Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine — the name alone promises revolution, but in reality you get something completely different. This isn't about musicians, but a simple action game released by some minor American-European studio in the late '90s for DOS. The idea: throw things at people, collect them back, repeat until you don't care anymore.

You're playing something like a modern David with plenty of slingshots. The scene is static, enemies run around the sides or things fall from the top of the screen. You have to collect them and press a key to make them fly at the enemies. That's how you force a defeated enemy to surrender. The longer you play, the more things pile down and the more enemies show up. It's a bit like Tetris, but with bleeding.

Playing it is hypnotic in its own way. The number of things grows, time pressure increases, the screen fills with objects and you click, collect, throw. The controls are primitive — mouse or keyboard, nothing complicated. The graphics are flat, purely geometric, without much effort at visuals. The sound is rather hollow, like a ream of paper hitting a table. The game plays in one go for about five minutes, then you know everything. Further rounds are just numbers that grow.

There's really nothing to tell from memory. Rage Against the Machine is one of those games that thousands of people played from some free collection of shareware games and then deleted as quickly as possible. It had no ambitions to be art, no story, no ending. It was just entertainment for a quarter hour while waiting for a better game to download from the internet.

Today? When someone's looking over your shoulder and you want something mindless that runs in a browser right away, remember Rage. It's not bad, just pointless. But it's sometimes interesting precisely because of that pointlessness — nothing distracts you, no menus, no hidden mechanics. Just falling things and your gosh-what-a-relic from a couple of days old.