This Fake Video Game from Criminal Minds Will Leave You Intrigued

The Mystery of Gods Of Combat

The fake video games in movies and TV shows can be difficult to understand, for an obvious reason: they’re not real games. Their function is providing a few seconds of motion, colours, and noises, and possibly a premise for a plot to riff on. They don’t need to be coherent or good. Still, sometimes these glimpses and ideas are interesting enough that I quite enjoy trying to figure them out. Take Gods Of Combat, a fake first-person shooter featured in police procedural show Criminal Minds. Apparently it’s such a great game that the only way to achieve a similar high after being banned is hijacking a schoolbus and forcing teenagers to kill each other.

Describing Gods Of Combat

Criminal Minds is an American cop ’em up about FBI profilers solving unlikely crimes. In the season 8 episode ‘The Wheels On The Bus’, aired in November 2012, the kooky gang hunt for the armed “unsubs” (short for “unknown subjects”, said so often that it seems an in-joke) who hijacked a school bus. A rescued passenger explains that the unsubs (see?) in gas masks separated ten teenagers, fitted them with weird collars, then took turns picking from the lineup.

What We Know About Gods Of Combat

“Abducting a bus (a form of transportation), gas masks, shock collars, dividing people into teams… this sounds a lot like Gods Of Combat,” says the FBI agent played by Joe Mantegna, who also voices Fat Tony on The Simpsons. “This is a video game.”

Apparently, MutantSoft’s Gods Of Combat has been running since at least the year 2000, with over six million players. Conceding that he “may have played it once or twice,” Fat Tony explains that Gods Of Combat is a “multi-user online first-person shooter game” where at the start “you take over a form of public transportation-subway, train, bus-that’s how you get your players.” Then “the game consists of five players: captain, lieutenant, a pair of soldiers, and the pawn.” Abductees wear shock collars, which are “used to keep your player from straying from their mission.” Ultimately, “the object of the game is to destroy as many of your opponents as possible. The one with the highest body count wins.”

Analyzing Gods Of Combat

It’s never clear whether Gods Of Combat is a 1v1 game, a 5v5 game, or possibly even a 6v6 game. Do five players fill the roles, or when Fat Tony says “player” does he mean “character”, and so one player plays all five lives themself? Hell, does one leader oversee and direct five players as a team, or individually? And how are the roles different? What does the pawn do, because the implications are fascinating?

Oh, here’s the kicker: the unsubs (you almost forgot, didn’t you?) created their murdergame to sustain their sibling rivalry after being “blacklisted” in the Gods Of Combat “Hell mod.” The what? Fat Tony explains, “if you get killed off playing Hell mod, your entire gaming profile is deleted.” Nor could I say with certainty what “gaming profile” means here, though they suggest that their profiles “would have taken years for them to build” so it seems at least an impressively hardcore Hardcore mode. Oh, and apparently ‘Hell mods’ exist in many games? A colleague explains that “the Hell mod in this game was like a battle royale. I mean literally, anything goes. There are no rules.”

The Mystery Unfolds

This is all assuming we take the show’s portrayal of Gods Of Combat as accurate, too. The problem: it’s not a real game and it doesn’t need to make sense. Its function is making viewers understand that teenagers did murder after playing a violent video game with a morally outrageous premise. And yet, I’ve enjoyed turning over the pieces in my head. Fill in gaps and blur edges and you might find several interesting—and strikingly different—game concepts within this range of possibilities.

The Curiosity of Fake Games

Sure, part of my enjoyment of fake games in shows and movies is seeing how ridiculous they are, but I often enjoy thinking about them as if they were real games. I like figuring out how they might work, then making a hasty evaluation of whether that’s any good. Every game is only a collection of ideas and imagings until you play it and there are more games than anyone will ever play, so Gods Of Combat is as real to me as, I don’t know, Modern Warfare 3. It is a bit of a busman’s holiday, considering my inbox swells daily with dozens of announcements and press releases offering not much more solid information (and solid looks) than we have for Gods Of Combat. Still, what a curious challenge to build a concrete game from random fragments that are, you know, not real. I’ve accidentally found a real game inside the fake game.

Conclusion

In the end, Gods Of Combat remains a fictional video game that has left us with more questions than answers. While we may never truly understand its mechanics and gameplay, exploring the possibilities and creating our own interpretations can be a fun exercise for any gaming enthusiast. So, what do you think Gods Of Combat is like? Share your thoughts and join in the speculation!