C’mon, Game Devs: It’s Time to Bring Back ‘Blast Corps’

Above: Blast Corps screenshot taken from Rare Replay, courtesy of Microsoft Studios.

The gaming industry can often look like a big-budget Container Wars, developers strip-mining their own cemeteries in search of stuff to spit on and rub—sorry, "remaster" or "remake"—in order to sell for full price. That's how we end up with things like 2009's Bionic Commando. We've seen it too often: updates that crash through the past but fail to truly inspire or even understand what made them great in the first place.

By which I mean, I'm asking: can we please fix up the games that undeservedly "failed?" Rehashing former glories only guarantees complaints, about how the changes aren't in the spirit of what came before, or are outright blasphemy. We should be using this future-world tech of ours to put right what once went wrong. We can rebuild the games that could have been, but never had the chance. Games that have become nerdy old classics, loved by the few but capable of much more. Games like Blast Corps.

Released in March 1997 for the Nintendo 64, and developed by celebrated British studio Rare, Blast Corps let you power slide a bulldozer through buildings to save an out-of-control nuclear missile carrier, commandeer a train to unlock the star-spangled AmeriCar, and blare the General Lee's horn while ramming explosives into a housing complex to rescue survivors. And that's all in the first level.

The second lets you loose in a giant robot strapped into a jetpack, whose sole attack is a skyscraper-smashing butt-stomp. And the game never stops getting better. You dash between vehicles to demolish everything in the path of the missile (just don't dash into the carrier itself, or you're atomic toast). There are rocket-firing tricycles, indestructible bulldozers, a weird anti-construction thing with ammo-powered panels that punch sideways, smashing everything you pass.

It's as if the Thunderbirds finally cracked one day, after rescuing one idiot too many, and decided to destroy everything in the world instead. Only, Blast Corps is even more fun than that.

Sometimes, I think more game design documents should amount to: "because it's cool." I can't say for certain if that was Rare's guiding principle for Blast Corps, but it sure feels like it, like every decision was based upon a straw poll on whether or not what they were doing was awesome enough. Sorry, what? A story? Blast Corps just has more explosives where other developers might have been tempted to go looking for plot exposition or emotional resonance. All the character development here is engineered through mechanics, not cutscenes or static screens of text.

Blast Corps starts by letting the player rampage around, experiment with new instruments of destruction, and generally have a blast—yes, the clue is in the name. But then it'll toss in a twist. And another. And another.

Above: Rare Replay's Blast Corps masterclass.

Example: You'll slam into a railway station and it won't budge, it won't break, and that warhead's just a minute behind you. You frantically race along the track, over a hill, through a tunnel—and there, on the other side, you find a train with a ramp that'll allow the slow-moving missile carrier to pass over the station. Quickly, it's back to where you began. The lumbering payload makes it across—but wait, there's more. Something you didn't see before. An off-screen obstacle, and the vehicle you need to clear it is way back there, and… BOOM.

Blast Corps begins as a silly smash 'em up, then, before turning into this wonderful puzzler of ever-escalating explosiveness. It's always fun, even when you're failing, its ballet of devastation growing in intensity until the later levels are wildly interlocking clockwork mechanisms of combustive absurdity.

Brilliant, basically. But while you can play Blast Corps today, as part of the Rare Replay collection, it's showing its age, for all of its excitable appeal. For one thing, its makers reached beyond what the game's platform could handle, what the N64 could successfully render. That's why the game's camera is locked, so close to the action, offering less in the way of visual range than a mole in Silent Hill.

It also suffered from some difficultly spikes that very nearly threatened to stub out the fun. The Diamond Sands level is harder than its namesake gem. The "Backlash" dump truck offered one of gaming's greatest power slides, emphasizing exaggeration over realistic physics, capable of leveling entire buildings; but that you got it after the simple, blunt-force thrills of a bulldozer left some players frustrated by its exacting controls. There was a lack of balance to the proceedings, something current testing standards could help with—back then, it was enough to just blow stuff up.

These are easy fixes, nowadays. Today's consoles could easily manage a Blast Corps with manual zoom camera controls, and if people are getting pissy with the exacting demands of pirouetting a truck into the corner of a condo, just pop in an "easy" mode, making those walls more crepe paper than bricks and mortar. An open-world Blast Corps, now that'd be something. The chore of collecting every little extra would be so much less painful when the uncovering of them meant leveling entire city blocks. Going further still, imagine allowing players to build and share their own levels, like Halo's Forge mode. Factor in time trials and completion bonuses, and a "new" Corps becomes a Twitch magnet.

Originally selling a disappointing million copies, significantly fewer than anticipated, Blast Corps has nevertheless featured in its share of Greatest Ever Nintendo Games lists—but with Microsoft now owning Rare, it's tough to say exactly where the series rights are. Wherever a new version of the game goes, though, should it ever happen—and, please, come on, make it happen—it's important that its devs acknowledge lessons learned in the past 20 years. Don't just release a "remaster" with shinier wheel trims. Put out a Blast Corps with the event structure of Burnout Paradise, the open map of a Grand Theft Auto, the replayable challenges of Hitman, and the joyous incendiary potential of Just Cause 3. Go on. We all know you want to.

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