Ancient Legend

I feel like I should have an obituary prepared for this game. It’s on a hell of a run – since 2006!

It is of course Kidou Senshi Gandamu: Senjou no Kizuna / Mobile Suit Gundam: Bonds of the Battlefield. These days, finally, it’s got fairly scarce, having dominated acres of carpet tiles and basement lino forever. Not quite time for the eulogy – and long may it survive in its smaller numbers – but let’s a have a rundown:

✨ April 2006 – 2009 REV. 1.x

Huge, white and black plastic spheres installed for location tests in Tokyo and Yokohama. You sit in the middle of a wraparound screen, a Toshiba DLP projector behind your head. It’s a pod – P.O.D. for Panoramic Optical Display. Pedals and levers and surround sound…

It *still* sounds awesome: imagine what people must have thought! It was mysterious; it was impressive; and it was lusciously uninstragrammable – because it was back when if you had a mobile phone, you had to say “mobile” in front of “phone”.

✨ 2008–2011 REV. 2.x Hardware upgrade significant enough to be incompatible with REV. 1.x. Updated the joystick and headset connectors for voice comms, too.

✨ 2011–2018 (seven f’ing years!) REV. 3.x Another hardware jump obsoleting old versions. New full HD projector.

✨ 2016–present REV. 4.x Software only: gameplay tweaks and the latest Gundam content – but basically nothing broke, nothing fixed.

The 2020 Nationwide Winter Battle is recruiting. This thing isn’t done yet.

I’ve written about this game tons of times, but basically you sit in a pod and drive massive mechs from a custom seat and control setup.

The concept – from 2006 – is *incredibly* effective. It still feels amazing to sit there with your windows opening to the battlefield. Your opponents still feel *huge* – as you must to them. Unlike recent trends in Japanese arcades, this is first-person, simulator-esque gameplay. Closest comparison has to be Steel Battalion – but hugely popular and successful and piles of fun.

Anyway, what will happen when this does go? An online game is tough to preserve. Even if you can keep the infrastructure in place so that people can get together and play it even once it’s retro, the community’s moved on, it’s just not the same.

The game is about the people as much as it is about the software. But Bonds of the Battlefield is about – as much as either software or people – its unique hardware. Not the musty, rosetinted feel of old D-pads and CRTs: it’s an almost overwhelming experience of clambering into and being totally enveloped by a game.

Imagine you came from a land where no one ever dared admit to using the toilet – and you see a public toilet cubicle for the first time. In this strange country, everyone uses them, and everyone knows what goes on in them, but no one talks about it and no one judges, because it’s just normal – and entirely uninteresting.

I came from a teenage when gaming was repulsively uncool. When I went to Japan and first saw the Gundam PODs, I felt strangely embarrassed to go in. It was a mixture of being way more into games than had been acceptable in my past, and yet nowhere near *enough* into games to stand confidently in a culture where gaming was unremarkable. What got me onto the seat was the invaluable advice my wife always gives me if I ever feel nervous or self-conscious: “No one’s that interested in you”. So that’s like a toilet.

Right?

Sorry, not sure where that came from…

The Bonds of the Battlefield hardware isn’t just a way to play the game, it’s a relic of a whole civilisation that’s nearly faded away, one whose lost technology ran on crystals and granted eternal life and was made of stone.

And alongside the software and the people and the hardware, there’s the *place*. And that’s something Steel Battalion or any console game will never give you. You have to go to it. If you play Bonds multiple times a week, you certainly have your spots. Favourite arcade and probably favourite POD. A home, a routine, a lifestyle. And, once it goes, not one piece of that will ever be brought back.

So when Gundam pods fade away, it really will be a final goodbye. The end of an era for Japanese arcades. Another era in history and photographs, tales to be told by those who were there. Kidou Senshi Gandamu: Senjou no Kizuna will be the one people make sure to say they were part of – to kids who can only read Wikipedia about it.

Oh, and there’s a sequel in development.

!!!!!