I lay prone next to a wooden shed, my M16A2 up at the ready. In my sights was a lone enemy figure, some 50 yards away who had just entered my field of view. I bring up the rifle to quickly line up my rear sight with my front sight post. The sights bobbed just slightly to the rhythm of my breath, and as soon as I exhaled, I pulled the trigger. A sharp bang followed by a click.

‘What the hell!’ I thought. A malfunction, much to my dismay. I quickly performed SPORTS (Slap the magazine, Pull the charging handle, Observe the chamber, Release the charging handle, Tap the forward assist and Shoot), but I only got halfway through as the enemy combatant turned toward my direction and delivered a volley of return fire. I could hear wood splinters break off next to me as enemy rounds slammed into the shed and I crawled back for better cover. Sharp cracks from the enemy rounds punctuated my surrounding space and I quickly found myself staring at the dark sky, my vision fading from consciousness.

I was than treated to an aerial view of my teammates and reminder that the round still had a long way to go.”

Just another round in “America’s Army,” the official U.S. Army video game.

Genesis

The U.S. military always had a long-standing issue with recruitment, a problem that would ebb and flow during times of war and good civilian employment. As a result, each service would come up with unique ways to try to get young people interested in joining when Uncle Sam doesn’t have the legal authority to round them up. The Marines had their recruits slay a lava monster, the Air Force peddled their reputation for a high quality of life and abundance of opportunities, and the Navy had the village people. The U.S. Army had none of these, so they had to employ a wide variety of different marketing schemes to attract new recruits. Besides changing one of the best marketing campaigns of the 20th Century to one of the most ill-conceived marketing campaigns in the 21st century, or (maybe?) lowering standards, the Army looked around at what young people were doing and notice one thing in common: video games. Specifically, first-person shooter (FPS) video games.

Box Art (AA version 2) | Moby Games

The game was originally envisioned by Lt. Col Casey Wardynski in 1999, who at the time was the director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point. His idea was to reach out more effectively to young Americans, taking notice of the popularity of first-person shooters among his own young sons. This concept somehow survived the gauntlet of Army bureaucracy that befalls a litany of other “good-idea fairies.” and was given the go-ahead shortly after. The first official full release was in July 2002, dubbed “Recon,” which was a multiplayer component of the game. The game has gone through several different developers over the years, but the latest version is produced by the Army Game Studio, part of the AMRDEC Software Engineering Directorate at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville Alabama.

This Isn’t Doom

The aptly named game, “America’s Army” (usually referred to as AA), was developed and released at a time when a litany of military-themed video games were becoming popular to the public. “Delta Force,” by Novia logic, a tactical first-person loosely based on actual Delta Force, was released in 1998, culminating in the very well received game and the better known “Delta Force: Black Hawk Down” in 2003. The first “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon,” another well-received tactical shooter, was released in 2001. “Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis” was also released in 2001 and featured both shooting and vehicle mechanics. For more arcade action, a popular modification to the base game “Half-Life” was released in 1999 called “Counter-Strike.” Widely popular due to the multiplayer mechanics, it became an instant hit with tournament play and would spawn countless sequels and versions.

It’s obvious there was already fierce competition in the video game market. “America’s Army,” faced with this type of competition and wanting to implement a vast option of gameplay mechanics, split the baby and took a variety of different elements from all of them.