When I started playing "Space Marine" I knew very little about Games Workshop's Warhammer & Warhammer 40K products. Now I'm a pretty big old nerd, the kind of guy who watches "White And Nerdy" and embraces it as my personal theme song, so I was aware something called "Warhammer 40K" existed. Stuff with the label has been semi-ubiquitous in the comic book shops, sci-fi/fantasy specialty book stores and other geeky venues where I've wasted most of my disposable income. Once upon a time, I even played a game called "Warhammer Online". But my disinterest was so complete, nothing Warhammer 40K-related has ever appeared near the top of my list of Amazon recommends (except, of course, "Space Marine" itself). I had some vague notion that the 40K story backdrop was a cross between generic high fantasy and the "Pigs in Space" skits from the old Muppet Show.
During my first hour in "Space Marine" I realized that, (while the Orcs _are_ pretty hilarious) the "Guns of Navarone" storyline took itself way too seriously for Warhammer 40K be experienced only as simple comedy. I've been reading up on Warhammer 40K, both on the Wikipedia and http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/, so now I know a bit more than very little, consider myself an expert and feel entitled to rant at length.
Let's start with a TL;DR tangent about the concept of Ragnarok, the ancient Norse Doomsday myth. According to my garbled and distorted memories of old Thor comics from the 80s, the Vikings miniseries on History Channel and Bullfinch's Mythology, Ragnarok is the epic final battle that will precede the destruction of both Midgard (Earth) and Valhalla (Viking Heaven). The good guys (Odin, Thor, Luke Skywalker, Spongebob, etc...) and all the warriors gathered up by the Valkyries over the centuries will issue out of the mead halls and dive bars of Valhalla for one final glorious battle with the bad guys (Loki, Surtur the Fire Giant/Demon, Darth Sidious, Squidward, etc...) . The bad guys WILL THEN WIN and burn the world to cinders. Hopefully, a few of the good gods will manage to survive and create a gentler, kinder world to replace the old, but there doesn't really seem to be a solid guarantee.
What kind of people create such a mythology? What kind of fatalism must permeate a culture for it to generate a mythic cosmos where the bad gods ultimately triumph? What kind of warrior becomes a berserker believing that his reward for dying gloriously in battle will consist of preparing endlessly to fight in the final battle to preserve the world. ... on the losing side? Is it any wonder that Vikings managed to terrorize everyone from Byzantium to Baffin Island until long after Christian missionaries got their hooks in?
None of that really matters, of course. What's important to understand is that the mythic cosmology of Ragnarok has liberally influenced the entertainment-oriented cosmology of gaming Nerd-dom. Pen and paper RPG source guides, tabletop miniatures rulesets, and video game storylines have been borrowing and bending the concept of the tragic fight for a doomed world for decades now, and serving it back up to the nerd community with varying degrees of success.
The most commercially successful example (at the moment) is, of course, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Skyrim is a cold, icy land inhabited by a people knows as the Norse....err....the Nords. According to ancient Nord prophecy, the king of dragons, Alduin the World Eater, will someday, inevitably, return and destroy the world by bathing it in blood and fire. Then he'll eat it for good measure. With the sort of serendipity almost standard for video game openings, the day of Alduin's return coincides with the day the player finds himself about to be executed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Inadvertently assisted by the World Eater, the player escapes the clutches of his captors and soon discovers he is one of (perhaps the last one of?) the legendary Dragonborn. High adventure and general video game mayhem and hijinks ensue.
While Alduin's creators obviously owe a debt to Tolkein's Smaug, they were also clearly familiar, at least on some level, with Jormungand, The World Serpent. Jormungand is one of the children of Loki, a great serpent wrapped around Midgard with his tail clutched in his teeth. Ragnarok will begin when his jaws release his tail. He is destined to be killed by Thor, but only _after_ poisoning the sky, then mortally wounding Thor himself, dooming all creation in the process. Alduin plays a similar role. His reemergence into the world signals the end times. The optimistic view among the (very few) historically-literate characters encountered by the player is that mankind's reign as master of the world is over. The most educated view is that the literal end of the world is in sight, and there is nothing to be done about it but cower in a hole.
Skyrim is a successful, mass-market video game, so naturally it fails to fully embrace the inherent pessimism and gloom required to truly capture the spirit of Ragnarok. The Dragonborn's job is to take the immovable, unbreakable doom set down by ancient prophecy, pick it up and bounce it over the horizon like a flubber-coated frisbee. When warned that he might stop the birth of a better world, The Dragonborn tells his ancient mentor "The next world can $%^&-ing take care of itself!" (My Dragonborn mentally inserts the expletive, anyway) The Dragonborn finds plenty of opportunity to acquire the physical and magical resources needed to vaporize the World Eater. In the end, its not even really that hard (unless the player heavily mods his game - Deadly Dragons and Dragon Combat Overhaul make the last fight a bit more epic). Skyrim invokes and embraces Ragnarok the way the seasonal goods aisle of a CVS or Walmart embraces zombies, witches and ghouls every October - figures of terror are turned into skimpy Halloween costumes for young women who want to upset their fathers, and molded candy for kids seeking to induldge their cravings for sweets.
This is not a criticism, mind you. I LOVE Skyrim. According to my too-embarrassing-to-be-revealed "hours played" number on Steam, I've spent more time running Skyrim on my PC than all other Steam games put together. And some of those other games have been played in the hundreds of hours. Inside every (male) video gamer is a five year old boy. Feelings of omnipotence and omni-importance apparently appeal to those five year old boys even more than candy. This is the approach of Skyrim to Doomsday. And it's completely typical of the approach to Ragnarok one finds in gaming.
The entire "Warhammer 40K" mythos boldly strikes off in exactly the opposite direction. From what I can tell, the Warhammer 40K source writers took the almost unbearably grim legend of Ragnorak, then excised all the cheery bits about the possible birth of a gentler world with a meat cleaver. The creators then appended images of Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic doom. After Doomsday, the galaxy will be overrun with semi-vampirical Chaos Gods, rival horrors inspired by the movie Alien, and trillions and trillions and trillions of greenskinned goofballs from a race of genetically engineered doomsday bio-weapons that look and act the way Tolkien's Orcs would if they appeared in a "Pigs in Space" skit scripted and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Mankind has an empire spread across a million worlds. But its a nasty, decaying empire where nobody knows how anything actually works, and everything is maintained by a combination of superstition, corruption and poorly understood photocopies of old "Popular Mechanics" articles. There _was_ a glorious, enlightened Golden Age thousands of years in the past (until it was wrecked by the irresponsible frolicking of Space Elves). And later there was a hopeful crusade thousands of years later that _almost_ fixed things. But the crusade failed and there is currently no long-term hope. Humanity's genetically and cybernetically enhanced defenders are fighting a holding action against the inevitable day the perimeter crumbles and genocide proceeds at the hands of tentacled horrors, goat-headed mutants and giant, green-skinned nosepickers from "The Hobbit". And the overwhelming majority of those defenders are half-crazed, bloodthirsty berserkers or suspicious, trigger-happy religious fanatics. Most of the rest are jaded, egotistical prima donnas one bounced paycheck away from shouting "I'm outta here" and defecting to the Chaos Lords. Humanity's best days are in the past, and the few other civilizations out there are in even worse shape. Maybe today, maybe ten-thousand years from now, one too many Space Marines will get their brains sucked out by multi-tentacled horrors, or get buried under a wave of Space Orcs, or simply lose their marbles, and mankind _will_ perish.
Obviously, its easy to milk this sort of thing this for laughs. And, especially with regard to anything Orc-related, Games Workshop and the subtribe of geek-dom that embraces all things "Warhammer" often does, especially when gaming. But it also provides the pathos needed for over-the-top, operatic drama, gothic tragedy and relentless action. A quick perusal on Amazon turns up well over a dozen Warhammer 40K novels, all of which appear to take the backdrop seriously instead of as an excuse to work in "Da red wunz go fasta" jokes.
"Space Marine" takes the tragic, operatic route with its storyline. The player avatar, Captain Titus, is a decent (genetically enhanced super)man, a fearless warrior struggling to protect the people of a world under siege, and to recover from disaster before military necessity compels his superiors to pull the plug and nuke everything (and everyone) from orbit. Mark Strong, the voice actor, deserves real credit for imbuing Titus with just the right balance of determination, humility and humor to really stand out as a heroic figure in a gaming genre filled with mock criminal sociopaths, ridiculous accents, Duke Nukem wannabes, and pseudo-soldiers doing their best imitation of George C. Scott's "Patton". Ditto for the poor, under-appreciated dialogue writer(s) (who, if even mentioned in the game's credits, is so far down the list I can't really be blamed for not finding the name).
"Space Marine" is an excellent game, but it still makes me sad. Very sad, in fact. The storyline embraces the grim ethos of Ragnarok. Where "Skyrim" offers me an escape from a (self-perceived) life of bumbling ineffectiveness and the slow physical decay of middle age, "Space Marine" seems to be more of a metaphor for that life. The Warhammer 40K backdrop is basically a tale of disaster and missed opportunities leading to an not-so-happy apogee. I wish I could say I don't ever view _my_ life that way, but that is probably the dominant internal narrative I now carry around. As it is with the "Empire of Man", I am increasingly aware my physical body is now doomed to slow decay, old-age and death. I might slow the process of entropy a little bit, if I make an effort to exercise and eat right, but ultimately I will only stave off the inevitable. Or maybe not even. I might just trade the risk of cancer and heart disease for musculoskeletal injuries and foodborne diseases. At least processed food will kill me slowly, right?
The game's economic history as a product doesn't cheer me up, either. The developer, Relic Entertainment, meticulously hand-crafted a game that remained true in its storyline, visual presentation and spirit to the nerdy little mythos from which it sprang, while still being great fun to play, even for someone like me who is not a fan of either "Warhammer" or 3D-shooters as genres. Despite appearing to do just about everything right, the developers were shackled to the publisher THQ when it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy soon after the game was published. "Space Marine" wound up orphaned, abandoned and dumped, quite prematurely, in a sort of virtual online bargain bin at Steam and Amazon, priced lower than a ghastly, universally reviled pile of shame like "Duke Nukem Forever". This is ultimately because a man can do everything right and STILL wind up flat on his back. And most of us don't manage to do everything right. That's one of the painful lessons a lot of us refuse to learn before middle age, but that becomes ever harder to deny as dents and dings pile up. And it may, of course, be the central point of the Ragnarok myth. I can almost hear Heimdal's Gjallarhorn ringing, warning Thor, Odin and all the mead-drunk viking ghosts of the approach of giants and the end of all things.
Heck, even the name of the protaganist, Titus, induces personal melancholia and a sense of doom. My favorite sitcom of all time was "Titus", probably the most gloomy sitcom ever made. Every episode opened and closed with Christopher Titus(**please PRETTY PLEASE see final note below**) delivering a monologue simultaneously grim and hilarious in black and white, in a bare room illuminated by a lightbulb he would turn off at the end, sometimes by unscrewing it. "Courage in the face of certain doom" pretty much summed up the collective attitude of the characters, loosely based on Christopher Titus own family, seeking to cope with their various personal and familial dysfunctions. The show was brilliant, hilarious, original, critically acclaimed and filled with the gothic spirit of "Warhammer 40K" or the Ragnarok. And naturally, not that many people watched and it was cancelled halfway through its third season. Titus was even the name of Rome's emperor when when Mt. Vesuvius blew up and covered all those poor people in Pompeii with ash. That has GOT to make the name Titus a pretty gloomy thing. If any Romans were swept up by the Valkyries and taken to Valhalla, their contingent on the fields of Ragnarok will be lead by someone named Titus.
Getting back to Ragnarok, Warhammer 40K, and their relationship to the meaning of everything, maybe it really is about middle age. Maybe the tale of Ragnarok is a good yarn to tell among warriors who know, that eventually they will die on the battlefield, or maybe worse, live past their prime. Either way, death and doom will come. The original Ragnarok myth contains seeds of hope focused on a potential future after the old hands are gone. And that seems to resonate with the growing sense of creeping age, too. I hope for a better life for my kids. And I haven't even needed to go off to war (outside the world of video games, natch) to want that life to be peaceful and free of strife (other than the virtual & 3D rendered sort).
Once again, I'm tired and a little sad, so that's all for now. I suppose at some point I'm obligated to actually discuss the game itself rather than using its existence as a flagpole to run up the dirty laundry of my psyche. But that can wait until tomorrow.
Final Note on Christopher Titus: I could rant and rave about how Christopher Titus is the funniest man alive, but that would take too much time away from plowing through my unplayed Steam Library and ranting about how these games are the key to understanding life, the universe and everything. Instead I will end with a plea for everyone who loves Star Wars, or enjoys comedy, or was a teenager ~1980, or who just has six minutes to kill to watch I was a teenage Darth Vader. Christopher Titus is a very funny man. And that monologue is nerd gold.
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