April 30, 2024|

Filed under: Editorial

Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 4: Bald Whitem’n and the Case of the Missing Franchise

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.

“Oh, settle down. If you had anything important to do, you wouldn’t be playing a game.”—Matt Hazard, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

It got a sequel, you know. It was called Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond and came out a year later for XBLA and PlayStation Network. No one remembers it. When I put together the list of games for this series, I singled out Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard as, among other things, a good option for showing never-were IPs. The kind of franchises people were trying to make back in the late 2000’s that landed like a lead balloon. And yet, it got a sequel—a small, 2D retro one, to be sure, but one nonetheless. That does add a fun wrinkle to the proceedings. This was a franchise, technically, briefly, and then it wasn’t. Just disappeared.

Image: Source Gaming. Level 1 of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. Set in an elegant Japanese steakhouse, it gives you generic weapons… which are not that different from the guns you get in the wackier levels.

The late Aughts were, for a gamer as “artsy” as my teenage self, a wasteland as dopey Nineties rebelliousness curdled into a mean, reactionary phase. It was a sea of ugly gunplay, exploration, and marketing cycles. These were games about things that were hard and real and serious, like shooting racial stereotypes with real world guns or finding collectables. Thankfully, they weren’t the only games being made or the only ones that were successful. But ugly blockbusters about modern war, bloated sandboxes, and cheap cinematic thrills drove the industry. This tone, this gun metal gray attitude and aesthetic, was the carrot, with the stick being harsh economic realities that would only get harsher. Several of these games still carry well-earned respect. Most—Kane & Lynch, Haze, Too Human, Ride to Hell: Retribution, Homefront: The Revolution, Dark Void—have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Every era has its dross, but we spent the Seventh Generation of Gaming drowning in it. Today’s obsessions with open worlds, cutting edge graphics, and live services are literally killing this industry, but they’re less embarrassing.

It was in this era that a certain type of hero emerged. He was tough. He didn’t have time for anything egg-headed, and he’d make sure every NPC knew. Maybe he had a wife who was murdered, or raped, or turned into his robot arm. And he was great with a gun… or a sword, in the rare case that he was in a fantasy setting. I like to call him “Bald Whitem’n” (though he wasn’t always white or bald), but he’s known by many names: Nathan Drake, Isaac Clarke, Niko Bellic, Cole McGrath, John Marston, Frank West, Geralt of Rivia, Rico Rodriguez, Commander Shepard, Alan Wake, Marcus Fenix, and far more still. While some of them were good, even great, the vast majority weren’t—just ask Jet Brody, star of Fracture. It’s abundantly clear that the industry was struggling to make compelling new mascots and picked this grizzled archetype as one they thought would resonate best with the hip, modern audience. Of course, this only furthered the problem of these games being too samey, and by the early 2010s Bald Whitem’n had become a joke. It’s why Chris Redfield circa 2012 is a steroidal action movie hero and Chris Redfield circa 2021 is a middle-aged PTSD survivor. As a culture, we got just a bit wiser.

Image: Source Gaming. Matt Hazard: Bald Whitem’n personified.

Matt Hazard is a Bald Whitem’n, too. He looks like one of the shiftless meatheads Timothy Olyphant would beat holy hell out of in Deadwood and Justified. He hates getting instructions, constantly calls his obligatory hacker sidekick “babe” against her wishes, and leaves a trail of bodies in his wake. He blasts enemies from cover and survives their onslaughts with regenerating health. In fact, there’s only one thing different about Mr. Hazard: he knows he’s in a video game. In a spin on Toy Story three years before Wreck-It Ralph, Hazard is a gaming icon from yesteryear who’s fallen on hard times. After a series of poor career choices, like a nonviolent water gun shooter that weirdly presages Splatoon’s blockbuster success, his life is in the gutter. And while this third person shooter seems like the best way to refurbish his public image, a shadowy mendacity by a new executive threatens not only his very digital existence but those of his fellow mascots at Marathon Megasoft.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is full of references to its eponymous hero’s career that poke fun at Mario Kart, BioShock, and Contra, but it went far beyond the game itself. D3 Publisher put out a trove of box art, screenshots, and promotional websites for games of his that never existed but might have in some other universe. The first trailer was an Inside the Music spoof. Gamasutra and PlayStation Magazine got in on the game with fictional histories and interviews with the Hazard character. This kind of viral hype cycle was fairly novel for the time. The fictional history was intriguing, since we were a few years before the retro boom would fully explode (though back then I was mostly suspicious of the humor). Plus, many of the games being spoofed—Metal Gear Solid 2, for instance, whose “protagonist switcharoo” twist is a very real fate looming over our hero—were classics far more colorful than the dry, realistic, boring cover shooters publishers were hocking then. You know, shooters like Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the fictional games of Hazard’s past: a Mario Kart parody—and a Smash Bros. parody, going by Captain Carpenter on the cover. This is about as clever a title as you get here; the rest are on the level of “Crown of Light” (Halo), “Conflict of the Deities” (God of War), and “Penultimate Illusion” (Final Fantasy).

Information on the actual, real world history behind Eat Lead is unfortunately sparse. It was a notable outlier from Vicious Cycle Software, whose material—the cult PSP game Dead Head Fred aside—was kid-friendly fare based on IPs like Dora the Explorer, Ben 10, and the DreamWorks flop Flushed Away. Their main “property” was not a game but an in-house engine. By the time they made Matt Hazard, they had been purchased by D3 Publisher (now D3 Go!); in 2014 they were sold to Little Orbit, who shuttered them two years later after waves of layoffs. From a distance, they appear to have been a very standard Aughts-era studio. Their stability was built on licensed tie-ins years before that market collapsed, they needed to expand in size to account for next gen development, and they appear to have been hit with sea changes well beyond their control. Many companies just like Vicious died throughout the Seventh Generation. The move to HD cost too much, swaths of the market bottomed out, and long term stability was barely a concern. Of course, it’s impossible to talk about this and not think about the industry’s current upheaval.

Image: Source Gaming. A standard battle in Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard.

Mechanically, Matt Hazard happily follows the leader in the era’s most defining genre. It is a cover shooter and little else. You hunker down behind objects and return fire, something you probably did in Gears of War or Resident Evil 5 or GTA4. With ammo relatively scarce and Hazard only able to carry two guns at once, you regularly grab pistols, rifles, and sub machine guns off the ground. There’s a mechanic where you can add temporary fire and ice effects to them. The most interesting idea is that because this is a glitchy video game, many of the objects used for cover will be removed from the game after taking too much punishment, but it’s not particularly dynamic. While the previous subjects of “Gun Metal Gaming” had gameplay that was innovative, challenging, and surprising, this is very typical of the late 2000s.

Image: Source Gaming. This level starts as a factory before an executive mandated glitch warps in this Wild West level. It turns back into a factory that’s also a dance club later, though. These shifts are common but fairly forgettable.

That extends to the level design. Generally speaking, each level dumps Hazard into a bunch of corridors to rescue one of his friends, like Dexter Dare (the Luigi to Hazard’s Mario in the Matt and Dexter spinoff), Bill “the Wizard” Schindler (an Wizardry-type mage whose voice is a staticy William Shatner impression), or Master Chef (perhaps the laziest joke I’ve ever seen in a game). Sometimes the corridors are a boat, sometimes they’re a mansion, and most often they’re a factory. The enemy types, all baddies from Hazard’s old games, are recycled throughout. That means zombies and Wild West gunslingers and, for some reason, overalls-clad gunsels. There are also hardcore special ops types packing the squirt guns from that one embarrassment and, far grosser, simulacra of various female co-stars Dexter has programmed into his game as personal sex objects—you know, a very real problem of AI proliferation. The only interesting ones are lookalikes of the Nazis from Wolfenstein 3D, since their 2D pixelation is both fun and an actual gameplay mechanic; you literally can’t shoot them if they turn sideways.

Image: Source Gaming. The Wolfenstein losers in a shocking moment, where Hazard walks through a doorway in the dock level and winds up in a pastiche of Wolfenstein itself. There’s nothing like this moment at all in the rest of the game. Even more shocking is that it beat Wolfenstein: The New Order, which sent BJ Blazkowicz through his game’s pixelated hallways in traumatic nightmares, by half a decade.

Probably the most notable aspect of the gameplay is how bad it is. Our hero is chunky, slow, and struggles with a cover mechanic that you’ll desperately need even on the Easy Mode I used (there’s actually a button that automatically sends you to a safe spot, but I found it unreliable). The shooting is rote. Your default “Hazard Pistol” carries no weight; the water guns feel stronger. There’s a stiffness to everything. And each new mechanic only makes things worse. Turret sections protecting one character, inversions where you dodge an invincible sniper, and quick time event boss fights do more to put out the energy than ignite it. A sequence with a tentacled monstrosity on a pirate ship, a dead ringer for God of War’s famous Hydra battle, is nigh-unplayable due to the “behind the shoulder” camera hiding the tentacles’ one-hit kills. Actually, insta-kills are very common, and it’s telling that they come from the stuff atypical of military shooters. The game fitfully tries to incorporate content from more exciting genres and years, but they all get funneled indelicately.

Maybe it’s unfair to criticize the gunplay of a shooter, given that this is, in theory, a comedy first and foremost. Eat Lead is meant to be a zany meta farce about the struggles of living through video game history. Hazard is even voiced by Arrested Development’s Will Arnett, and Neil Patrick Harris plays Wallace Wellesley, the CEO who wants Hazard to get a Game Over—the only way of voiding his contract, somehow—because his games were just too hard for him as a kid. Arnett is exceptional at jerkish monomaniacs (“GOB” Bluth, LEGO Batman, Bojack Horseman) who have a heart less of gold than deep despair. Harris, meanwhile, is both nerd royalty—this was between Dr. Horrible and “Mayhem of the Music Meister”—and someone who knows the score; he’s the only one in Starship Troopers who seems to be in on the joke. To a broader extent, the two are useful for showing a practice that has gone out of fashion in the industry: the celebrity voice actor. While plenty of famous actors still contribute to games, of course, stunt casting was bigger back then. It was mixed, too; for every chilling Martin Sheen in Mass Effect there’d be a bored Patrick Stewart or two in Oblivion, or even whole franchises like Kingdom Hearts built around miscast celebrities. How does it work here? Well, Arnett is, unsurprisingly, fully on autopilot, and Harris is perfectly fine with some truly terrible material. The game desperately needs life the two aren’t giving.

Image: Source Gaming. A decent example of Eat Lead‘s attempt at comedy is in this title for Level 4. It’s a sex joke, a lazy one at that, but it’s also self-conscious about being a sex joke. It’s this obnoxious nudging that defines a lot of the experience.

The game is most interesting when it’s world building. Essentially, Hazard is a sort of unholy fusion of Mario’s history and Duke Nukem’s persona. He got to be in cart racers and the first shooters and still tanked his career by being a selfish ass. His new rival, wildly out of date Arnold Schwarzenegger pastiche Sting Sniperscope, is the traditional Bald Whitem’n; he’s the “next gen freak” threatening to replace the colorful icons of yesteryear. That was a real fear back then. Mario’s actual counterpart Captain Carpenter is an appropriately humble everyman behind every exploding barrel and mana potion (and while he has stiflingly unfunny nods to Brick Blocks and mushrooms, he’s also the only character written with real affection). And then there’s JRPG hero Altos Tratus. The sixth level’s boss has a silly bishōnen design, a personal HUD with an HP meter that actually dynamically falls from your attacks, and a propensity for ellipsis-laden monologues—all through text boxes, since his series never incorporated voice acting. His genre and Hazard’s collide viscerally, which makes for a terrible fight but a captivating image. Beats like that and the goofy German pixel enemies are special, not just because they are fun but because they suggest a far more magical world. And probably a better version of Eat Lead, one I suspect the developers had in mind from the start.

Image: Souce Gaming. Captain Carpenter, the only likable character in Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. He honestly lifts it up just a bit. The 2D Nazis and the Cloud Strife parody show up right afterwards, making Level 6 the best area by default.

While the game has fun poking at franchising and gaming trends, its primary comedy prop is lampshading, that practice of referencing a thing’s quirk or flaw or oddity as a joke. I’m very mixed on the trope, and Eat Lead shows exactly why: these are mostly complaints by Hazard about things that we as players still have to deal with. After the second interminable sniper turret section, he’s annoyed he can’t take the gun with him. If he gets hurt, he asks why there aren’t health packs. He complains about the drab level design, the boring tutorials, the admittedly many ellipses in Altos’s dialogue, the cut interrogation mini-game, your gaming skills, and the load times which were presumably much worse fifteen years ago. And it’s not just him; the instructions get in on the action by pointing out its own clichés.

Image: Source Gaming. Hazard exhausted at how extensive JRPG dialogue can be.

There are many reasons why works of art do this. Sometimes, it’s to show solidarity with a frustrated audience. Sometimes it’s rebellion by a staff stuck on something whose quality is far out of their control (something true of virtually all games. Programmers aren’t lazy, even if bad jokes are). Sometimes it’s a smokescreen when making a fix is beyond time or budget or the thing’s own vision. Most of the time, it’s just a poor sense of humor. But, no matter what, it doesn’t deal with the fundamental problem, which in this case is that Matt Hazard is a slog with an actively unpleasant protagonist. Most of those Bald Whitem’n types were boring men, and Hazard is exceptionally boring: whiny, incurious, and oafish without a trace of wit. Lampshading lets you gesture towards subversiveness without actually being subversive, which is a perfect way to describe a game that is, jokes and the occasional wacky moment aside, identical to every other bad shooter of the Seventh Generation. It’s just passive aggressive about it.

Comedy wasn’t gone in the Aughts, of course. But I wouldn’t call it a particularly funny or witty decade; its humor came mostly from angrily punching down. South Park, JibJab, ugly three camera sitcoms, and the worst of GTA got laughs by demeaning its marks, often by the violent antiheroes that also defined the decade. Gaming had plenty of those as well, and a few were operating as deconstruction—Travis Touchdown, for instance, who in the first No More Heroes was a fairly scathing indictment of toxic gamer culture. But that was the exception. Most existed to push a jockish faux-maturity, like Kratos’ wanton violence in God of War, or generic edgy humor on the level of Raz from Psychonauts cheerfully setting squirrels on fire. This was what it was like to live in the Bush Era. Everyone was hostile, and everyone pretended we weren’t. It was all cruelty and gaslighting. A lot of comedy followed that. The games industry did, too.

That deep-seated resentment powers this game like a battery. That’s the lampshading; it’s humor born of irritation. But you also have the villain as a coded “filthy casual” ruining real games. It’s ugly, but it’s also a potshot at what was a heavily overreported phenomenon, not unlike the many jokes about the Soak ‘Em water gun game that sank Hazard’s career. That satirizes the prevalence of overly sanitized kiddie games, but in the era where the M-rating became the default for any game that mattered (and this joke was made in a thoroughly T-rated shooter. The sequel was the one with the real cursing). So many of the jabs are hitting one strawman or another that barely existed in 2009, if ever. In fact, there are a lot of contemporary targets the game surprisingly ignores. It does barely anything with its own genre, and nothing with the prevalence of DLC or sandboxes or Bloom lighting or cinematic aspirations… The closest you get are with the Achievements, which openly mock the obsession with “gamerscores” and, in one case, the trend of terrible, executive-demanded deathmatch modes.

Image: Source Gaming. It’s not just cheap game references and negativity, though. There are also several Looney Tunes references, and bizarre ones at that: FRAGGMEE instead of ACME (though maybe that’s a Wii reference, too?), the Wassup Dock that serves as Level 8, and the plot’s kind of a tired take on Duck Amuck.

The thing that galls me about the jokes isn’t even the meanness or the blandness. I’ve reviewed things for Source Gaming that were actively unfunny. It’s how they could’ve done so much with this premise. Like, in the very first level, we run afoul of an absurd and rather upsetting 1970s jive caricature. Before their conversation dovetails into the game’s first button prompt boss fight, Hazard accuses him of having gotten “the wrong script,” because this Japanese steakhouse is supposedly a modern setting (this joke happens again a few minutes later with the Arnold pastiche). He doesn’t respond. Then right in Level 2, we’re accosted by the cowboy and Soviet baddies Hazard fought in A Fistful of Hazard and You’ll Only Die Once, but there’s no indication they have any awareness of their jobs. Outside our hero and his co-stars, no one seems to know they’re in a game. A conversation or two between goons references the silly tropes of enemy AI behavior—more lampshading—but nothing beyond that.

Image: Source Gaming. The deeply unfortunate Sonny Tang, a character who’s somehow in a game from 2009 and not a deeply ill-conceived Luke Cage villain from four decades earlier.

It’s a real shame the weird Toy Story premise goes out the window almost immediately. Imagine if, say, each stock enemy model was treated as an actual character, and they and Hazard could chat with each other over the course of the level as they keep getting killed and reloaded in as cannon fodder. Maybe one of the background dancers in the nightclub could talk about being an NPC in different kinds of games, and debating whether or not this is a career low. I’m holding off on prohibitively expensive suggestions like additional mechanics or wilder level design, but even just some changes to the writing could add a lot. We’re given a world where video game characters are real, but there’s only a few real video game characters.

In the eighth and final level, Hazard storms a digital version of the Marathon headquarters, humiliates Wellesley, and gets corporate to resurrect his IP. It’s far too long, gloriously idiotic, and manages one great idea—Wellesley forces the company’s entire staff to join the assault, meaning you’re fighting enemies with the same regenerating health as you. Things were worse off in the real world. In spite of a loud publicity circuit, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard had negligible impact. Its reviews were mixed, which is to say they went below the “80%” positive range that “real” gamers consider the minimum level of acceptability. It did get the sequel (which I assume started production before the first game launched and seems to be what Vicious wanted to make all along), thus validating the “return” in the title, but that was it. Perhaps its greatest accomplishment was winning “Best Comedy Game” uncontested at the Spike Video Game Awards, a perfect marriage of subject and medium. Critics actually did praise its humor, which I chalk up to either poor taste or everyone being starved for subversive material.

Image: Source Gaming. The equally bonkers and tiring final level, where Hazard cuts a swath through the game’s development team. It’s one of the few moments where Eat Lead feels like something close to clever.

Today, this game feels utterly, shockingly out of date. Outside of the moments where one genre intrudes on another, like the 2D enemies or the Final Fantasy parody, nothing lands. It doesn’t even have captions, the most basic accessibility option (which you’d think would be key for a game that prided itself on its writing). Characters like Hazard are passé now, and while the idea of a meta comedy isn’t, I don’t think the execution would fly for a current mainstream production in any way. As modern players, we expect more from these kinds of jokes and these kinds of characters. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that the joyless gameplay has aged less poorly than the obnoxious, self-satisfied dialogue. Matt Hazard tried to be a spoof of the 2000s’ dull gaming culture, and a paean to “how things used to be,” and ended up a straight example. Instead of undermining the worst tropes of 2009, it perpetuated them.

Image: Source Gaming. All in all, the whole affair is just… sad. Sad and slow.

To what extent Eat Lead is instructive, it is as a barometer of how far we’ve come. Good video game comedy is still limited, but more of it’s available and more of it is good. There’s well written dialogue in Ace Attorney and Paper Mario, but we also have works like Hitman or Untitled Goose Game that build their gameplay around farce and slapstick. UNDERTALE, The Stanley Parable, and (to a much lesser extent) Pony Island are just a few modern meta games that do so much with their fourth wall breaks, even using it for drama or horror. Plenty of games today are also better at celebrating gaming histories, and real ones at that, whether they be Super Smash Bros., Sony’s Astro’s Playroom, or the best compilation bundles. Those antiheroes I mentioned? Well, Travis, Kratos, and Raz have all changed with the times to become smarter, richer protagonists. Even stunt casting can work today, if what I’ve heard about George Takei in Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Queen Latifah in Sayonara Wild Hearts is any indication. And, of course, while the archetype still exists and problems of tone and representation persist, the era of Bald Whitem’n feels over. We have overcome the 2000s’ outward ugliness, if not our inner ugliness. If I’m right and Eat Lead did believe in some kind of gaming golden age, perhaps it never existed and will never come back, but it feels a lot closer than it did back then.