A blast from the past: the action game that fell short of its target
‘Impact’ promised that it was the ‘action battle game with real fire power’. In 2005 it was the most heavily tv advertised game aimed at small boys. My son James, then six, and in his second year at school must have watched the advertisement thousands of times on CITV and Disney’s woeful Jetix channel.
The advertisements showed the board game’s characters in animated fight sequences, blasting each other with fearsome bazookas. Missiles whizzed through the air and cartoon versions of the plastic men who populated the game were thrust in the air amidst quaking scenery.
Inevitably, the game topped James’ Christmas wish list. His uncle Tom provided the actual gift, at a cost of at least £30. It made him that season’s favoured family member.
A substantial portion of the cost of purchase must have financed the blanket advertising that supported the product. Perhaps that makes mugs of the punters. But were it not for the frenzied tv build-up, the present would not have seemed nearly so magical when it arrived.
Once unwrapped, however, Impact didn’t really work. The board folded out to provide a ‘battle field’ approximately 90cm by 60cm. On this players arranged plastic blocks representing sand dunes, and on these were arranged the armies of ‘Raptor Scouts’ on one side and ‘Corezec Drill Rig Squad’ on the other. Some aspect of play required you to move your characters around the board, but the main point of the game was for the little plastic models to exchange fire. Each character was fitted with a spring-loaded ejector that, at the flick of a switch, shot a plastic projectile in the direction of one of your opponent’s models.
While there was some pleasure in setting the game up, play itself was dismal – at least for those adults who were persuaded to indulge their children. Aiming was hard, the fiddly plastic shapes discharged accidentally before you were ready and the projectiles generally overshot the board and became immediately lost (to their credit, manufacturers Drummond Park of West Lothian did reply to a plaintive appeal for fresh ordnance with a bag of replacement bullets). But more than anything else, it was very hard to get remotely interested in plastic toys firing bullets at each other that actually order zolpidem online left their targets entirely unscathed. It was a game that married the most profound shortcomings of Subbuteo with those of Action Man.
James and his then best friend Edyn did set the game up quite a few times, but its completeness and good condition today, eight years later, would appear to confirm my assessment. And today James consented to the game being dispatched to ‘charity’.
I can’t help but feel rather sad.
It represents one of those endless milestones that mark the end of something. It brings to a close the period when my universe was crammed with cretinous children’s television programs and the ads that funded them. It is evidence that my 13-year-old son is speeding towards adulthood.
It also represents broader changes. Board games are, I very much hope, not dead. But will one ever again promise to serve up ‘action’, while screen-based distractions are so much more visceral? My daughter, five years younger has certainly never hankered for a board game.
Like so much modern culture, Impact’s moment was fleeting indeed. Its box did promise an ‘Episode 2’, but, to my knowledge it never materialised. I played Monopoly with my parents, as they has with their parents in the 1940s. To this day, I play Monopoly with my own children. By comparison, I would be surprised if James, when he is old enough to consider having children, will remember Impact – much less want to seek out the box to share its delights. Even my paternal reminiscences will resonate only with those whose sons were born around 1999, I suspect.
There is something poignant about such a lavish flash-in-the-pan, as there is with all old, but unplayed toys. It is the same quality that Stinky Pete embodies in Pixar’s Toy Story 2. Of little interest to the children who wanted ‘Woody’ dolls, production of ‘Petes’ was limited, thereby making them collectors’ gold dust.
If I am honest, the game for which my son successfully campaigned was an elaborately packaged false promise. Maybe it provided him with a useful lesson in the need for scepticism? But even if Impact was lost on everyone else, it resonates with me yet, but it was the advertising campaign, rather than the game that had the real fire power.