I've made it no secret here that I'm a big fan of Battletech, although I have been terrible about actually really discussing the game here. There's a couple of reasons for that, mainly that I'm not a completionist so I have a fairly small collection of stuff, and also because I'm woefully behind on getting anything these days.
That being said, I do love Battletech and spent a lot of years in that world. I played the old Mechwarrior PC games, my brother and I spent countless hours bonding over the MechAssault games and I even watched the god awful cartoon when it was airing. But there's an era of Battletech's history that I feel like either gets glossed over completely, or is only ever brought up in ridicule. I speak, of course, of the infamous Dark Age.
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| Well this certainly takes me back |
Mechwarrior Dark Age, for those who might not know, was a collectable miniatures game produced by Wizkids based on their popular Heroclix game and launched in 2002.
And I played the absolute shit out of it.
See, in the early 2000's there wasn't anything even close to resembling a Battletech community where I lived. My exposure was video games and fuzzy memories of a TV show that were getting pushed aside for fond memories of my girlfriend when she wasn't around. Battletech was sort of on its deathbed at the time, and Dark Age was an attempt to pump some life into the franchise by the new owners after FASA imploded.
It was what one could charitably call a mixed bag. The collectable nature of the game did indeed keep my brother and I buying boosters to bolster our armies, but it was a turn off for a lot of people. And I get that, because the ratios were completely fucked. My brother and I, for a while at least, always bought stuff together to keep us pretty even in terms of our collections, and I had probably twice as many actual battlemechs as him as he just kept pulling industrialmechs. I will never deny, however, that there is a thrill to opening a pack and pulling something super awesome or rare, it's part of what keeps TCGs having some appeal to me.
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| It did give us the Behemoth II, which I will hear no slander against |
A lot of people were also turned off by the pre-painted models, but I don't feel like this came up too often. I know some people hated it, but most of my local community just rolled with it and people even repainted some of their stuff.
But you know what? Dark Age was fun. It certainly isn't as well designed as Classic Battletech or Alpha Strike, but as a high school kid who just wanted to throw down from time to time with buddies it was sort of the perfect game. Everyone likes big robots, the rules were pretty straightforward and I was able to teach several people pretty quickly. It wasn't deep by any means, but it did deliver on what it promised. Now, full disclosure, I stopped playing after the second or third expansion came out. The local community seemed to dry up, my attention became more devoted to the opposite sex and Dark Age sort of drifted out of my sphere. But I did still have fond memories of it, and would find my models from time to time and go "oh yeah!" I played Dark Age more than I played 40k at the time, and had more than enough stuff to play big games and be able to mix up my lists (unlike with 40k where I had like 1000 points of Tau by the time I graduated).
But all anyone ever seems to want to do is talk about the lore and the worst model the game ever made. So let's get this out of the way.
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| Yeah, the early 2000's were a hell of a thing |
Yes, the Atlas model is a fucking travesty of a design. Yes, Dark Age did several classic 'mechs dirty and some of the redesigns are questionable at best and violations of the Area Conventions at worst. I will not defend the Dark Age Atlas, despite the fact I owned one and used it quite a lot. It is bad. But Classic Battletech wasn't innocent of the sin of shitty models, either.
But Dark Age did give us lots of cool new toys, and even some solid new redesigns. The Spider, Koshi, Black Hawk and Centurion all got solid new designs that look great, so why don't we ever seem to talk about those? I'm sure if I went through the Dark Age catalog I could find plenty of bad designs, but I would also find plenty of good ones.
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| Centurion is best 'mech in all eras. Fight me, nerds. |
We also got our fair share of cool new stuff, that have thankfully made their way to CBT via the folks at Iron Wind Metals. The Cygnus, Arbalest, Valiant, the Marksman Mk.1 tank, the Jes II missile carrier and others. For a lot of these things these were the first sort of modern designs in Battletech, where a lot of models were still from the 80's and early 90's and based off some pretty bad art.
The other big issue with Dark Age is the lore. I'm not lore expert when it comes to Battletech, by any stretch of the imagination, and it is dense as hell. I love it, don't get me wrong, but holy shit.
The issue was how it was handled. See, when Dark Age came out the last major era in Battletech had been the FedCom Civil War (the best era, and I will fight you on that). In universe the Civil War ends in 3067, and Dark Age picks up 3132. Now you might think that a six decade time jump wouldn't be a big problem, except that the lore that was written for Dark Age mentioned a whole lot of stuff happening in the meantime, and when it came time to integrate it into the official Battletech lore the writers suddenly found themselves needing to cram a whole lot into a fairly small span of time.
The writers now had to fit in not only the massive upheaval that would become the Word of Blake Jihad, but also all the other events such as the establishment of the Republic of the Sphere into just 60 short years. Some of the Succession Wars last nearly that long on their own, and none of them saw the Free Worlds League get cracked like a coconut (as far as I remember). It was just a lot of galaxy wide changes in a very short period of time, and as a result the Jihad ends up feeling rushed and unrefined.
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| The Valiant, the Hatchetman's sexier cousin |
I read a handful of the novels that came out around the time Dark Age was being produced, and I remember having a nominally good time with them (despite some absurd bullshit that happens in them). But the greater lore of the Dark Age and the rise and fall of the Republic of the Sphere is beyond me, but the people I know who have gone deep diving on that subject have not come back impressed. I don't know how much of that is the original lore from those novels, and how much is stuff added later by Catalyst Game Labs to try and move things along, but I do know that the era is generally not well recieved.
Which I think is something of a shame. I think the Dark Age era has some cool stuff coming out of it. This being Battletech, that does mean most all of it carries over pretty easily into the latest era, Ilclan, so at least once I get around to building forces for that I can grab some of my favorite designs. But I think Dark Age deserves better than its been given, and while it's easy to sneer at it for some pitfalls it was kind of pivotal in the survival of the Battletech franchise at the time. Battletech is seeing something of a renaissance now, but in the early 2000's the future was pretty bleak.
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| Marksman stans, represent! |
Was Dark Age perfect? God no. It was flawed, desecrated some of the setting's most iconic mechs and left a hell of a job for the writers to fill the void between the Civil War and the Dark Age. But was it awful? I'd say no. It was a fun little game that gave us some cool new toys and some updates of classic toys. It wasn't groundbreaking by any means, but at a time when the future of Battletech was uncertain it (and the MechAssault games) managed to grab my attention and something stuck long enough that damn near 20 years later I was still invested in those big stompy robots. It took risks, which in itself is kind of admirable when dealing with a property as old and loved as Battletech, and while they didn't always pay off it did leave an impression.
For better or worse we'll likely be discussing Dark Age, both the game and the era, and its ramifications on the greater history of Battletech for some time to come. But I say that maybe we be a little nicer to it, and try to remember that some good came out of this weird little experiment.
