Terra Firma focused on humanity’s ground war against the Sobrukai after their drones had reached Earth. Armada was an aerospace combat sim released the following year, allowing players to remotely control humanity’s global stockpile of defense drones, and use them to battle the Sobrukai invaders out in space and over the besieged cities of Earth. Since their release, Terra Firma and Armada had become two of the most popular multiplayer action games in the world. I’d played TF religiously when it came out—until Chaos Terrain released Armada the following year, and then it had become my primary videogame obsession. I still played Terra Firma with Cruz and Diehl a few times a week—usually in return for them agreeing to play an Armada mission with me.
Ray also frequently coerced me into playing TF with him here at work, so my infantry drone skills were still sharp. This was essential, because in Terra Firma, the size and power of the drones you were allowed to control during each mission was based on your overall combat skill rating. Newbie players were only authorized to operate the smallest and cheapest combat drones in the EDA’s arsenal. Once you increased in rank and skill, you were allowed to pilot increasingly bigger and more advanced drones—Spartan hover tanks, Nautiloid attack submarines, and the EDA’s largest and most impressive weapon, the Titan Warmech—a giant humanoid robot that looked like something out of an old Saturday morning cartoon.
Ray happened to be controlling a Warmech at that very moment, and he was in trouble. I watched as a horde of alien Spider Fighters closed in on him. His mech finally succumbed to the incoming barrage of laser fire and toppled backward into a large tenement building, demolishing it. He and I both winced—in Terra Firma, players got penalized for all of the property damage caused by their drones in combat—intentional or otherwise.
Although the game’s backstory embraced a lot of tired alien invasion tropes, it subverted many of them, too. For example, the Sobrukai weren’t actually invading Earth in person—they were using drones to do it. And humanity had constructed its own stockpile of drones to repel them. So all of the aerospace fighters, mechs, tanks, subs, and ground troops used by both sides were remotely controlled war machines—each one operated by an alien or human who was physically located somewhere far from the battlefield.
From a purely tactical standpoint, using drones made a hell of a lot more sense than using manned (or aliened) ships and vehicles to wage an interplanetary war. Why risk the lives of your best pilots by sending them into combat? Now whenever I watched a Star Wars film, I found myself wondering how the Empire had the technology to make long-distance holographic phone calls between planets light-years apart, and yet no one had figured out how to make a remote-controlled TIE Fighter or X-Wing yet.
A warning message flashed on Ray’s HUD: your drone has been destroyed! Then his display went dark for a second before a new message flashed on his HUD, informing him that he had just been given control of a new drone. But since all of his unit’s larger drones and tanks had already been destroyed, Ray was forced to take control of the only thing they had left. An ATHID—Armored Tactical Humanoid Infantry Drone.
From the neck down, an ATHID looked similar to the original Terminator, after all of Arnie’s cyborg flesh got burned away, leaving only its armored chrome skeleton underneath. But in place of a human-shaped head, each ATHID had a stereoscopic camera encased inside an armored acrylic dome, giving it a vaguely insect-like appearance. Every ATHID was armed with a Gauss mini-gun mounted on each forearm, a pair of shoulder-mounted missile launchers, and a laser cannon embedded in its chest plate.
I watched over Ray’s shoulder as he used his ATHID’s twin mini-guns to mow down an onslaught of Sobrukai Spider Fighters—eight-legged antipersonnel robots—that were attacking him on the roof of a burning tenement building, somewhere near the center of the besieged city he was helping defend. He was bobbing his head in time to his favorite TF battle soundtrack song, “Vital Signs” by Rush. Ray claimed that its unique time signature matched up perfectly with the alien Spider Fighter drones’ erratic swarming patterns, making it easier for him to anticipate their movements and rate of attack. He also claimed that each of the other songs on Rush’s Moving Pictures album was perfect for battling a different Sobrukai drone. Personally, I’d always assumed this was just an excuse he’d concocted for playing that same album on a continuous loop, day after day.