By any metric, 2012 was an absolutely blockbuster year for video game fans.
That year saw the release of some of the most heralded games ever. Heavyweight hits like Mass Effect 3, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Journey, Borderlands 2, Halo 4, Persona 4 Golden, Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Diablo III all released that year.
And yes, that list is excluding a number of other great titles — but that’s sort of the point.
A litany of iconic franchises and beloved numbered sequels (too many to list without my editor accusing me of trying to pad this story out) all dropped in 2012… and yet it was a little-known franchise that may have spawned the most indelibly lasting video game of that year, controversial military shooter Spec Ops: The Line.
The Spec Ops series has existed since 1998, but it was the 2012 title (and soft reboot of the franchise) that introduced the series to many gamers.
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(In a cruel twist, Spec Ops: The Line was a commercial failure when it came out, but swiftly built a cult following.)
But that storm, long since dulled by the 11 years since it released, appears to be on the verge of dying out quickly.
In a statement to Eurogamer, publisher 2K confirmed that licensing issues would see the third-person shooter delisted from digital storefronts — a stark reminder about the dangers of not actually owning content.
“Spec Ops: The Line will no longer be available on online storefronts, as several partnership licenses related to the game are expiring,” a 2K representative told the outlet. The game uses some licensed music in its soundtrack.
Did you play Spec Ops: The Line?
A sliver of good news: the representative added that the game will still be available to players, so long as they’ve previously purchased it.
“Players who have purchased the game can still download and play the game uninterrupted. 2K would like to thank our community of players who have supported the game, and we look forward to bringing you more offerings from our label throughout this year and beyond,” the representative said.
So… what made this game so controversial and so easily able to foster a cult following years after its release?
In short, this is one of the few games in existence that refuses to trivialize the horrors of war.
Spec Ops: The Line takes great inspiration from the 1899 Joseph Conrad classic “Heart of Darkness” and 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” Just like in those stories, Spec Ops: The Line main character Captain Martin Walker is sent into a war-torn region on a recon mission.
Walker is tasked with finding and recovering the PTSD-troubled Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad, who was stuck in Dubai following a series of destructive sandstorms that turned the Middle Eastern city into a no-man’s land.
(Fun fact: The game’s depiction of a devastated Dubai, the game’s main setting, actually got Spec Ops: The Line banned in the United Arab Emirates.)
Spoiler Alert: Walker commits some atrocious war crimes en route to hunting down Konrad… only to discover that Konrad has been dead this whole time and an increasingly mentally unstable Walker had been chasing a literal hallucination.
And it’s those war crimes that get an unusually heavy emphasis in Spec Ops: The Line.
Sure, this game goes through the motions of playing like your standard, cover-based, third-person shooter (duck behind cover, kill some guys, reload, rinse and repeat), but unlike a video game franchise like “Uncharted,” where protagonist Nathan Drake will kill dozens of men and then offer a witty quote, there is some weight to the player’s actions in Spec Ops: The Line.
Compare your standard Drake quip (“Sorry boys, just needed to punch your tickets” after killing people on a train) to this infamous scene from Spec Ops: The Line, where Walker (and by proxy, you, the player) use white phosphorous to flush out Konrad… only to discover that innocent people had been hiding in the bombing area to escape the sandstorms:
WARNING: The following video contains graphic imagery that the viewer may find disturbing.
Niko Bellic, the main protagonist of 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV, actually provided an incredibly apropos quote about the crux of Spec Ops: The Line.
“In the army they prepared me to die, but they never prepared me to live with the things I did.”
Finding this gem of a game may be incredibly difficult with the delisting, but if you can, I cannot recommend playing this game enough. It honestly does the whole “make you, as the gamer, feel morally icky”-vibe much better than The Last of Us Part II.
