I first met the guys from Contested Ground about a decade back, and at
that time, they were only just coming into their own and hadn’t released such
things as Cold City, Hot War, 3:16 and all the other things that they’re now
renowned for.
Back then they were all focussed on putting out a game called A/State,
in which the characters were all living in a place known only as the city,
which was a massive walled complex divided into several different sections
based around a circular canal system and surrounded by impenetrable walls. The difference between this and my day six
choice, Mechanical Dream, is that all the sectors were neatly laid out, there
were personalities, there were ideas, there were things that you could do
within the city, even if you couldn’t make a change to the status quo, there
were things that could be done, and that was enough for me.
The other thing was the presentation, it’s always possible to tell when
a games company has an artist in their midst, because the amount and quality of
artwork will always be more and higher than those games produced by companies
that don’t have an artist working on staff.
In this case, the images of the city were all computer rendered and
produced, which gave the game a very distinct feel when it came to how it was
presented. This, combined with the hints
of what was going on in the world, inspired me sufficiently to write a
novelette for the game, in the hopes of getting more people interested in the
game and improving the sales for the company.
If I’m ever interested in a game enough to want to support it, I don’t
do things by half, the book only came out to somewhere near 37 pages, and it’s
still available at www.thedodd.com for
free.
The problem was that while the game won the Indie Award for Best
production and was nominated for another five awards including two Ennies, like
a number of other excellent games before it, the enthusiasm of the fanbase that
it had wasn’t enough to keep it going, and contested ground moved on from this
to the other games that the individual members are now famous for and by the
late 2000’s, most of the team were working on other projects as well as this
which led to the eventual cessation of the line when Malcolm Craig took a break
from writing for a while.
For me, it remains one of the more striking games of the 2000’s, with a
visual style and starkness that only enhanced the product that was within and a
game landscape that had not just enough to keep you going, but enough to
inspire you. I didn’t much like the
system, but system is often something that can be supplanted with something
else if you don’t like it, so it wouldn’t be an impediment to anyone if the
system were retained.
The reason why I’d want to see a new or improved edition of A/State is
because there was so much left unanswered, and in the manner of most explorers,
I want to know what the Shifted were, I want to know what’s beyond the wall,
what’s out there to be found, why the city was created, how the spire came to
be, so many questions that presently will never be answered. When you consider the interest being shown in
games like Numenera and the Strange, there’s clearly a market out there that
wants games that make them think, that makes them wonder what’s going on in the
world, that makes them look into things and make things of their own up about
the world, and while I have no doubt that the Contested Ground team (Now spread
throughout the industry in high positions) have enough on their many plates, if there was a chance that one day A/State would be
brought to the fore again…
I’d be buying…
