle for the Intellivision and Armor Ambush for the Atari 2600, in that a single player must command multiple units, but with much more depth.

There is also quite a bit of General Chaos essence in Team Fortress 2, even though it’s not an FPS, for both its comical, satirical atmosphere and its array of characters which each have substantial differences from each other. There are gunners, rocket launchers, grenadiers, flame throwers and dynamite chuckers. Most of the time characters are controlled indirectly: control a cursor to point at a location and press the B button to send your current character to it. C changes characters, and A tells all your units to fire their weapons. They automatically pick their targets.

When opposing soldiers get near each other the battle pauses and they engage in hand-to-hand battle, in the form of a simple fighting game. Combatants who are knocked down can be revived by pointing at them with the cursor and pressing A to call in one of a limited number of Medics. Characters who fall too often will eventually turn into a pile of bones and vanish. Additional Medic uses can be found on the battlefield, and are also awarded for reaching certain point totals.

As an alternative playstyle, a side can choose to field a pair of Commandos. If one player is using Commandos they must divide their attention between them, but two players can also play co-op with a Commando apiece. Commandos don’t use the indirect method of control, and instead control directly. This can make them much more effective warriors, but comes at the cost of only being two people to a squad, instead of a full team of five. Commandos can call in Medics too, but must reach their teammate in person to do so.

There are lots of worthy games from the 16-bit era that didn’t receive their due, and while I don’t know how well it sold, General Chaos always struck me as a bit of a sleeper hit. Video game genres were already becoming locked-down, and Electronic Arts was already showing signs of abandoning their reputation for nurturing talent and becoming the grotesque behemoth they are today. I’m surprised they don’t outright own the rights to General Chaos, but it appears they do not, or maybe Game Refuge bought it back from them.

The Kickstarter page makes it clear that Colin and Neuman have spent a lot of time thinking about how their classic wargame could be improved. There are more characters planned, more control options, between battle upgrades and most interesting of all, the ability to “go commando” and take direct control of any unit on your side. Home turf battles come with extra units on a given side, “expendables” that have limited abilities but help to give defenders a slight edge. There’s an array of stretch goals, with an especially interesting one at $200k: an arcade version. I think General Chaos was always destined for the arcade, and now it may finally happen.

So if all of this seems interesting to you, please consider supporting their project. Because war is a deadly serious business, so the best thing any of us can do is to laugh at it.

rodneylives