Have You Played: One Must Fall 2097

Of course like all kids what I really wanted to do on the machine was to play games. While the games that were bundled with the computer were pretty fun even for a kid who'd just started primary school (I still replay Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis about once a year), I got bored of them quick.

Salvation arrived in a (in all probability illegal, but my memory is hazy) disc called 'Byteman CD', which was pre-loaded with tonnes of cool shareware stuff. And my favourite out of those many, many games was a fighting game called One Must Fall: 2097 (OMF).

I'd never played Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, so OMF was a revelation for me. The storyline was pretty engaging, even if I had to read the absurdly long manual to fully comprehend it. A hundred years into the future the WAR Corporation develops 90ft tall Human-Assisted Robots (HARs) for various purposes like construction and space exploration. A combat tournament is proposed among WAR's employees to determine who will lead a project to colonise Ganymede, Jupiter's moon. Each fighter had its own cool little back-story, even if they were pretty much stock characters – the girl out to avenge her father’s death, the arrogant rich kid, the mysterious stranger.

And the robots were awesome. My favourites were the Jaguar (with its concussion cannon) and the Shadow (with its projectile attacks). The game was easy to learn, although I remember scouring the Internet on my dial-up 56kbit connection finding out move lists to try and learn combos. I had the shareware edition, which meant I could only use 3 robots and 5 pilots, and my ‘boss battle’ was chief villain Major Kreissack’s bodyguard Raven and his Pyros robot. The day when I first beat him was one of the greatest moments of my life. Still, my parents were pretty adamant about not buying the full version of the game, so I had to be content with playing the game’s tournament mode.

Tournament mode basically worked outside the single-player campaign storyline. You started out with a basic robot and pilot with barely any stats. The aim was to win money by winning enough money in tournaments in order to upgrade these meagre stats. It was pretty fun, but the shareware edition meant that you could only play one tournament, and that got dull quickly after winning the North American Open for the 23rd time.

Until one fine day when I was fourteen or fifteen when I found out that Epic Megagames had decided in their goodwill to release the full version of the game as freeware. I immediately downloaded it and lost many, many hours in trying to become World Champion in Tournament Mode.

Epic released a sequel in 2003 called One Must Fall: Battlegrounds. It was exclusively multi-player and in 3D but met with an extremely poor reception. I can’t give my opinion on it, because I’ve never played it, but I don’t think I’d like it that much. I love playing old, classic games precisely because they don’t seem all that cutting-edge now. OMF seemed pretty revolutionary when it first came out, but now one can point at the cartoony 2D graphics, the 16bit techno soundtrack and the lack of side-scrolling as relics of a distant era. Nonetheless, I’m not really bothered. Games to me are all about fun, and OMF was – and is – ridiculously fun. I might go play it now actually....

One Must Fall: 2097 is available for download here. You may need a DOS emulator for it – I recommend DosBox.

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