Fantastic video. I haven't thought about DEFCON in depth for many years and this brought back a lot of memories - of making the game, and imagining how people might behave once they understood the rules. Even during development when it was just us testing the game, we weren't sure of the most optimal strategies in each game mode. The kind of high level sociological strategies you describe in the video are what we dreamed the game would one day be like among the most serious players. So don't feel bad, it was designed to be that way! Chris
A successor is dearly needed. My college ran a scenario with two war rooms that I helped organize last year. Nothing comes close to this game with the flat design and dreary atmosphere.
It makes sense for the incompetent to be afraid, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the incompetent are more easily exploited, competency is not encouraged. It makes sense why the average human brain size has actually been shrinking over the past few thousand years. The idea of progress and security is the propaganda of civilization, giving compounded momentum to our mutually ensured destruction, but more insidious than most consciously realize, complacency. Pain and suffering, and prosperity and contentment are two sides of the same lie told by artificial lifeforms who are subjugated by the God of greed and fear.
I really hope this game picks up again to any extent. I only started playing in mid-2020 and AI is fine but aside from a few matches with my friends I've never played with any humans and fear if I do I'll instantly get sniped by some gigachad who's been training for the past decade and a half
Introversion also put out an intern project that's a VR spectator mode. Virtual war room with multiple statistical displays, each player's view, and a 3D hologram of the true (i.e. unfogged) Earth. Certainly not as fun as being able to play yourself, but great for visuals.
A game of Diplomacy but played with nukes, I kinda wish I had seen the multiplayer as a kid now. As a developer, I feel very differently about your last thought. Someone that participated as deeply as you did in the game's social and mechanical systems is no detriment to the community; far from it, since an expert player that's active in the scene fuels others to compete with them, possibly create new metas and rulesets as you noted with the time budgets of certain servers. Without people earnestly playing, trying to basically make poetry out of the designer's rules, a game community dries up and expires sooner rather than later. If you were toxic to other players I could understand having regret, but otherwise? There's no greater tribute to a contest than giving it your all.
I may have played a game with you back in the day. My favorite is the music. The woman coughing, a woman crying, the sound of boots walking down a hallway, the low hum of electronics. The nerve-wracking RONK! of the DEFCON timer ticking down. The multiple ROCK of the launch detection. The low rumble of the nukes hit. In the end a simple score. The number of millions dead. This game changed my outlook on nuclear war. I live in a major strategic city. I don't want to survive.
Yeah, I stopped playing Defcon after I straight up lost 2 long time friends as a result of all the gaslighting, backstabbing and betrayals. That and the existential dread brought about by total global nuclear annihilation. Its fun enough tho, decent game.
i am a musician (a much too big of a word to describe my art so far) and i just wanted to confirm that yes - you are correct. the music does lower its pitch over the course of a game as you're being hit more and more. i dont remember exactly, its been a while since i fired up defcon, but i think it also slows down aswell. im 100% sure about the pitch thing though, thats the first thing i've noticed the first time i played the game a few years back
also a great video, i stumbled upon it randomly because i wanted to just watch some defcon things, maybe some guides or tactics i was not disappointed, watched the whole thing and greatly enjoyed it
It breaks my heart i didn't know about this game sooner. Manipulating members of the gaming group into war with each is my specialty. I know what I'm buying everyone for Christmas this year
its kind of funny how similar to the board game diplomacy the diplomacy gamemode is. the "I'm just passing through" excuse is a classic way to backstab an ally in diplomacy.
As much as I love Defcon, I don't think any game has yet covered the true horror of the psychology behind Nuclear War and MAD, and why targets were selected in such a manner. Random betrayal is more an artefact of pre-industrial aristocratic cultures, not post-industrial strategic planners and the policy-makers of naton-states. You cannot grasp the full magnitude of the horror until you wrestle with the near-inevitability of the nuclear escalation ladder and how it is mandated by our psychology. Nuking population centres to rack up Megadeaths is only an escalatory response to a strategic decapitation/disabling strike of the military, which is itself an escalatory response to nuking a particularly large military formation/installation like a fleet or airbase to secure a decisive outcome for a conventional war, which is a response to some idiot shooting at a border crossing and so on, and this whole chain of increasing tit for tat only exists because MAD is an evolutionarily robust strategy, for which we have the game theory to back it up. In every MAD game, including Interplanetary despite it giving you more mechanical possibilities for disabling your enemy's strategic attack capability, there is no escalatory ladder because the whole point is to race to the finish line with casualties being at best a tangential concern, there is no blurring of the line between combatant and civilian targets as you work your way up the target list from military airbases to civilian airports to catch any bombers that might have dispersed and are staging for a sortie. In this light, it becomes easy to dismiss Cold War strategic planners as merely psychopaths trying to meet a Pavlovian need to hit the high score instead of there being a rigorous calculus behind the kinds of decisions the average person would think only a madman would make, which does a disservice to the magnitude of the issue and the threat it poses to human existence. I mean, the fact that the shorthand for Defcon 1 was "Cocked Pistol" makes it pretty apparent no one at the planning level in the US triad was under any illusions about the nature of the job. The entire point is we have to set things up so that the only winning move is not to play because some small subset of people are unable to reasoned with any other way, and we have to live in that world, and that is the most horrifying thing about it all. The horror is realising we are in The Dark Forest. Actually playing the game won't convey the horror of being the person to set the pieces with that knowledge in mind.
It's a tragedy this video doesn't have way more views. So much horrible shite content gets boosted into the stratosphere by the algorithm, while gems like this don't get the attention they deserve. Love the video, DEFCON is one of my favourite shorter games that's very pointed in its message. I'll def be sharing this w/ everyone I can, and I hope to see more
@Mauricio Diaz War is nasty business. Ive always knew that. So it did not really change my views on war. But I must say the game has a unique atmosphere for the subject matter. I wrote a script about how Africa would cope if the Northern Hemisphere decided to Nuke itself into oblivion. Spoke to people in the military, did tons of research on it. One day I hope to find the right people to get my script funded.
to paraphrase ernest hemingway, "every game dies twice, once when it's final player stops playing, and again when the final video essay is made about it". i think defcon's value has been just as much as a cultural artifact and a political statement as it has been a game, and maybe it had to be this way, i don't think it wouldve ever been as much of a success as it was without eventually proving itself right
I once played a game of CPU Asia and North America me, managing to destroy the computer while only getting nuked in Detroit and New York, so I'd say I won twice.
Really interesting sounding game, is it actually fun to play it casually or do you have to get your teeth really into it yo understand what's going on?
WOULD BE COOL IF your base randomly generates within the map and if someone gets close to hitting it your screen shakes or hear muffled explosion, sand falling from roof
What sells the game the most is the occasional baby crying or female scream when a nuclear weapon is roughly ~5 seconds from a city. The soundtrack is extremely depressing when you realise a nuclear war never ends until everyone dies. It’s always nice seeing good DEFCON videos.
2 peter, chapter 3 verse 10, King James Version "The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up"
I have to say, I didn't like the 2020 DEFCON trailer, it goes against the entire atmosphere and mood that the game creates and just feels like a generic game trailer that does not encapsulate the actual essence of the game at all.
19:53 bruh you can literally see that rise of nations have a diplomacy mode. the diplomacy mode has been in most rts games since age of empires 1 and it plays almost exactly like in defcon . what are you talking about
I did not claim games have not had diplomacy modes. Obviously, as you note diplomacy is an option there in Rise of Nations. What I was calling out was that in the vast majority of RTS multiplayer games that mode is a slideshow, with most games occuring in modes where the teams are locked and clear. Whereas in DEFCON the main gameplay mode allows for far more flexibility. And even in its diplomacy mode, your options for being deceitful are more than most RTS games give you.
Fantastic video. I haven't thought about DEFCON in depth for many years and this brought back a lot of memories - of making the game, and imagining how people might behave once they understood the rules. Even during development when it was just us testing the game, we weren't sure of the most optimal strategies in each game mode. The kind of high level sociological strategies you describe in the video are what we dreamed the game would one day be like among the most serious players. So don't feel bad, it was designed to be that way!
Chris
Thank you, and thanks for making such great games!
A successor is dearly needed. My college ran a scenario with two war rooms that I helped organize last year. Nothing comes close to this game with the flat design and dreary atmosphere.
It struck me like a ICBM-loaded truck upon realizing that DEFCON is basically Among us with nukes.
It makes sense for the incompetent to be afraid, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the incompetent are more easily exploited, competency is not encouraged. It makes sense why the average human brain size has actually been shrinking over the past few thousand years. The idea of progress and security is the propaganda of civilization, giving compounded momentum to our mutually ensured destruction, but more insidious than most consciously realize, complacency. Pain and suffering, and prosperity and contentment are two sides of the same lie told by artificial lifeforms who are subjugated by the God of greed and fear.
I really hope this game picks up again to any extent. I only started playing in mid-2020 and AI is fine but aside from a few matches with my friends I've never played with any humans and fear if I do I'll instantly get sniped by some gigachad who's been training for the past decade and a half
ICBM is the new nuclear war game. its better in that you can create strike plans and have more unit options
Well you can rest assured knowing that they’ll lose too. That’s the beauty of the game. Everyone loses.
@@nnn4376 This is not true, you can def have matches where you lose nothing
I stream this game on Twitch often
@@SuperpowerBroadcasting multiplayer?
Introversion also put out an intern project that's a VR spectator mode. Virtual war room with multiple statistical displays, each player's view, and a 3D hologram of the true (i.e. unfogged) Earth. Certainly not as fun as being able to play yourself, but great for visuals.
Playing this as a kid really made me feel like I was in a 90s chat room playing with NORADS computers
A game of Diplomacy but played with nukes, I kinda wish I had seen the multiplayer as a kid now.
As a developer, I feel very differently about your last thought. Someone that participated as deeply as you did in the game's social and mechanical systems is no detriment to the community; far from it, since an expert player that's active in the scene fuels others to compete with them, possibly create new metas and rulesets as you noted with the time budgets of certain servers. Without people earnestly playing, trying to basically make poetry out of the designer's rules, a game community dries up and expires sooner rather than later.
If you were toxic to other players I could understand having regret, but otherwise? There's no greater tribute to a contest than giving it your all.
I may have played a game with you back in the day. My favorite is the music. The woman coughing, a woman crying, the sound of boots walking down a hallway, the low hum of electronics. The nerve-wracking RONK! of the DEFCON timer ticking down. The multiple ROCK of the launch detection. The low rumble of the nukes hit. In the end a simple score. The number of millions dead. This game changed my outlook on nuclear war. I live in a major strategic city. I don't want to survive.
Yeah, I stopped playing Defcon after I straight up lost 2 long time friends as a result of all the gaslighting, backstabbing and betrayals. That and the existential dread brought about by total global nuclear annihilation. Its fun enough tho, decent game.
I’ve learned long ago that player-driven diplomacy is best engaged in with people you don’t have history with. Nice thing about the Internet.
Hell, its just a game fellas. XD
Damn, even games can break friendships apart
i am a musician (a much too big of a word to describe my art so far) and i just wanted to confirm that yes - you are correct. the music does lower its pitch over the course of a game as you're being hit more and more. i dont remember exactly, its been a while since i fired up defcon, but i think it also slows down aswell. im 100% sure about the pitch thing though, thats the first thing i've noticed the first time i played the game a few years back
also a great video, i stumbled upon it randomly because i wanted to just watch some defcon things, maybe some guides or tactics
i was not disappointed, watched the whole thing and greatly enjoyed it
As a "musician" I can confirm pitch change, also it's worth noticing that as game progresses more and more choral (vocal) music appear.
17 years ago. whoa
It breaks my heart i didn't know about this game sooner. Manipulating members of the gaming group into war with each is my specialty. I know what I'm buying everyone for Christmas this year
Just be aware and forewarned
This has the same level of relationship destruction potential as the likes of Among Us and even MONOPOLY
its kind of funny how similar to the board game diplomacy the diplomacy gamemode is. the "I'm just passing through" excuse is a classic way to backstab an ally in diplomacy.
As much as I love Defcon, I don't think any game has yet covered the true horror of the psychology behind Nuclear War and MAD, and why targets were selected in such a manner. Random betrayal is more an artefact of pre-industrial aristocratic cultures, not post-industrial strategic planners and the policy-makers of naton-states. You cannot grasp the full magnitude of the horror until you wrestle with the near-inevitability of the nuclear escalation ladder and how it is mandated by our psychology. Nuking population centres to rack up Megadeaths is only an escalatory response to a strategic decapitation/disabling strike of the military, which is itself an escalatory response to nuking a particularly large military formation/installation like a fleet or airbase to secure a decisive outcome for a conventional war, which is a response to some idiot shooting at a border crossing and so on, and this whole chain of increasing tit for tat only exists because MAD is an evolutionarily robust strategy, for which we have the game theory to back it up.
In every MAD game, including Interplanetary despite it giving you more mechanical possibilities for disabling your enemy's strategic attack capability, there is no escalatory ladder because the whole point is to race to the finish line with casualties being at best a tangential concern, there is no blurring of the line between combatant and civilian targets as you work your way up the target list from military airbases to civilian airports to catch any bombers that might have dispersed and are staging for a sortie. In this light, it becomes easy to dismiss Cold War strategic planners as merely psychopaths trying to meet a Pavlovian need to hit the high score instead of there being a rigorous calculus behind the kinds of decisions the average person would think only a madman would make, which does a disservice to the magnitude of the issue and the threat it poses to human existence. I mean, the fact that the shorthand for Defcon 1 was "Cocked Pistol" makes it pretty apparent no one at the planning level in the US triad was under any illusions about the nature of the job.
The entire point is we have to set things up so that the only winning move is not to play because some small subset of people are unable to reasoned with any other way, and we have to live in that world, and that is the most horrifying thing about it all. The horror is realising we are in The Dark Forest. Actually playing the game won't convey the horror of being the person to set the pieces with that knowledge in mind.
You had me until the Dark Forest, but take my +1 anyway.
People shouldn't sleep on this channel, you're great, I'll see you at a 100k.
Started streaming this game on Twitch recently. I love it.
Do you need enemies?
@@ah1rooivalk Sure
"the flag maybe different, but the methods are always the same"
I clicked for the cool thumbnail
It's a tragedy this video doesn't have way more views. So much horrible shite content gets boosted into the stratosphere by the algorithm, while gems like this don't get the attention they deserve. Love the video, DEFCON is one of my favourite shorter games that's very pointed in its message. I'll def be sharing this w/ everyone I can, and I hope to see more
Diplomacy mode is basically just Shepard from MW2 simulator
It just takes a knife to the eye 🤷♂️
Really enjoyed this! Thanks!
I played this game with you I feel special now
You launch a nuclear bomb.
And now, you've sent 1,000,000,000,000 people to heaven.
Or hell...
Or nowhere…
Introversion are amazing! Uplink might be my favourite game ever and it was only their first!
Great video btw
Heavily underrated video. I enjoyed this a lot.
Man I just got this game.
@Mauricio Diaz War is nasty business. Ive always knew that. So it did not really change my views on war. But I must say the game has a unique atmosphere for the subject matter. I wrote a script about how Africa would cope if the Northern Hemisphere decided to Nuke itself into oblivion. Spoke to people in the military, did tons of research on it. One day I hope to find the right people to get my script funded.
Very timely.
Love the Ahoy esque thumbnail
This game is fun af. Also your voice is real nice
This... this is terrifying...
I love it!!! xD!
Awesome video
very nice and pleasant video
still have no clue how to play
Ok I just found a fantastic channel before it gets famous
to paraphrase ernest hemingway, "every game dies twice, once when it's final player stops playing, and again when the final video essay is made about it". i think defcon's value has been just as much as a cultural artifact and a political statement as it has been a game, and maybe it had to be this way, i don't think it wouldve ever been as much of a success as it was without eventually proving itself right
for sale: nuclear game, never played
I once played a game of CPU Asia and North America me, managing to destroy the computer while only getting nuked in Detroit and New York, so I'd say I won twice.
I remember getting keys to 5 of my friends, ended up playing against AI. Shame, one of the best games ever made.
This is underrated
Amazing thumbnail
What in the…I was not expecting to see a Ritalin ref, anywhere, ever.
My internet brainrot started very early
Really interesting sounding game, is it actually fun to play it casually or do you have to get your teeth really into it yo understand what's going on?
I got it last week and have been playing with my mates since. I’d recommend it, great game and it’s super fun
I just deserved this game and trying to get my friends into it with me
nice vid!
I hate myself for not finding this game sooner
WOULD BE COOL IF your base randomly generates within the map and if someone gets close to hitting it your screen shakes or hear muffled explosion, sand falling from roof
What sells the game the most is the occasional baby crying or female scream when a nuclear weapon is roughly ~5 seconds from a city. The soundtrack is extremely depressing when you realise a nuclear war never ends until everyone dies.
It’s always nice seeing good DEFCON videos.
its so funny how in literally every game he played in the video he was playing africa, i wonder what that say about his subconscious mind
"fractured yaw"
Even though I've watched the ad multiple times, I only just noticed how bad the "Play Online or Play Alone" line is.
If only this vid had more views. Maybe more people could’ve have some mutually assured fun
how the fuck is this video made today? haven't i had it in the watchlist for months? but i have.. havent I?
2 peter, chapter 3 verse 10, King James Version
"The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up"
NORAD has a Defcon
I never played It but i would realy like to
Dangerous lunatics showing Trump ? LOL.
He was maybe a lunatic but far from hostile.
Should have put up a picture of putin or ursela von der leyen...
i've never seen any of this guy's content but he's definitely suffering trump derangement syndrome lmao.
now im sad :(
War game s is not a joke
welp
It's not a movie it's true and real
africa be kinda sus
I have to say, I didn't like the 2020 DEFCON trailer, it goes against the entire atmosphere and mood that the game creates and just feels like a generic game trailer that does not encapsulate the actual essence of the game at all.
Good luck millennials
Trump would never push the button.
Orange man bad 🙄
hey man you're right, he is pretty bad huh
19:53 bruh you can literally see that rise of nations have a diplomacy mode. the diplomacy mode has been in most rts games since age of empires 1 and it plays almost exactly like in defcon . what are you talking about
I did not claim games have not had diplomacy modes. Obviously, as you note diplomacy is an option there in Rise of Nations. What I was calling out was that in the vast majority of RTS multiplayer games that mode is a slideshow, with most games occuring in modes where the teams are locked and clear. Whereas in DEFCON the main gameplay mode allows for far more flexibility. And even in its diplomacy mode, your options for being deceitful are more than most RTS games give you.