Delta Force. If you were a kid growing up in the 90s, you probably saw movies about cool special forces guys. Back in the day, we, kids who never grew up in the US, knew shit about NAVY SEALS. I think there was no YouTube, and NAVY SEALS had no platform to tell people they were NAVY SEALS. We knew about Green Berets and Delta Force. Movies, books, TV series, games – you name it. The toughest, meanest, built different kind of guys. Guys with the mindset.
So, as soon as I saw a game called Delta Force, I was ready to sell my soul to play it. Yeah, when you’re a kid, approximately 8-9 years old, you’re ready to sell your soul at least six times a day for some weird or completely irrelevant shit. But this time, this shit was relevant. It was a game about just the coolest guys in the world, Delta Force.
It happened like that. I was at my friend’s place. We were playing Syndicate (yes-yes, the same game that started my lifelong obsession with the cyberpunk genre). At some point, I went to his room and saw a CD (back then we had CDs, and before that, we had floppy disks) with the Delta Force game. I asked what it was, and my friend told me something like: “Oh, that’s a shitty game, you can take it.” Now, it was years before I got access to the internet and could find information about Delta Force (and find out that real stories were even more bizarre and hardcore than whatever Hollywood could produce), but even with my limited knowledge, I knew – this came can’t be shit. This game is about Delta motherfucking Force, for fuck’s sake!
So obviously, I took the game, brought it home, installed it, ran. It looked cool, it looked realistic as fuck. Of course, I couldn’t understand shit. It was in the English language, and back then, I had a very limited understanding of the English language (I have one now, so you could imagine what shit show was back then) thus, naturally, I understood shit. I didn’t know who I was, where I came from, and where I should go. All I knew (since I was raised on Doom, Contra, and such games) I had to find enemies and kill them. That’s what I did.
I ran where the map asked me to. Saw some distant dots, and long story short, I got killed. Why? Because my dumb ass played on the hardest difficulty possible, and I didn’t know how to use the scope. But I also had a mindset. I went for another round and another round. Right till eventually, I got the idea of using a scope (now that was fucking awesome, I could zoom black dots and see some jerks who were shooting at me) and could deal some precise damage in response. I beat the first level by killing everything alive. Now that felt like a real Delta Force kind of game.
And just when I felt like the king of the world, the problem started. My lack of English knowledge played a joke on me. I think it was the second or third mission. I did everything as usual. Ran around, killed everything in sight, and all this fun shit before facing a problem. I didn’t know what to do next. I butchered the entire map, and it still wasn’t the end of it. Turns out there was a mission to blow up crates. I found it sometime later (I think by growing desperate and throwing grenades at everything), and when I found it out, it was a miracle. I could go further.
After that, I think the game was nothing but a piece of cake. Besides one mission where you had to ambush the convoy at night (had to learn how to use explosives), everything was a piece of cake. I just ran around and shot everything at sight, and it was fun. I enjoyed being this one-man army and also enjoyed having teammates running around. Before, in games like Doom, I was alone, and now having someone to back me up and even be useful (bots here were actually useful, they could snipe enemies and did their assault thing according to some plan they had, yeah, it was scripted, but it worked, so I can’t complain) seemed like a revolution to me.
I don’t remember what happened to this game. Whether I returned the CD or left it for myself. I remember trying to explain to my friend that the game was actually cool, and he had to give it a chance. But he already moved on and wasn’t interested. I think he had Quake 2 at the moment, and let’s be honest. Quake 2 was the shit. Few games could hold the race against Quake 2. Well, maybe Half-Life could, but I didn’t play it then. You also know, I checked the dates of game releases on Google, and it shocks me how all those games were published in 1997, 1998, or 1999. Those three years were golden. Each year had at least one or two epic games that revolutionized the gaming industry. Those were truly the golden times for the gaming community.
But back to Delta Force. Basically, Delta Force was my introduction to the world of hardcore tactical shooters. Now I know it’s far from being hardcore or tactical. Everything is basically solved by scoping enemies from far-far away. And Doom on Nightmare (I think it is a legitimate skill level, or maybe I’m wrong) and Contra were much-much more hardcore, if not impossible at times (well, Doom is still impossible for me, I’m not good at Doom). But this was maybe the first game about special forces where there was some kind of map, objectives, clear goals, and it was based on the real stuff.
Of course, later, I got into Rainbow Six Rogue Spear, Operation Flashpoint, Hidden and Dangerous, and Special Forces (there were this series of games, I didn’t play them much, but have a memory or two about them, Winter Ops in particular) and found out what real hardcore tactical shooters mean. But before that, this game seemed as real as it could be to me. And that was nice.