Military Madness Established the Foundation for Strategy Games 35 Years Ago

Let’s set the scene. It’s 1989, in Japan. Sega hasn’t released a Shining Force game yet, and won’t for another three years. Nintendo has the first Fire Emblem on the way, but it won’t be out for another year (and when it did release, it wouldn’t have any of the kind of strategic elements it’s now known for outside of permadeath). Turn-based strategy games, RPG or otherwise, weren’t prevalent in Japan just yet: Famicom Wars, the predecessor to what would become known internationally as the Advance Wars series, released in 1988, and Koei’s Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms franchises had gotten started years before, but generally the early offerings in the strategy genre were the province of North American developers at this point in history, and usually for home computers rather than consoles.

It’s kind of funny, then, that it was a couple of Japanese console games that played a significant role in the direction western strategy games would eventually take. Thanks to Dia Lacina, we’ve had a recent reminder of the influence that western games like Wizardry and Ultima had on the development of role-playing games in Japan, but this kind of shaping and sharing goes both ways. Westwood Studios, the developers of Command & Conquer and the studio responsible for refining what a real-time strategy game was, were influenced by Sega’s Herzog Zwei, as well as Hudson Soft’s Nectaris, which released in February of ‘89. In North America, it would be released one year later for the TurboGrafx-16, where it would be known as Military Madness.

These weren’t the lone influences, but they were key ones. As Cam Winstanley wrote of Military Madness for Read-Only Memory, on the subject of the making of Westwood Studio’s Dune II, “Playable as both a single or multiplayer game, movement is turn-based and restricted to hex grids, giving it that board-game-to-videogame feeling typical of its time. Yet in its simple control interface, rapid combat resolution and clear graphics, the basis for Dune II is clear to see.” And that’s no mere guess at influence, either, as Joe Bostic, co-creator of Command & Conquer, cited Military Madness (along with a few other games, Herzog Zwei included) as an influence on Dune II in a Reddit ama over a decade ago. Dune II’s success—and gameplay formula—is what led to Command & Conquer and the influence of Westwood Studios over the industry in the ‘90s. It’s a seminal title that pushed a genre forward into its most recognizable form, and Hudson Soft’s underrated gem of a strategy game helped it get there.

What is it about Military Madness that made it stick in the heads of Westwood Studio’s developers? It was easy to get into, and difficult to put down, and this was the case despite the strategy elements actually being pretty high level out of the gate. Hudson nailed the gameplay and its mechanics so well the first time around in 1989, just six months after the comparatively simple Famicom Wars, that each subsequent entry in the Military Madness/Nectaris series, save one, was an updated remake for whatever hardware it was releasing on. There were some visual differences in each of these, and things got a little flashier by the time the Playstation’s 3D-focused hardware was involved, but it was Military Madness just the same each time out. 

Military Madness utilized hexes instead of squares, and terrain bonuses play a significant part in your strategy. Further, the game is designed so that your focus is on the most efficient, organized, and brutal attacks possible. You aren’t building new units here to replace old ones or to build up an unstoppable army, but for the most part you have the ones you have. And that’s because you can take out tanks with standard soldiers without even suffering heavy losses, but only if you play things right. Terrain bonuses play a part in that, as does the invisible leveling up of your units that occurs the more they fight—even as they get weaker in numbers, the remaining soldiers, vehicles, whatever, get stronger. Where the game truly sings, however, is in positioning your units. Allies adjacent to an attacking unit will provide support fire bonuses—if you’re familiar with how later Fire Emblem games work, you’ve got the right idea. The difference here is that, instead of one paired unit or one adjacent unit aiding with support attacks, you can completely encircle a foe and then attack, and get bonuses from all of the encircling units. You don’t even have to get that complicated with it, though: so long as you’ve surrounded a foe, even with just two units, you can earn an encirclement bonus.

An encirclement bonus halves the offensive and defensive stats of an enemy unit, meaning you can surround a dangerous vehicle with a bunch of foot soldiers and then destroy it without losing a ton of your units in the process—or, at the least, severely lessen the damage it can do to you. Which in turn means that in order to get into this position, you have to be thinking far ahead with each move, and not just reacting to whatever happened on the last turn. Failure to plan means a lot of 1v1 encounters, and you’ll wear down your units and inevitably lose if you play that way. Instead, trap enemy units so they can’t escape what’s about to happen to them, and they’ll be ineffectual both in their attacks to break free as well as in their defense of your own assaults. Whereas calculations for attacks in early turn-based strategy games were fairly simple—again, the famed weapon triangle wasn’t even part of Fire Emblem games until a few entries in, while Shining Force attempted to be even snappier and with less friction than that—all of the bonus calculations and terrain bonuses of Military Madness meant there was a ton going on and to consider with each move. You didn’t need to grab a pen and paper to figure it out yourself, however: you just needed to start moving around and testing out the effectiveness of your plans, and try a new one if it didn’t work out.

Earlier, when I said that “for the most part” the units you start with are the ones you have? There’s an exception to that which also plays into how you plan out those moves. Some maps have factories on them, which are unclaimed at the start of the battle. So it becomes a race to reach the factory and have it produce some new units for you to help stem or turn the tide, depending on your situation, but you also can’t be leaving your more agile and faster units out where they can get picked off. So it has to be a smart race, where you’re still able to manage encirclement bonuses and efficiently take down what’s racing you. Or else even if you do get the factory and the units within, you’ll just be using them to get back to where you were, strength-wise, before your poor decisions thinned your numbers. This also goes for the way to win a map outside of defeating all enemy forces, which is to reach the enemy prison camp first to free the prisoners within. You can’t just run there with your fastest unit and expect to succeed: you’ve got to plan this out, and efficiently so. 

Military Madness is a bit simple in terms of how much there is within—16 basic stages and then 16 advanced ones that unlock for completing that first wave—but that mostly means it’s due for an update. The original received ports to practically everything besides Sega and Nintendo’s home platforms, such as the PC-9801, X68000, MS-DOS, Windows 95, and Windows 98 (a 1998 Game Boy port, Nectaris GB, was the exception on the Nintendo front, and also likely earned Hudson Soft their spot making the sequels to Game Boy Wars for the Big N). The Playstation received a full-blown remake with new maps and 3D battle sequences powered by the 32-bit hardware—this one was called Nectaris: Military Madness, finally uniting the two names used in Japan and North America. Just one true sequel was developed: 1994’s Neo Nectaris for the PC Engine CD, and that didn’t end up coming to North America given its late release in the platform’s lifecycle. 

The last console edition of Military Madness is now 15 years old, as it was released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the original’s release in Japan. That’s Military Madness: Nectaris, which came out on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii. It’s an updated version of the original, and still a good time today, albeit a little simple in some ways given the advances made within the genre between 1989 and 2009. It probably was supposed to be more than just an anniversary game and then back on the shelf for the series, but instead a revival of an underrated franchise that had been pushed aside as Hudson focused more on multiplatform Bomberman and publishing after their era of first-party game development alongside NEC ended in the mid-’90s. The problem is that Konami would fully absorb Hudson into itself just a few years later, and this is Konami we’re talking about, so there hasn’t been a new Military Madness since. 

That should change, but it’s important that fans of Military Madness recognize that “should” and “will” are very different things. It’s been 15 years since the last Military Madness now, and who knows? Maybe it’ll be another 15 before the next. Sadly, the original isn’t widely available any longer: it had a Virtual Console release on the Wii, but that shop has been closed for half-a-decade now, and while it was included on the excellent Turbografx-16 Mini, that’s not exactly widely available or priced in a consumer-friendly fashion any longer. At the least, we can hope for this to be available once more—where’s the Turbografx-16 section for Nintendo Switch Online, like there was on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Consoles, like Sega has on the Switch with the Genesis? Why aren’t these games being released on Playstation Network any longer, and why was the re-release of the Playstation remake only available on Japan’s PSN? Why isn’t Konami flooding Steam with Turbografx re-releases or making like Capcom and Namco with their rich (acquired) history? But what we should really hope for is some studio with a love for Military Madness, like Westwood Studios once had, wanting to take a shot at making a new entry for a new generation, and for Konami to listen to that pitch. It’s healthy to have dreams.

Military Madness was ahead of its time, and inevitably underappreciated in comparison to the more famous tactical series released on Sega and Nintendo hardware. It helped influence the shift to real-time strategy, though, and focused on complicated—but accessible—turn-based battles well before that was the norm for this kind of strategy game. It deserves better in terms of being available than it’s got now, but you can still snag 2009’s Military Madness: Nectaris on the Xbox Marketplace thanks to backwards-compatibility, at least. And that might have to tide you over for some time even if it should be otherwise.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.