Paul Woakes' Mercenary: The Definitive Review

About Games From The Future, And How They’re The Past

In interrogating my lack of commitment to the modern, fully expanded No Man’s Sky, a game I should be utterly devoted to, I couldn’t escape the realisation that all my excuses were ultimately dishonest. I’d told myself that I didn’t have the time, that I had so many other things to play, that I’d play it when I’m old, but the real reason was far more emotional than that. In my initial playthrough with the base game, there were moments where I’d step from my ship to discover a vista that immediately recalled some wonderful purple-skied Chris Foss or Peter Elson Sci-Fi paperback cover. These often had a chasmic heart-rending impact,¹ being less nostalgic transportation and more a memorial to my lost hopes and shattered dreams, of the realisation that travel to these fantasy planets was going to be impossible, that I’d never get to fly in such spacecraft or walk on alien landscapes, despite PopSci children’s books promising orbital hotels and tourist jaunts on the Moon by the 1990s. It made the game indelibly melancholic on some unconscious level and hence No Man’s Sky always carried a mournful quality for me. At its heart is the lament for lost innocence and cruelly deflowered naivete born of witnessing the human space race wither into a kind of grey mundanity interspersed with tragedies caused by design flaws and human weakness. Space probes and Hubble certainly pointed in the direction where most progress could be made, but the dream of being part of a spacefaring generation faded without hope. All we could do was to nuzzle into the fiction that surrounded us, for the facts were too stark to keep any dreams alive. What Sean Murray’s team did wasn’t to resurrect those dreams, but to build them a fitting mausoleum under procedural generation, to give a cohort that was promised the heavens a tiny sci-fi simulacrum of their very own, perhaps by way of compensation for those promises still unfulfilled. In this sense, No Man’s Sky is a game about a cultural past and that quality of wish fulfilment by indulging with that past. It draws on games like Elite and Rescue on Fractalus to interpose the old, collectively-imagined future into the post-modern space sim as an act of charitable contemporisation. This knowing and conscious re-examination and re-implementation, despite the heavy and earnest romance with its source inspirations, turned out to be really quite conventional. But Elite was always something entirely different and in period, carried a novel sense of the dazzlingly exciting². Like the subject of this piece, and unlike No Man’s Sky, Elite wasn’t just a game about the future, but a game that felt like it had come from it.

Elite defined more than just the space trading sim. It defined an entire tier of videogame in the 1980s, being generally lavish, first-person (or cockpit view) high-concept productions, furnished at retail with additional materials beyond the expected instruction manual and game media. An affordance of riches that shallowly substantiates the implied superior status of the game’s design. Within a year of Elite’s debut, Paul Woakes released Mercenary,³ which is eventually joined by the likes of Driller, Starglider, Cholo and Tracker as games hallmarked by big boxes, supplemental novellas⁴ and the use of wireframe vector graphics. Driller being the exception here as it bravely attempted flat-shaded polygons on 8-bit hardware⁵. But nonetheless, these explicitly premium titles form their own micro-genre of aspirational games from a time where realtime polygons, wireframe or otherwise, were generally recognised in popular culture as imagery of the future, often bagging those twin superlatives of being at the cutting edge and representing ‘the state of the art’. Therefore to be in that visual mode already places a game as being a cut above the sprites-and-tiles hoi polloi. Yet it genuinely seems that adopting the vector promoted a kind of higher conceptualisation across the discipline; it almost demanded novel, unusually rich Sci-Fi settings and somehow gave licence to inventive interactive design⁶. Adjunct to this set, which we can call ‘the novella suite’, were other sci-fi games with higher aspirations or vector excellence. Simon Brattel’s Dark Star on the ZX Spectrum stands out for being from 1984 and yet stunningly fast and fluid as a re-interpretation, of sorts, of segments from Atari’s Star Wars⁷ arcade machine with a sprinkling of Star Raiders.⁸ Later on, we get John Twiddy’s beautifully atmospheric Tau Ceti and later still, Geoff Crammond’s The Sentinel⁹ and Buchon & Ulrich’s spectacularly over-conceptual Captain Blood. What’s fascinating about these is the aspiration they share to transcend the conventional, to actively build on the idea of what a videogame could be. They do not fall easily into simple genre categorisation and instead demand to be taken as individual artefacts on their own merit. While we can draw similarities between some of them, they all have distinct concepts of their own. However only a few get to qualify as so superior to the status quo that they deserve extra-special status. These crystalline gems carry a singular aspect: they feel more advanced and accomplished than anyone thought games could be. And of everything mentioned above, Mercenary extols every virtue with an uncanny grace.

In a sentence, Mercenary is a game that’s both a flight sim and an open-world adventure. It takes place in the skies, on the surface and below ground, all in realtime 3D vector wireframe graphics. If that sounds like an ambitious prospect, rest assured that it is - the miraculous part is that Mercenary is an excellent videogame. It’s one of incredibly few titles that lives up to its own ambition, and never fails by stepping beyond its capabilities. Instead, you get a game of brilliant lucidity and daring innovation. There was no way you could have played it in period and not been impressed, and much like Elite, possibly captivated to such an extreme that the romance borders on obsessional. I’ve written about Mercenary quite a bit. I remain proud of my Eurogamer piece and naturally adore my outlandish collection. In fact, at the time of writing I’m bidding on a rare 1988 Commodore 64 re-release and am considering spending stupid sums to get hold of US and foreign-language editions. My utterly irrational and yet undying love of Starfield is undoubtedly due to Mercenary, which I made specific mention of in my review. But really, Mercenary was far more formative than that. It underlies my love of all exploration in open worlds, my adoration of the underground bunker complex, my delight in flying above terrain and through cities. Because Mercenary contains all those things and was the first time I’d seen a game deploy them in a satisfying way. Directly or not, Mercenary contains so much of the fundamental template for Immersive Sims¹⁰ that it should be held in the same, if not higher, esteem as the 90s PC titles so commonly attributed to the genre’s development. System Shock plays out beautifully as an evolution of Ultima Underworld’s design, and via its in-game cyberspace segments, deploys an act of accidental genius in tying the vector wireframe, flat-shaded past to the texture-mapped future. For me, that obviously connects Mercenary directly to the 1990s, even without Paul Woakes’s own 16-bit sequels, Damocles and Mercenary III, which took on the flat-shaded mantra of the era and expanded the original’s settings and ideas in beautiful ways.¹¹ And yet, the 1985 original encapsulates so much of the modern first person adventure that it seems more of an achievement now than it did nearly 40 years ago, which only ratifies it further as a game that came from the future.

Much of that sense of Mercenary being so unnaturally advanced is due to its wonderfully metered elegance. Mature 8-bit titles are hallmarked by a kind of effortless sophistication, both in terms of exploiting the hardware and in enhancing designs from primitive ancestry, but the very best-of-the-best qualify themselves by displaying a timeless kind of adroit craft and intelligent thinking. Much as we may look at a 17th Century Automata and find ourselves stunned at the technical excellence involved, and realise that the human ingenuity we associate with up-to-the-minute modernity has always been part of the beast, we should look at these 8-bit exemplars as being every bit as skilled and sophisticated as any contemporary great. In some ways, they reach beyond the confines of the modern AAA title, as the freedom to take grand risks was an under-appreciated virtue of the 8-bit age. Mercenary absolutely plays with this - the manual proudly announces that the game has no way to die, remarking that if you choose to leap out of your craft while flying far out in the wilderness, you will face a very long real-time walk back to the city.¹² It is a game that happily breaks so many of the rules we usually take for granted, even today. The maturity in creating a game with no definitive fail state, but also no focal enemy to defeat, remains incredibly refreshing. Having crash-landed in a city amidst a civil war, the task is to simply escape by assembling an interstellar craft or acquiring access to one. Thus, the emphasis in the game is in absolute exploration and discovery. It’s in mapping the city and the subterranean complexes it hides. There are the wireframe objects that the player can pick up and drop in certain locations to earn currency (to pay for an interstellar ship rental, perhaps?), and there are the objects that actually enhance the player’s abilities - right down to a combination of items that comprise a cheat mode of sorts. In my Eurogamer review from ten years ago, I mention oddly-shaped doors, which are actually fabulously emblematic of the quality of thinking involved with this game. I still marvel at the elegance of how Mercenary deploys locked doors and their keys - if you find a pentagon and pick it up, you can go through pentagonal-shaped doors that were previously impassable. And there’s a whole set of polygonal counterparts to collect. You’ll discover a new shape of door and immediately be tantalised by what may lie behind, spurring further exploration to find the appropriate key. But of course, there’s also a secret skeleton key, should you be tenacious enough to find it. Then there’s the network of teleporters¹³ that can fling you between complexes and even up to a colony craft hanging in the sky, beyond the reach of an unboosted Dominion Dart, the game’s signature aircraft.¹⁴ The game offers so much to map out in terms of geography and how best to use objects, but there’s also joy in mapping the humour in Woakes’ creation, as Mercenary is as wry as it gets.

Including Elite, the almost-too-smug wit of Douglas Adams would, in cohort with Monty Python et al, influence the character of 1980s British videogame humour for the entire decade¹⁵ and yet Mercenary finds its own particular chord, being not so slavish that it reads like a Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy ripoff, but balancing the right mix of sarcasm and absurdity to joke with its own, unique voice. But then such were the accounts of Paul Woakes himself, which paint him as a genuine example of the great British eccentric genius. Sadly, Paul died in 2017, but the testimony is of a man with a great sense of humour who had no reservations about injecting his games with it. Although his first entry, Encounter¹⁶ , is a fairly straight affair it nonetheless demonstrated a bravura command of the 6502 for simulating fast, fluid first-person flight. Having started on the Atari 400 and moving to the Commodore 64, Woakes also managed to write a turbo-loader for tape that cut loading times down to just 20% of the native Commodore loader. As such, Novaload became an industry standard for many a publisher, and set a template copied by nearly everyone else. It can probably be taken as read that Novaload was the bankroll for Novagen, the publisher Paul ran with Bruce Jordan and Tim Bosher. It’s often stated that Paul founded Novagen specifically to publish Encounter, and although we can presume it was successful enough, it was likely Novaload that gave Woakes the freedom to investigate realtime wireframes on the 6502. Wonderfully, instead of repeating Encounter, Paul accidentally defined the first-person realtime 3D adventure and made it funny. Mercenary is rich with the humour of consequence. Often mentioned is the city having a billboard for Encounter that can be demolished with a single shot. However the game won’t let you escape until you repair it, which requires finding a special object. Likewise, you can pick up the commander of one of the game’s factions¹⁷, who immediately demands you put him down. If you put him down in the opposing side’s prison, you get a hefty cash reward. But nothing personifies the Mercenary humour more than the Palyar Commander’s Brother-in-Law, an unseen¹⁸ nemesis whose old ship you can acquire, and whose new ship can be shot down for plenty of consternation. You can also demolish his house and steal his furniture, should you wish. This is all part of his origin story, for the relationship between the player and the Palyar Commander’s Brother-in-Law is expanded in The Second City¹⁹ and the 16-bit sequels.

If there’s one thing that really sets Mercenary apart from its ‘novella suite’ peers, it’s the simple honesty of its cover art. The 1980s UK scene is rightly celebrated for its game covers and the work of greats like Bob Wakelin, Steinar Lund and David Rowe, and it’s often attested that the fabulous paintings that adorned so many releases were intentionally splendid to serve as aids to the imagination, to help players fill in the gap between the rudimentary graphical capabilities of those 8-bit machines and the grander imagery the games were trying to promote. Not so with Mercenary - the artwork, which now bleeds with a kind of effortless Vaporwave cool, is directly representative of the game. This is almost extraordinary, as even Elite tries to fill in its vectors with an airbrushed Cobra Mk II attacking a signature space station. What Mercenary’s cover symbolises is a rightful pride and concordant lack of shame; the artwork hides nothing and instead celebrates the game’s achievement. It seems that from spoken accounts, Mercenary came about because Paul Woakes had knocked up a rudimentary flight simulator, but wanted to build a world where the player could do anything. And this spirit, this urge to push every boundary, to account for every possible player action, is what leads to Mercenary’s spectacular freedom. Sure enough, you’re offered to buy a ship within moments of crash-landing on Targ. Woakes allows you to steal it if you wish, but in doing so you get attacked by police craft. A simple lift from Elite’s punishment should you open fire on a space station perhaps,²⁰ but Elite never lets you actually steal anything. The Woakes mindset always has that extra layer of mischief, of delightful intelligence. In everything I’ve tried to relay about the magic of Mercenary, it’s that creative intelligence I most respect. The ingenuity, the ambition, the elegance. They’re the prime standards we should expect from any videogame; they’re what we should demand as default. 

If we want to ask why the brightest stars of the ‘novella suite’ felt like they came from the future, it’s because we underestimated the sheer degree to which they were pushing back the horizons of possibility in a grand, undiscovered country. They were about imagining what could be and finding the best compromise with the hardware they had. The risk of disaster was fundamental to the endeavour. But those games now feel like a part of some lost past, promoting as profound a sense of loss as those all-too-evocative No Man's Sky vistas. I wonder if I’ll ever feel that sense of futuristic providence again, or has the entire discipline turned away from attempting the impossible to focus on the viable? I felt like Cyberpunk 2077 was the best virtual city I’d ever seen, once again at the cutting edge, once again demonstrating the state of the art. Yet it felt so very contemporary. There is some lack of risk, a lack of daring, an absence of playful ingenuity in its soul. Despite stunning accomplishments in capturing the sense of the grandiose metropolis alongside the sprawl of the midtown and suburban, ultimately Night City was safely conservative. It did it extremely well, but it followed convention to the letter. For a deliciously pretentious curveball, I’ll invoke a physicist I admire, Frank Wilczek, who wrote of his theoretical approach being informed by the Jesuit proverb that it’s always better to seek forgiveness rather than ask permission for the sinful or heretical. Cyberpunk 2077 politely asks your permission to believe in its world. Mercenary asked forgiveness for what it couldn’t cram into 64 Kilobytes.

Being such an early outlier, Mercenary is criminally under-sung and under-celebrated. The monomyth only has room for one novella game, and that’s always going to be Elite. Yet Mercenary can be credited for inspiring so much. An old Edge making-of by Andy Krouwel went as far as pinning Grand Theft Auto 3’s realisation of the open world on Mercenary’s precocious fertilisation of the idea. In a sense, Mercenary’s wireframes are the literal skeleton upon which the future would be built, just as much as the intellectual bones of the modern Immersive Sim can be plucked from its interactive design. But Mercenary is far from some ossified fossil; with contemporary eyes, and using the wonderful MDDClone²¹ the Central City has a haunted quality and a unique atmosphere. An elevator descent from the surface into an underground hangar still evokes the air of mystique and intrigue. Wander enough around 09:06²² and you’ll find yourself back in the hangar and thus, the corridors and rooms satisfyingly resolve into a tangible sense of genuine place. It still works, even today. The invitation to explore is as timeless as the genius behind its ideas, even if our forgiveness for its rudimentary nature may be harder to offer. As an Affectionate Discourse standard ending, ponder what question Mercenary is asking. In my opinion, that answer can only be found by exploring its depths for yourself.²³

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1. It's in these accidental experiences that the true emotive power of the videogame is revealed. I'd argue that No Man's Sky is a very special thing without this unforeseen emotional impact. However it’s my bonkers faith that those deeply personal experiences, distinct from those arising from explicit narrative events and moods, feel like they can only be possible if the game itself carries some special quality derived from the emotional experiences of the people who made it.

2. Interestingly, Elite Dangerous ‘merely’ lives up to the potential that Elite originally defined. Magnificent as it is, Dangerous is carrying the torch, not lighting a new flame.

3. Note, this link is a full play-through of the game with captions explaining everything. If you want the true 1985 experience of entering this world to learn its secrets from within, just play the fucking thing.

4. Mercenary took an unusual path by offering a mail-order Survival Kit. A Big-box edition was released after the Second City add-on which bundled both games with the Survival Kit's poster, novella, maps and so on.

5. As a result of its brave vanguard into the viability of flat-shaded polys on 8-bit hardware, the Commodore 64 framerate is so glacial that for me at least, Driller was utterly unplayable. I got more enjoyment from the epic Matt Gray soundtrack if I'm perfectly honest.

6. Starglider being the exception to this rule. A flaccid, fairly mindless 3D shooter initially, it blossomed into something much more interesting with its flat-shaded (and distinctly Mercenary-tinged) 16-bit exclusive sequel. 

7. Popularised by Battlezone, Atari's wireframe vector platform created superb first-person shooters and Star Wars was by far the most loved. Absolutely defining that aspirational difference between humble home machines and the arcade powerhouses of our dreams, 1983's Star Wars is a true icon of the form and the wireframe visual mode, and hence utterly foundational for the 'novella suite'.

8. Few games can claim to be truly seminal, but Star Raiders is absolutely one of them. From 1980, it can certainly claim a 'from the future' credential by squeezing so much out of the Atari VCS hardware. In one fell swoop, it almost completely defines the first-person space-shooter archetype that forms the vertebrae that Elite would be built upon.

9. The Sentinel was a game so indescribably unique that Zzap 64 refused to give it a score, yet still tagged it with the ultimate Gold Medal award. Being a kind of virtualised boardgame, it used procedural content generation via 4-digit numeric seeds to create flat-shaded polygonal landscapes wherein a battle of wits plays out between the player and the titular Sentinel. The internals are a mix of strategic manoeuvring and balancing energy expenditure with what can be absorbed from the environment. The goal for each landscape is to get sufficiently higher than the Sentinel so that you can absorb it and then occupy its pedestal to claim that particular landscape. Dazzlingly original and toweringly elegant, it prompts the question of what wonders Geoff Crammond may have developed had he not followed his lineage of racing sims. If this piece is about games that felt like they'd come from the future, then The Sentinel is most certainly a shining example. While not strictly in realtime 3D, it instead rendered larger-than-screen views that could be panned around from the player’s position. A fascinating compromise.

10. OR RATHER, FIRST-PERSON ADVENTURES.

11. The Mercenary sequels, much like Starglider's, almost instinctually expanded their universes from a single planet or city to a full solar system. It was a leap that felt absolutely fitting for the technological leap the 16-bit home computers represented over the 8-bits. Once again, the homology with Starfield and No Man's Sky is completely obvious.

12. The manual does, in fact, include a keyboard shortcut to get you out of such situations by teleporting you back to a Central City location, but not without some cost. All the items you were carrying will be randomly scattered.

13. Thanks Mercenary having both two-way and one-way-only teleporters, there are mazes of sorts set up with them, as well as ways of getting to secret complexes far out in the wilderness, far beyond the city. The follow up, The Second City, is much more fiendish across the board, and includes some mind-scrambling teleporter networks that need extensive pen-and-paper mapping to get your head around.

14. Of course, because this game is fucking incredible, there is a way to enhance the Dominion Dart's power and fly to the Colony Craft instead of teleporting to it. Or you can use a food item that’s secretly the most powerful vehicle in the game.

15. Adams and Hitchhikers references abound in UK 8-bit games, and latterly we find plenty of Terry Pratchett, including a text adventure of The Colour of Magic as the decade ages. Notably in adventure titles, as lead by Adams's own Infocom titles, but also across a host of comedic entries ranging from outright parodies like Bored Of The Rings to cynicism-tinged dystopian sci-fi tales like Rigel's Revenge.

16. Interestingly, Encounter is a sprite-based reinterpretation of Battlezone, but at extreme speed. It's perhaps here that we can trace the seeds of Mercenary back to the foundational first-person vector title.

17. The factions, by the way, are the Palyar and the Mechanoids. The latter having the leader that you can kidnap.

18. (spoilers: unseen until Mercenary III)

19. Another example of mercilessly efficient genius, The Second City was an expansion that remixes the Central City of the original game, but as its evil twin. Far more twisted and difficult, The Second City was actually a Woakes-hacked savegame. Not that anyone begrudged paying for it. Well, that is until they teleported themselves into a booby-trap prison.

20. Departing the station at Lave, turning round, shooting the station and then being fucked by police ships is surely the '10 Print "fuck off", 20 Goto 10' of 8-bit videogaming.

21. I really must pay huge respect to the always excellent and utterly invaluable Mercenary Site: http://mercenarysite.free.fr/merce.htm. MDDClone itself is a wonder, if in dire need of a modern update. I can’t get it to run in fullscreen, but it does play all the Mercenary titles, including the sequels, at a lovely 60 FPS. Playing the originals on actual hardware or under emulation may prove quite taxing for those with modern expectations, so MDDClone is absolutely the best way to play these games.

22. Mercenary uses and X:Y coordinate system for its city grid. 09:06 is where you're invited to fly to after purchasing the Dominion Dart at the game's opening.

23. Yes, this whole piece is a thinly-veiled attempt to get Brandon to play it.