Nerding Day: FASA Promotional Videos (Patreon)

In the 1990s, roleplaying games weren't the massive industry they are today. We didn't have professional voice actors and comedians making every slack-jawed podcast listener think that they deserve a masterfully curated play experience, we didn't have dozens of well-crafted D&D alternatives about loneliness and fish knife fights, and hobby shops were grimy dens run by sallow, broken men who stank of cheese and regret.

Things are different today, presumably because of woke, for reasons I refuse and am indeed unable to articulate. Oh, I'm sorry, does your Dark Elf ranger have trauma and a tragic backstory, Jayden? Did the game store run out of your favorite microbrew? Is the campaign not cozycore enough for you? God, I despise this person I just made up in my head. And you know where I learned to use the power of my imagination like that? In the bad old days of RPGs with barely-functional rules and cartoonish worldbuilding.

In this benighted era, if you wanted to promote your tabletop game, you did one of two things: you took out an ad in Dragon next to the Knights of the Dinner Table strip, or you produced a needlessly complex short promotional film in an era when no practical technology existed for sharing videos of that length. Thank God FASA chose the latter.

I've never played BattleTech. My knowledge of the property extends only as far as what I could glean as a child from the covers of manuals strewn across the floor of the bedroom belonging to a friend's older brother who seemed, at that point, impossibly adult and sophisticated. The impression I got from those books was that BattleTech was a grown-up game for people who were capable of solving complex mathematical equations and for whatever reason chose to spend their time doing that instead of playing video games.

Not a great start to have a typo in the opening scroll of your promotional video, but I like that they keep things brief and to the point. It's the future, there's wars, the wars are with robots. Let's see some fucking war robots.

Drink it in, babe. That's the best CGI that a successful tabletop game company's money could buy in the '90s. The contrast between this awkward 3DO-ass footage and the next shot could not be more stark.

This is the most limp, lifeless product shot I've ever seen in my life. The person who staged this photo hated BattleTech. It's the exact shot you'd use if ten years earlier, BattleTech had fucked your dad and walked out of his bedroom the next morning wearing one of his shirts, acting like it owned the place and eating the last Toaster Strudel. This is a product upon which the photographer has sworn revenge and is exacting it in the only way they know how: by making a glamor shot look like it was taken in the lair of the Skin Rug Killer. And it's either a photo of a photo or they deliberately didn't crop out the top edge where the wall is visible behind the backdrop. From hell's heart I spit at thee, BattleTech.

As if the editor knew that sucked, they quickly shifted to footage of the BattleTech cartoon. It used a mix of traditional animation for the characters and CGI for the mechs, with the latter looking like something you would have to pay $600 to play in 1994 only to realize that Donkey Kong Country blew it out of the water both in terms of fun factor and ape quantity. There are zero apes that pilot mechs in the BattleTech cartoon, which just seems like paint left on the palette to me. You get me writing that show and day one I'm demanding a chimpanzee in the cockpit or I walk.

Also: this was the same year that ReBoot came out! I know the guys at Mainframe Entertainment were ahead of their time, but lumbering robots stomping around a gridded-out flat landscape look like dogshit next to a computer monster voiced by Tony Jay emerging from a tank-mounted coffin and shredding so hard on a guitar that the audience fears for their lives.

This shit looks like a PS1 cutscene.

Scratch that, it looks like the in-game graphics from ReBoot on the PS1.

That's the entire rest of the video, by the way: shitty robots wandering around a stark landscape shooting at each other and falling off bridges, no narration. Sometimes it goes into this weird wireframe mode and briefly looks like a Virtual Boy game.

God, I'm really making a lot of specific references to failed '90s video game technologies today, but this video does such an awful job of getting the viewer's attention that you'd rather play Hotel Mario on the CD-i than do whatever it is that BattleTech actually is. I guess it's a board game? But also a bunch of other things, according to one last vile product shot?

They do show two seconds of footage of a Super Nintendo game, but they move on from it pretty quickly, like they were ashamed. Why not show Mechwarrior on the PC? Weren't those games pretty good? But there's no time, we've got to keep this consumer-facing promotional video under three minutes and close it with the narrator — who sounds like he's recording this from inside a giant robot himself — reciting the famous BattleTech slogan, "No guts, no galaxy."

That doesn't even make sense. It's would be a better tagline for a Star Wars prequel porn parody where Jimmy Smits fucks Jar Jar Binks to save the Republic. And no, I checked and there doesn't seem to be any Bail Organa/Jar Jar Binks porno out there. There is, however, a lot of AI-generated art of Jar Jar pounding anime characters, which temporarily decreased my faith in humanity until I stumbled across a good old-fashioned crudely executed human drawing of Jar Jar Binks stroking himself while watching Heffer from Rocko's Modern Life gets fucked by the lamp from The Brave Little Toaster.

My day's looking up already! And it's about to get even better, because it's time to watch the greatest short film ever made for the purposes of promoting the experience of sitting at the dining room table with your friends, rolling lots of dice, and always, always having uncomfortable romantic interactions with imaginary elves. This is Shadowrun: A Night's Work.

I know even less about Shadowrun than I do about BattleTech. As best I can tell, it's Rifts with restraint, a world where ogres and pixies run amok alongside cybersamurai and console cowboys, but without technohunters riding kangaroos across the post-apocalyptic plains of Australia.

No text crawl this time, no product shot. FASA made this video to promote the game at GenCon, so it was all about creating a fantasy. And right from the jump, it's an appealing one. In the world of Shadowrun, you can be anybody. Lady with gun and big hair. Lady with computer and big hair. Guy with no shirt and big hair. Fuck. Yes.

The first thirty seconds of this four-and-a-half minute video is just the trio sidling along a grimy building while sirens and helicopter sound effects desperately attempt to create the sense that this is a dark cyberpunk future and not whatever alley in Chicago they could find that wasn't currently the site of an active shooting.

Then we finally get a better look at them, and holy shit. This looks like Zap Rowsdower got on juice and teamed up with Cher to take down a megacorp. Let's meet our crew. None of them have official names, so I'm just going by what I think I hear them call each other.

First we've got the big man.

Blood — or maybe Sludge — doesn't get to do a whole lot, honestly. He offers to shoot a guard at one point, but they presumably didn't have the effects budget for that, so his huge, extremely prominent weapon remains unfired for the entire runtime. Go to hell, Chekhov!

Instead, the hacker character squawks at him to bust up an electronics box so that she can get up in the circuitry and do her nasty work.

The implication is that he's using his monstrous strength to tear apart the casing, but both times this happens he gingerly removes the panel like the actor knows that if he breaks it, they're going to take it out of the $50 they promised him when they found him in the Eagle the night before.

Alternately, maybe in-fiction Blood is actually a Make a Wish Kid who wanted to rob a corp before the cybercancer aerosolized his bones. Maybe they shot him full of nanobots to give him the body of a Canadian wrestler for just one night, and that gun he's holding isn't even real.

You know what is real, though? Magic. I mean, not cybercancer-curing magic, but alley wizardry you can use for crimes.

It's possible that Sally is supposed to be an actual character from Shadowrun named Sally Tsung, who is a mage. And when the crew runs into a single security guard, it's her time to shine.

She steps out of the fog like she's in a Laura Branigan music video and her eyes glow while choral music plays. The music of magic!

The guard drops like a sack of nanopotatoes, so he's either unconscious or Sally has the power to give people brain aneurysms by looking at them. It's fucking brutal. Let's look at it one more time.

That seems pretty overpowered compared to Blood's whole deal (above, sidling). Maybe Sally and the other lady are actually high-level players shepherding a new character through the mission?

Her friend helps Sally put her coat back on and Blood asks if she's ok. I guess causing brain bleeds freezes you in sexy spellcasting pose temporarily? She's ready to go, which means it's time for more slow walking around decidedly unsexy environs. Walking's still free! The corpos haven't taken that from us yet!

They arrive at their destination, a normal garage door everyone pretends looks like some kind of futuristic security shutter. Blood delicately removes another panel and we get a look at what the other woman is actually carrying. It's incredible.

Yes, she has an enormous old IBM keyboard slung across her shoulder. That thing would probably do at least 1D6 blunt damage, but she's got another use for it. Let's give her a proper introduction as she enters what looks to be a disused Red Dwarf set.

We are almost exactly halfway through the video when Sierra enters computerspace. If you were alive thirty years ago, I don't even have to tell you how it looks.

This is the entire rest of the short, just a series of sequences that look like they were taken from those old CGI animations that would play on children's TV sometimes. You know the ones, right? Like the one with that horny bird?

As we all remember, that bird wanted to fuck a sultry fish so bad that he smashed through the barrier separating the sky and water realms contained within their transparent star dome in order to do so. And Shadowrun's cyberworld makes about as much sense as that sentence.

Also: shapes!

I truly love this kind of vision of the internet. The idea that people would be plugging wires into their heads to fly through a landscape of undifferentiated garbage at risk of having their brains exploded by viruses and corporate security is so beautifully stupid. Today, we know better: the internet can easily destroy your mind without the mess or expense of cranial ethernet port installation.

Sierra almost meets that fate, but escapes just before she's reduced to the cognitive level of the average 60-year-old TikTok user. The three run off as an alarm blares. It's unclear what, if anything, they have actually achieved in this "night's work." I guess they killed a low-level security guard and removed some panels. That's gotta be worth a few XP at least. Say ten each for the panels, five for the guy? Maybe Blood can level up and get a new skill, like summoning a spectral raccoon, which is apparently a real thing you can do in Shadowrun.

Lack of raccoon spirits aside, A Night's Work is wonderful. It's a short film for a cyberpunk RPG that looks like it was directed by Andy Sidaris. I wish there were 100 videos like it. I wish Kevin Siembieda had made one for Rifts. I wish I could find out literally anything else about its cast, creators, or contemporary reception. Unfortunately, 90% of the search results for A Night's Work are AI-generated.

This is the world they've built for us, and I suppose in a way it's appropriately dystopian that searching for information on this thing just turns up endless pages created by corporate robots in real-time to try and prevent actual human beings from connecting with one another online. Death to corpos, and remember: no guts, no Blood "Sludge" "Beef Boy" Blood.

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