Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, made by Saber Interactive, is the sequel to a beloved 2011 shooter and has been praised for, among other things, feeling like an old-school Xbox 360-era game. But some have marshaled that classic mystique into a rebuke of modern games that don’t conform to certain views they have about who gaming is for and what it needs to be good.
A week ago, YouTuber LegendaryDrops posted a video called “Space Marine 2 is a reminder of what we lost,” in which he praised the game for its gruesome combat, beautiful presentation, and celebration of the Warhammer 40K world and lore. He tried to juxtapose it with modern games that are either live service hamster wheels or single-player experiences that feel narratively convoluted and full of bloated gameplay systems.
But he also talked about the game oozing “with so much masculinity that I feel like I’ve been in a desert for the last few years” and how it has “themes nobody wants to go near anymore for [like] ‘for courage and honor, for brotherhood, for the emperor.’” LegendaryDrops went on to praise the limited banter among the characters, calling out games that eschew simple good and evil characters and more stoic dialogue.
The video didn’t blow up until a few days later when YouTuber Asmongold posted a nearly hour-long reaction to it, agreeing with most of LegendaryDrops’ points and elaborating on some of them. “The problem is not that [modern games] have complex characters, the problem is that their idea of a complex character is a self-indulgent loser that doesn’t have any charisma,” he said at one point.
He continued:
That’s the reason why I remember I had to read The Catcher in the Rye, and I hated that book so much. And I feel like the reason why I hated the book is because I thought the main character like Holden Caulfield or whatever was the biggest simp loser pussy bitch that I had ever, like just such a loser…I bet the people that fucking write stuff like fucking Dustborn or whatever they love that, they think it’s great.
There’s a two-step that happens in both assessments of Space Marine 2. Each argument conflates modern gaming trends that many players find exhausting with a more recent and boutique reactionary backlash against games accused of shoehorning progressive values into their narratives. These accusations are made whenever a title dares to showcase diverse characters or tell a story that doesn’t solely revolve around the straight white male that’s traditionally centered in video game box art.
Asmongold bringing up Dustborn, a recent action-adventure indie release about a band traveling across America, is specifically a reference to that. The game and the team behind it became such a target of “anti-woke” reactionaries online that the studio had to put out a statement. Rather than just disagreeing with the values expressed in the game, it became important for some to show that the game had financially failed and was bad because of those values, the same way some are now championing Space Marine 2 not just because it’s a fun or well-designed game, but in part claiming that it’s fun and well designed because it centers young men as the target demographic.
None of this would have particularly surprised anyone if it wasn’t for Saber Interactive’s own CEO appearing to join in the debate. Matt Karch, who co-founded the company in 2021, appeared to leave a comment on Asmongold’s reaction video near the end of last week. “Hey man,” it began. “CEO of Saber here. I love your videos. When we signed the deal to make Space Marine 2, all I wanted was a throwback game. We had the chance to work on something which by its nature was ‘old school.’ I can’t even comprehend many of the current games that we play these days. They are too complex and too much of an investment.”
The comment continued:
We worked on Halo back in the day, and that game could be distilled down to the simplest of shooting loops, but it was entirely addicting. That is what we wanted to recapture. I hope that games like Space Marine 2 and Wukong are the start of a reversion to a time when games were simply about fun and immersion. I spent some time as Chief Operating Officer at Embracer and I saw games there that made me want to cry with their overblown attempts at messaging or imposing morals on gamers. We just want to do some glory kills and get the heart rate up a little. For me that is what games should be about.
It wasn’t until Monday, September 16, when a Space Marine 2 news account on Twitter recirculated that comment that more people became aware of it. Those in the comment section instantly flocked to it, flooding it with upvotes and positive responses fluctuating between things like “you are doing god’s work” and “I‘m glad we got games failing hard that have pronouns in them, like who tf plays these DEI games?”
A lot of people probably just thought, “Yeah, Space Marine 2 rules, I miss couch co-op and not grinding battle passes.” But for a contingent of the anti-woke gaming backlash, it vindicated the idea that at least one of the scourges of modern gaming is “overblown attempts at messaging or imposing morals on gamers.” All of this might have been easy to shrug off it not for a highly motivated and ongoing harassment campaign against story consultants who, earlier this year, became the boogiemen responsible for every person of color and pride flag that showed up in a major game.
The YouTube account behind the comment had no uploaded videos and was only created in May of this year. The bio read “CEO of Saber Interactive. Generic male of sorts – lover of loud guitars, violent games, fast cars and all sorts of whisky.” When asked to confirm if the comment really belonged to Karch, a spokesperson for Saber Interactive declined. “Saber is not commenting on this matter,” they told Kotaku in an email.
So far, 2024 has been full of breakout action games that have eschewed some of the excesses associated with open-world RPGs and grindy multiplayer games in favor of more streamlined and “old-school” feeling designs, and some (though not all) have been dragged into a culture war that seems to not so secretly be about entirely different things. Stellar Blade was a sci-fi Souls-lite that became mired in controversy around sexy costume censorship. Black Myth: Wukong was a fantasy action game in the mold of Ninja Gaiden that became a breeding ground for fake conspiracies around nonexistent attempts to get the game canceled. And now Space Marine 2, a straightforward shooter campaign with crunchy combat and dazzling set pieces, has become the latest Rorschach test for what ails modern blockbuster gaming.
There’s extra irony in a Warhammer 40K game becoming that crucible, given its openly fascist world-building and the fact that the owners of it have had to repeatedly remind the more toxic corners of its fanbase that “Warhammer is for everyone.” To the degree that Space Marine 2 doesn’t “impose” morals on the player, it’s only because the politics of its universe are so obviously bleak and abhorrent that regular people know to treat them as grim dark fantasy rather than a hero’s journey parable for 21st century virtue ethics.
There’s another hit game that’s recently bucked modern blockbuster gaming trends, and it’s Astro Bot. There are no daily quests, crafting systems, or XP grind in that either, just a crisp and highly refined mashup of Super Mario Odyssey and Crash Bandicoot collectathon platforming. Weirdly, no one seems to be obsessed with whether the cute little robot at the center of the game is a paragon of masculinity or secretly a vehicle for transmitting woke propaganda.
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