History is a series of repeating cycles meshing like gears in varying but finite permutations. The saving grace of this eternally restless sturm und drang is the return of past works to relevance, and the power to mine new meaning from them in the revealing light of a different sociopolitical configuration. It is in the spirit of reclaiming and transfiguring the past in the service of our present that we endeavor to redeem works which, at first blush, were perhaps too far ahead of their time to be appropriately evaluated.
1994 was a more carefree era, utterly free of the specters of unpopular Middle Eastern wars. It could be considered, by all right-thinking sorts, the last “golden age” of America before culture began its inexorable slide into a vapid and irredeemable abyss. The music was better, the fashion trends were better; everything was unspoiled and pure for the final known time in Western history. It was in this environment of perfect bliss that Revolution X was released, and it struck as disharmonious with the immaculate perfection of America’s salad days.
As far as the philistines of the past, wallowing in the excess of meaningful culture they were so gifted, it appeared to be a poor game. To wit, it was panned unceremoniously, and in the 18 years since then it has been largely resigned to the status of ephemeral trivia. Detritus-like flotsam on the ebbing eddies of our collective consciousness, which has fluid and watery currents like a liquid sea. But armed with the wisdom and time devoted to hundreds of hours spent with this title, I have the authority to conclusively declare the game not only a lost classic, but a chilling warning of the obliteration of Western Society. Still, for the sake of my journalistic and editorial and critical integrity, I played the game again.
Spoilers follow.
First and foremost, a close reading of the setting and key beats of the story. Aerosmith, used to represent a variety of ideas, are first used as a visual metaphor for the loss of innocence in the 1970s when they are abducted by the sinister “New Order Nation”. In a brilliant inversion of the normalized and hoary tropes of writers, is a direct representation of the Illuminati influence overseeing the decline of the Western world in preparation of transferal of power and our enslavement to the rising East. This of course places it in a canon spanning decades, from Red Dawn (movie) to Revolution X (game) to Homefront (Red Dawn (movie) game) to Red Dawn (movie), but that’s for another time.
While most weaponry at the player’s disposal are more tradition fare like guns and shields and bombs, it is the other collectibles and gameplay mechanisms that further delve into its eerie prescience. The use of CDs (compact discs), acquired in pack of three and ten and tossed about as weaponry with often hundreds to be wielded, are a forebear to the rise of digital media and the obsolescence they would soon inherit. I highly doubt that their placement inside garbage cans is simply a staging device for hiding power-ups with scenery, at least. The irony of their super-powered iteration being a Lazerdisc was not lost on me.
Health power-ups are modeled as “energy shakes” in a Nostradamus-like nod to the stranglehold of taurine additives on our gullets not even two decades on. In a staggeringly progressive espousal of third-wave feminist ideology, massive point bonuses are granted for shooting open the go-go cages of scantily-clad pixel vixens in a stirringly poetic liberation of sex-positivity. The routine drudgery of mowing down impossible swaths of yellow-jacketed NON footmen in mindless bloodshed is a damning critique of the jingoistic military shooters that the game would go on, ironically, to father in its massive wake.
After storming the club and recovering two of the five members of Aerosmith, including Steven Tyler, a secret television behind the mirror in Steven Tyler’s catwalk-access dressing room plays you a personal message from Steven Tyler to find their car as the next step in the liberation of the world. Steven Tyler (the Steven Tyler of the video within the game, not the Steven Tyler you saved) throws you the keys to said car, momentarily working to dissolve the desert of the real and toy with preconceived notions. You the steal a NON chopper and take to the skies, slaughtering more grunts located (symbolically!) in the windows on the rooftops of buildings like the NON-controlled megaliths like MVN (the Music Video Network), Midway Plaza, Yuk Yuk, MCM Motion Pictures, MUDFLaPs!, Paranoid Pictures, ABS TV, and finally the Los Angeles News. After an epic helicopter sequence which truly tests the player’s skill, the car is found parked behind Tallarico’s. Thus the game plants its roots firmly in the history of whistle-blowing on game industry collusion, although the cryptic evidence was never discovered until now. [Tallarico is the original last name of Steven Tyler, and while he is, surprisingly, Tommy Tallarico's cousin, I cannot think of what conspiracy would involve them both. -Ed.]
Throughout the play-through I had elected enhance my experience through the use of banandine, a psychotropic long since fallen out of vogue for its variable success rate but notorious for ease of access. I sensed that I was beginning to come down, but at this point in the game is a startling demonstration of Acclaim’s trust in player agency. I could next to go to the Amazon, The Middle East, or the Pacific Rim, and I chose this junction to take a brief pause and have a few more drags of peel. As I began to rise out of my mortal shell and tap into the energies beyond, my hand must have slipped and I select a level without looking. Such is kismet.
In the South American jungles I fought Evergreen Chemicals / Clown Foods and their threats of deforestation, food with genetic modifications and chemical additives, spear-hurling African tribesmen whose murder probably represented the ascendancy to a post-racial society, a tank, more sex-positive damsel rescue, and finally a skull made of slime. Joe Perry soared with the power of bluesy riffs and a flaming guitar outside a third-story window, and I shot him in the head to rescue him; another wry inversion of the primary gameplay mechanism. The giant drums of Food Additives were the set stage as mutant soldiers were made out of the same damsel, for ultimately we are all doomed to subservience. Another slime skull guarded a room with a spiky bug thing with the power to jump dozens of feet over walls as we beat our retreat; in yet more irony, the bug was only defeated by shooting out the bridge it was standing on.
Kimmi Tech was a maze of halls, littered with ninjas and forklifts. As I shot men off catwalks, their identical death wails became an ambient symphony of the common pain of all men, but with each death Steven Tyler’s voice implored me not to give up, and another fifty cents was spent in the hunt for investigative games journalism. I exploded Orwellian data banks of “Youth Data” as posters of some leather-clad woman named Helga implored me to submit. [Head Mistress Helga the main villain and leader of the NON. -Ed.] I shot a gong for 5000 points, and did this several times in repentance for the grim necessity of my methods. The Mind Floss machines yielded to my torrents of bullets, the cause of feminism was further freed from their lab chairs, and then I shot a guy in flying desk made from an office desk. As I refused to bow to my doom, as the pilot implored, I shed a single tear in recognition of a formidable foe and unwilling pawn.
In the Middle East I freed a labor camp of feminists being forced to break down guitars and televisions and arcade cabinets, then shot at a bus and some roller skaters en route to abduct yet more feminists. It was in this sequence it dawned on me that the young woman clad in a pink halter top and jean skirt was a primal representation of the feminine spirit, and any doubts about Acclaim’s commitment to providing strong female role models to players were abolished.
Finally I traveled to Wembley Stadium to confront a dazzling variety of all the past foes and break down a wall of TVs, this time purposed for evil instead of good, and do battle with the poster lady for some reason. [This was the final boss. -Ed.] After shooting her for several minutes amidst her barrage of insults, she sat down and was possessed by a chair into the true final boss. [I think was her true form being revealed, not a product of the chair's doing. -Ed.] Systematically I destroyed the Chair Demon limb by limb, and at long last I had symbolically ended apartheid. [I quit. -Ed.]
As the riff to “Walk This Way” played on looped and announced I had won, I was left with questions. Had I truly defeated the evil, or was I the villain all along? Was the buxom chrome robot on the cover of Aerosmith’s 2001 album Just Push Play the precedent for EDI’s pro-transgender-metaphor body acquisition in Mass Effect 3? Had I rescued/shot all the members of Aerosmith and unlocked the best ending? I don’t know because the owner of the arcade smelled burnt fruit and threw me out. But then, isn’t my individual journey through this masterpiece really the story here? I think so.
Further Reading: Fear of Music: The Untold History of Rock Band Network(Medium Difficulty)
