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Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
You might have caught it in the news: Sony infuriated absolutely everyone recently with a single blog post (usually it’s me who does that) announcing that, come the big year 2028, PlayStation owners can wave goodbye to physical media. It’s the information superhighway or the, ah, highway from here on out—your games will be digital or they will be nothing at all.
The tide of anger at Sony was such that it was only temporarily diverted when Xbox CEO Asha Sharma spent a Monday marching from studio to studio with a chainsaw and a can-do attitude.
I suppose Sony’s antics are old-hat to you and me. We are PC people; we have been de facto digital-only for over a decade at this point (almost two for me, to be honest: I made my Steam account in 2009). The last time I built a PC with a disc drive was back in 2015, and I didn’t use it for anything but moving around photos.
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Nevertheless, Sony’s war on the physical realm got me thinking: what was the first big-box PC game I remember handling, back when I was a speck of a boy at a hulking Fujitsu desktop? Was it good? Was it an all-time classic, rightly embodied in unconquerable materiality?
Tunnel vision
No. It was Tunnel B1, a 1996 first-person shooter that asks ‘What if a hovercraft had machine guns?’ and which no one but me remembers. It’s an odd thing—despite its year of release, it feels like a transitional fossil between dime-guzzling arcade shooters and something more modern, more narrative, more id-inflected.
It is a messy beast of a game that does not really have all that much going on, which I imagine is why its Wikipedia article cites contemporary GamePro reviewers Scary Larry and Dr Zombie as feeling pretty ho-hum about it. We should go back to being called things like Scary Larry. I’m just called Josh. It’s terrible.
I remember turning it over in my hands, fascinated by the screenshots. What wonders were contained within?
I was mesmerised by Tunnel B1 as a kid. I don’t know how my household came to possess it or why, but I remember finding it parked in my dad’s CD collection. Amid a stack of Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers albums, there it was: a weird gold-ish box with a very startled guy in a gas mask on the front, making direct eye contact with me.
I remember turning it over in my hands, fascinated by the screenshots. What wonders were contained within? What could it be about? The box suggested speed, danger, maybe a hint of terror—the wide-eyed gas-mask guy was sure worried about something.
Long before I had put the disc in the drive (or made my dad put the disc in the drive—I couldn’t reach it), I had an entire world of Tunnel B1 mapped out in my head. This was, doubtless, the greatest game ever made. It had action and drama, enormous guns and vehicles whose treads turned the whole world to mulch beneath them. I would emerge a different person from playing it, my life delineated into pre-B1 and post-B1 eras.
You can replicate the experience for yourself, if you like, thanks to the wonderful archive over at Big Box Collection (though my copy was not “Komplett in Deutsch”).
I am focusing so much on the tactile and aesthetic experience of ol’ B1 because my memory of actually playing it is, well, hazy. Far hazier than my memory of the fantasies I built up around it. So hazy, in fact, that I repurchased it on Steam (for £0.89, which I will absolutely be expensing).
The troubling news is that there’s a reason my memories are muddy—Tunnel B1 is not the remarkable, life-altering game my six-year-old brain imagined. You race down a series of circuitous highways in your hoverthing, blasting enemy turrets and vehicles with your guns that you can upgrade by racing over pick-ups. Some levels are timed, in an attempt by the game’s designers to sort of gesture vaguely at tension. It’s all based heavily around attaining a spot on a scoreboard in that charming, videogames-of-old sort of way.
The levels are all essentially the same sickly green highway, challenging you on occasion to ram a button to open a door, and your weapons are limp and unspectacular—your machine guns sound like someone is crinkling tin foil in an adjacent room, your rockets spurt directionlessly from your nozzle. This is not Doom or Quake; the gunplay is geriatric.
Sometimes you will zoom over a new weapon or pick-up, and the estranged wife of Microsoft Sam will chime in to tell you what it was in a dazed, bored sort of way. “More. Energy” she says on a health pickup, maybe as a statement, maybe as a request.
The best part is that you really do move fast. Your hovercraft has two modes: stationary and practically out of control. You are more pinball than pilot, bouncing off walls and obstacles and Czech hedgehogs as you proceed in the vague direction of something that is very probably your goal.
In other words, it’s not something I should remember. I played a lot of games as a kid, many of them bad, and all of them except Tunnel B1 appeared on our family computer courtesy of a family friend who knew how to do piracy in the mid-to-late ’90s: digital distribution in an early skunkworks form. Those games—the bad ones? I’ve forgotten them all, but goddammit I remember Tunnel B1 like I was running my thumbs over its corners five seconds ago.
You see where I’m going with this. I might’ve made my peace with being a 21st century digital boy in my current PC videogame-playing career, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t lost anything, and it doesn’t mean we don’t all lose something when the entire concept of physical media goes away. And, yes, Sony says that—over in console land—it will keep selling codes in boxes at retailers, but we can all see the road they’re headed down here, right?
I don’t think it’s pure boomer nostalgia to say that there was something a little magical about the videogame box, a physical vessel into which your child mind could pour all its energy, warping the actual game within into something far grander and stranger than it could ever be in practice.
Those kinds of fantasies, pawing over game boxes my parents could not afford to buy me in shopping centres and second-hand stores, were a really vital part of me falling in love with videogames growing up. Can kids today feel the same way about a Steam page, an App Store download?
Well, maybe. I’m not one of them, and I might just be an old man waxing nostalgic for a world that—like all worlds—only existed for a brief moment in time. But I think something does get lost when you leave behind the material world, if only my moonstruck boyhood fantasies of whatever was in the box of Tunnel B1.
