Nerding Day: Fight Club the Video Game (Patreon)

Fight Club came out when I was in high school, which is the exact time to see that movie and think it’s deep. All of my friends who saw it came into class ranting and raving about how it was real, man. It’s about consumerism, you know? Because, like, we’re all consumers? And, like, that’s how society treats us? And, you know, it’s like we gotta resist that? Because I am not just a number in a machine, dad! Let’s all fight the power like Rosie Perez at the start of Do The Right Thing. And how do you fight the power? By fighting each other. It either really makes you think or you can’t think at all now because your mind just got blown. Whoa.

When Fight Club came out in 1999, it took the culture by storm. America collectively decided to stop shouting, “Run, Forrest, run!” and start shouting, “The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club!” And since it was such a huge part of the world in 1999, it makes absolute sense that Vivendi would release a PlayStation 2 fighting game based on the movie in 2004. Which is five years after 1999. I guess the best angle of anything is in the rearview mirror. We’re really striking while the iron is ice cold here. But the good news is the fighting game version of Fight Club is like if you asked the dumbest guy in your friend group to program a game over a weekend, rewrite some fan fiction, and record all the dialogue himself in slightly different voices.

Oh, and completing the story mode unlocks Fred Durst. So if you’ve been waiting for that Fred Durst video game, I’m happy to tell you that your search is over. Fred Durst is here. Fighting. In the club. That you can’t talk about.

Now, I will say that the idea of a Fight Club video game makes sense. Shit, if there was a game on the NES called “Fight Club,” all of us would be jizzing onto each other for the upcoming release of “Fight Club XV: Bash Fist Championship.” And a movie about people punching each other should translate pretty well into a game about people punching each other. But, lord almighty, that “should” is doing some real heavy lifting. Because, as I’ve hinted earlier, it is not good. If the movie undercuts the idea of bare masculinity as a solution to social issues, then the PlayStation 2 and Xbox version undercuts the idea of fun existing.

Fight Club, the game based on the movie based on the novel, opens with a CGI sequence that looks less like it was made in 2004 and more like it was made in 1996 by a drunk dog trying to push the limits of 3D Studio Max. After a quick scene of blowing up a building that doesn’t make sense unless you’ve already seen the movie, we cut to the game’s version of Tyler Durden voiced by a man who may have heard Brad Pitt’s voice whispered to him over a can attached to a string. He kind of sounds like Brad Pitt if you really, really, really pretend hard enough. Fortunately, Tyler Durden barely appears in this game based on the Tyler Durden movie and every character looks nearly identical, so it’s almost impossible to know the difference anyway.

Wait! That’s my favorite part: Literally almost every single fucking character looks exactly the same. Imagine an entire fighting game roster where everyone is Ken or Ryu except for one dude with giant breasts. That’s Bob from the movie if you don’t remember. The game briefly explains why he has massive honkers, but that’s about all we get from him. No emotional arc. No death that turns into something bigger. Just… Bob with big boobs. He’s one of the few fighters who you can actually tell apart from the others, so that’s cool. And picking him in the Arcade mode is fun, I guess? Although, as far as I can tell, the point of a video game shouldn’t be to seek out slivers of enjoyment.

Okay, okay, I’m not being completely fair. Along with five identical white guys, there’s a white guy who looks like old Wolverine, an asian guy, a black guy, and an elderly man who sounds like Danny Aiello but, as far as I can tell, is not Danny Aiello. Do you even care? Have you read this far? Are these words going to disappear into the mists of time, my whole being and consciousness nothing but a brief drop in the ocean of humanity?

To be fair, there are some differences in costumes. Let me list them: Some characters wear jeans and a tanktop. Some characters wear jeans and no shirt at all. And that’s all, folks! You’ve basically got the whole thing right there. Good luck telling the difference between Angel Face and Jack and anyone else outside of different hair colors or, in literally just one case, skin color. And since Fight Club is a movie about men doing men things for men like you and me, just guys, there are no women fighters in the game. There are ten characters at the start of the game and not one of them is any different.

What about the unlockable characters? Well, Fred Durst appears if you beat the Story Mode, which I did for this stupid article. Beating Arcade Mode with every character will get you Abraham Lincoln, which sounds cool but there’s no fucking way I’m going to put myself through that. And as far as Lincoln is concerned, I do give them credit for at least trying to get at least one of the movie’s gags in there. The rest of the unlockables you get from completing various tasks that sound equally painful so I didn’t do it. You wouldn’t either if you were in my shoes. Also take my fucking shoes off.

And just as every character looks the same, they also - and you’re going to love this - play the same. I picked various people in arcade mode and, while I’m sure there’s some vague underlying nuance I’m missing, they all had the same three or four attacks. And when you fight other characters in arcade mode, they also play the same. Kick, punch, it’s all in the mind. Because it’s based on a movie ostensibly grounded in the real world, there are no fireballs or super combos. Because the game has no budget, there are no interesting mixed martial arts mechanics. People just hit each other until they fall down. Oh, and you can perform throws that barely do any damage and are hard to pull off, so why bother.

Wait, there is actually a reason to bother. There’s a fight in the middle of story mode where you have to break a guy’s arm during a fight. It’s something you’ll accidentally do 30 times before that fight and then never do on purpose until you look it up. You’d think a broken arm would end the fight instantly, but apparently it does the same amount of damage as a shin tap.

This carries over into the style of the fights themselves. You’ll be in a cutscene in which there are thirty dudes shouting at you to fight and then, suddenly, you’ll be in an abandoned parking lot facing off against another guy who could be literally any character in this fucking mess. The entire crowd disappears. The Fight Club just becomes The Fight. Other stages might be generous enough to allow a few dudes who stand almost completely still like guys always do when there’s a fight club going on in the neighborhood.

Okay, okay, so Fight Club isn’t a fun fighting game nor does it have a club-like atmosphere. But what about the story mode? It must be cool re-living Tyler Durden’s rise! Nope. It’s a parallel story. And here’s how fucking generic those characters are, baby: You just name a guy and that’s who you play as. I wanted to name him “Jack’s Butt” because I’m 41 and at the top of my comedy game, but I only had space for “Jack’s B” which is actually way better. So, not only are the fighters generic, but your main character in the story is even more generic. This game is slightly below the Nintendo eShop slop which was clearly made by a student trying GODOT for the first time.

And that story! Oh, man! Remember that CGI opening I mentioned? You can’t even begin to fathom how much I laughed when every cutscene after that (outside of the ending) were still images. That’s right, the cutscenes in the PlayStation 2 version of Fight Club play out the same way that a Game Boy Advance port of a console game would. And they’re all in the same ugly CGI style, so you’re just getting the worst of both worlds. It almost makes it worth it on its own.

The narrative itself runs parallel to the movie. But while the movie is about a man whose dissatisfaction with his own life leads to a disassociation to become the person he wishes he could be, the game is about a guy who just wants to fight and for that reason he becomes the vice president of Fight Club. Yep. Your hero meets a guy at a bar who tells him where Fight Club is (which is against the rules, btw) and then he fights people. After every fight, someone goes, “Whoa! You’re pretty good! You want to meet Tyler, you better go to Miami!”

If I remember correctly, you go from Los Angeles to Seattle to San Francisco to Miami to a bunch of other places that don’t matter because the stages are also virtually identical. There’s no difference between an abandoned parking lot at night in California and an abandoned industrial zone at night in Florida. The only iconic location in the entire game is the weird, broken-down house from the movie. And even then you’re fighting on the lawn in front of disinterested club members. Oh, and you also fight in a hotel ballroom because Tyler Durden worked in a hotel, I guess. Really, there’s very little reason given for any of this.

After fighting your way to the top, you eventually get a similar ending to the final scene of the movie: A bunch of pre-9/11 skyscrapers falling to the ground, which somehow ensures that society will be reset. That didn’t even make sense in the 1999 film. Credit card companies had backups and shit. It wasn’t 1950.

It’s not that nothing happens in the story mode. It’s just that nothing changes. I half expected the hero to turn out to be an undercover federal agent or something - you know, a twist that makes his entry into Fight Club seem more interesting. Nope! Just a depressed guy who a bartender gave some advice to. We’re not even really clear on why he’s obsessed with meeting Tyler Durden. Or what Tyler Durden’s plan really is. If you haven’t seen the movie, the game basically makes it sound like Fight Club is planning an international terrorist attack for absolutely no reason. It just doesn’t give one. Not even a mustache twirl. It’s like if a guy in a bar told you about a cool arcade, and once you started going there you joined a serial killer cult because it seemed fun. Which I guess people do.

As an adaptation of a movie, Fight Club misses the point. It takes a lot of the iconography of the film, but just twists the knob until it’s the blandest nu metal rap rock bullshit. While some very, very minor actors reprise their very, very minor roles, none of the stars’ likenesses are in the game and the voice actors are spotty at best.

On the other hand, as a fighting game, Fight Club also misses the point. Each character fights almost exactly the same. Pick any two random people and the match will almost always be identical to two other random people. Outside of the unlockable characters, this could have had just one character in different outfits and it would’ve been the same experience. However, it is kind of impressive that they put so much effort into making the game look like no effort went into it at all. Seriously, why would you put fourteen similar fighters into a game unless you were intentionally fucking with your audience?

Maybe that’s it. Maybe the video game version of Fight Club is a commentary on game consumerism, man. We all buy these fighting games, right? We’re all badasses, yeah. But what do we do? We pick the same characters over and over, just like how our bosses pick the same printer paper over and over or something. I don’t know. I mostly work in comedy with people who are nightmares for different reasons, so I don’t have as much quirky office humor in my pocket. Perhaps the game is trying to tell us that, no matter who we pick, we’re all just fighting against the system.

Or perhaps it was just made really fast by someone who accidentally got the license for the property in a cereal box competition.

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