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A Winnable War, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Toy Soldiers

"In Europe and America
There's a growing feeling of hysteria
Conditioned to respond to all the threats
in the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets"
--Sting, "Russians" (1985)

Toy Soldiers: Cold War comes out this Wednesday, and I love it for a number of reasons. Certainly, I think it's a great game just in terms of its nuts-and-bolts gameplay. But it's also an example of a game whose concept and visual design make it resonate a bit more than it otherwise might for me.

I remember a lot of talk in the early 1980s of Ronald Reagan and Star Wars. I was a kid and I couldn't make much sense of it, but I understood enough to know that the talk wasn't about the Star Wars movies at all, that it involved lasers in space shooting down incoming Russian nuclear missiles. In short, I understood just enough to be afraid.

Ronald Reagan delivering the "Star Wars" speech, March 23, 1983

For children, playing with toys and using the imagination is, in part, a way of confronting fears, and I know that in my elaborate childhood play fantasies, the rag-tag bunch of heroes that included whatever Barbie dolls, He-Man figures, G.I. Joes and other toys I could wrangle up often dealt with symbolic versions of the Russian nuclear attack I was programmed to fear.

Of course, looking back on that time now, it all seems almost silly, like a bunch of sci-fi nonsense. Star Wars? Lasers shooting down missiles in space?! It's easy now to imagine Reagan playing with toys himself in the White House war room, making pew-pew noises with model satellites and model missiles over a map of the world. But at the time, I didn't see the absurdity in it.

Toy Soldiers: Cold War finds the absurdity both by reenvisioning the Cold War as a Russian invasion played out by toys, with all the inherent silliness that entails, and by acknowledging the serious fears of that period, in its own silly way. Between missions, a radio broadcasts phrases like "the Soviet Union has launched unprovoked hostilities" and "duck and cover" (yes, we had duck and cover drills at my school, as if hiding under our desks would save us from nuclear attack). And the levels combine elements in such a way as to evoke the early 80s so well that the game conjures in me a palpable yearning for the musty, toy- and game-filled basement of the home I lived in during those years. The first level, for instance, perhaps taking a cue from the 1984 film Red Dawn, has a small-town U.S.A. look to it. This is what was at stake. Our American way of life. Our love of football.

This football field, with its cheap flat football players, is one of my favorite details in the game. Ostensibly a board and pieces for a game called BLITZ! that have been tossed into the elaborate model battlefield, it reminds me of so many games of that era that had cheap pieces with cheap stands, games that I was often more likely to incorporate into my elaborate play scenarios than I was to actually sit down and play them as they were meant to be played.

I love, too, the little black and red connectors where the toy vehicles recharge their batteries. It's a perfect little touch that makes me think of these toys as the sort of thing my dad might have brought home from Radio Shack.

It's these details and so many more like them that make Cold War a little experience in time-travel for me, a game that, like the elaborate scenarios I'd play out back then as a way of coping with (among other things) the fear of a nuclear attack, does my inner 7-year-old a lot of good. These touches may not have quite the same nostalgic pull for you that they do for me, but if you play Toy Soldiers: Cold War (and I really think you should), I think you'll find that the game's production design, from its Top Gun-inspired music to its Rambo-esque commandos and so much more, is top-notch, and that its 80s cold war setting is more than just an amusing superficial concept. It's a smart and affectionate acknowledgment of the anxieties many kids had in the early 1980s, and a celebration of the ways in which imagination (and totally awesome toys) can help us confront such fears.