All Quiet

All Quiet is a tiny freeware release from 1994 and quite possibly the strangest World War I game you will find in any archive. Matt Bell built it with Game-Maker, the construction kit from Recreational Software Designs that let amateurs assemble their own tile-based action games without writing a line of code.

The premise reads like an absurdist short story. Your soldier has spent a full year in the trenches of the Western Front without seeing a single living plant, and the deprivation has given him grunactruava — a fictional mental illness caused by the absence of greenery. Word around the trench says there are grass meadows behind enemy lines, so he decides to cross the front, straight through the artillery barrages, not for king or country but simply to stand in grass one more time.

The nod to Remarque in the title is pure irony, and that irony is the whole point. Mechanically this is a short, one-man action piece built from Game-Maker stock parts: simple graphics and a straightforward task — push through the fire to the far side. The joke is the load-bearing structure here; the gameplay is just the delivery mechanism.

Games like this circulated by the hundreds on BBSes and shareware discs in 1994, and most of them have been forgotten for good reason. All Quiet earns its ten minutes because instead of cloning something successful it tried to be a literary anecdote in playable form. As a game it is primitive, and there is no point pretending otherwise; as a curiosity it still lands, and its punchline will stay with you longer than many far more polished shooters of the era.

All Quiet runs at oldgame.cz straight in your browser, nothing to install.