Retro Games Revival: Blast Chamber - Misery Loves Exploding
Imagine you've got a bomb strapped to your chest and the counter is set at 3 minutes. You try to remove it, but you can't get it off. Suddenly, a door opens revealing a collection of treadmills, spikes, springs, and a large glowing crystal in the center of the room along with 3 other people with bombs strapped to their chests. A bell rings as your counter reads 2:59, 2:58, 2:57...
This is the premise behind the 1996 sleeper hit, Blast Chamber. Published by Activision, Blast Chamber is sometimes heralded as the first "non sports 4 player game" for the Sony PS1 and Sega Saturn. While I know what they mean by "sport," that is exactly what Blast Chamber is and they may have had a better reception if they named it Futuristic Gladiator Murderball.
The Gameplay
Blast Chamber is sort of a cross between rugby, motocross, and Saw-style trap room torture puzzles (cause there ain't no way of getting grown men to strap bombs on their chest for the amusement of others short of getting off death row). 4 Competitors face off using their wits, grit, and mighty stiff arms to pick up a glowing crystal ball and put it inside a hole that corresponds to a color of one of the players that removes time from their bombs or adds to their own. Simple enough, save for the fact that the field is a rotating cube and they're spikes and shit everywhere.
In the movies, we had seen several bloody, future sports that drew from the past in *Rollerball*, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and Death Race 2000. The sports were violent but grounded. With gaming in 1996, save for Mortal Kombat and the Mutant League series, futuristic sports typically went full wacky and included robots and superpowers in games like Baseball Simulator 1000, Base Wars, and *Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball*
Why is this... even?
So Blast Chamber's violent premise, and twisted future sport alone was worth picking it up, but the real draw of it for my crew of misfits was the multiplayer gaming elements. You you run and leap and push players to make them cough up the football like crystal. You could walk over to a wall and kick flashing arrow or pod to rotate the stage 90 or 180 degrees, causing every player fall and smash themselves on the floor coughing up that glorious crystal. There were fans that blew you into the air, as well as floor tiles that could make spikes fly out to prematurely "kill" an opponent and cost them time. Moreover, there were also power ups to grab that could shift the play, like crystal magnets, player freezers, magnetic boots, and the always hilarious crystal bomb.
Legendary Texas Longhorns football Coach Darrell K. Royal once said, "Three things can happen when you throw the ball, and two of them are bad." Well about 30 things can happen in a round of Blast Chamber, and 29 of them are bad, and bad things are happening to everybody is the apex of party gaming.
Party Gaming Couch Competition
Since Blast Chamber was a non-sport sports game, it boasted the ever illusive ability to play with up to 3 friends in frenzied battles that were as much about self preservation as conquest!
Since your Blast Chamber avatar has a ticking bomb on his chest, that sense of urgency transfers right through the screen to you. Then, if you are playing with a group known for its venomous streak, then intensity this produces is palpable. You don't win Blast Chamber so much as survive it. This philosophy is echoed in Player Unknown Battlegrounds, and a big reason for why I think this experience has become so popular for dropping 100 players on an island and where the winner is the last one standing. Like Blast Chamber, being good helps, but not as much as being cunning.
All we needed was to set up the Playstation, procure a multitap and grab a few bags of candy and we could play all night as damned athletes who shoved each other in the hopes of stopping a bomb on their chest from exploding. The game was fun on its own, but what really pushed Blast Chamber to the gaming bliss point was a discovery that placing the game on THERMONUCLEAR (hard mode) created 3 interesting effects.
1. You got less time (+15 sec) for putting the crystal into your own scoring reactor.
2. Opponents got more time off when the crystal landed in their scoring reactor (- 45 sec)
3. Explosions were larger and could kill other players that were too close to them.
When you saw your clock dwindling down to its final ticks, rather than grabbing the crystal and trying to stay in the game longer, you could instead say "screw winning" and go full pessimist, find the closest opponent and push them down repeatedly, laughing maniacally as you exploded into colored mist taking the poor sap with you. Worse yet, if you found yourself lucky enough to grab a crystal magnet to tear the lifesaving ball from your opponents grip, the opponent in turn could quickly grab a crystal bomb leaving you to helplessly watching a dangerous, soon-to-be-exploding implement float slowly across a screen to you.
Athletic Nihilism
In a way, Blast Chamber takes athletic nihilism to an absurd and hilarious level that somehow inverts and makes it a blast to play. It's like Schadenfreude: the game. You will lose time. You will die on spikes. You will explode at the hands of other players. You will lose time and take time, and rotate the entire stage to save yourself. You will make your friends hilariously miserable, but hopefully not as hilariously miserable as they make you. Blast Chamber is an awesome example of just how much fun shared misery can be when it's executed in a hilarious and competitive way. Next time you go old school, pick up Blast Chamber and play a game where you can push your friends into walls until you both explode. Repeat, then giggle until you pass out.