CLOSE COMBAT V: INVASION NORMANDY

Twenty years later, this RTS is still just as innovative.

- Steven Messner

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE October 2000

PUBLISHER Mattel Interactive

DEVELOPER Atomic Games

LINK bit.ly/2ViLhqN

During the frigid Canadian winters, the forest behind my house became a battlefield. Every night I’d meet my friends there and distribute our collection of toy guns, and then we’d reenact the scenes we had seen in war movies. I vividly remember sitting in the snow, back against a tree, pretending I was pinned down by my friend, who was now a German sniper. I was ten years old, and blessed with an absurdly active imagination. Immersion was everything, so crawling for an hour through freezing slush just to get to safety was not out of the question.

This was just one of the ways my childlike fascination with war manifested itself. Between gory drawings of battlefields or watching what few WWII documentaries I was allowed to see, ten-year-old me was obsessed with the thrill and glory of battle. Naturally, that troubled the hell out of my parents, who knew that war wasn’t glamorous or cool. But despite them trying to tell me otherwise, that realization only hit me the first time I booted up Close Combat on our family PC. This real-time strategy game was unlike any other I’d played, and it quickly taught me that war is a lot more horrifying than my kid brain could comprehend.

Reinstalling Close Combat V today, it’s funny that I initially found its low-res battlefields so harrowing. But even if its graphics haven’t aged well, there’s still something unique and innovative about one of PC gaming’s forgotten real-time strategy games.