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America’s Army, the Pentagon’s Video Game, Shuts Down After 20 Years

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

America’s Army: Proving Grounds, a game used as a recruitment tool by the United States government, is shutting down its servers on March 5 after existing in various iterations for 20 years. After that date, the game will be delisted on Steam and removed from the PSN store. Offline matches and private servers will work, but the game will no longer track stats or provide online matches.

For 20 years, players have been able to download and play the Counter-Strike-esque game for free on PCs and consoles. It was a recruitment tool when no one else was using video games for recruitment, a free-to-play game well before that became common, and an attempt by the U.S. Army to reach a new generation of Americans.

“The free-to-play America’s Army PC Game represented the first large-scale use of game technology by the U.S. government as a platform for strategic communication and recruitment, and the first use of game technology in support of U.S. Army recruiting,” a forum post announcing the game’s shutdown said. “Three mainline titles and more than 20 million AA players later, the series’ original purpose continued. There have been over 30 million objectives completed, 180 million successful missions accomplished, 250 million teammates assisted, and many more in-game achievements attained in AA: pG alone.”

In 1999, after a recruiting shortfall in the U.S. Army, Col. Casey Wardynski had an idea. Kids were playing video games all the damn time. Why not meet them where they were and design a video game that reflected American military values. Developed internally by the Army, America’s Army launched three years later in 2002.

It was a wild success. After flagging throughout the 1990s, enthusiasm for the American military skyrocketed after 9/11. Wardynski’s video game hit the market at just the right time to capture that enthusiasm. It was a first person shooter similar to Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six with some additional rules that reflected military culture. Team killers, for example, were sent to the brig. Most importantly, it was free.

For a brief period, Wardynski was all over mainstream news. "It's designed to give them an inside view on the very fundamentals of being a soldier, and it's also designed to give them a sense of self-efficacy, that they can do it," Wardynski told the Washington Post in 2005. "We want them to see that they can succeed in doing this. You don't have to think what it would look like—you can see what it looks like."
 
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Tschumi

Member
This game was a huge deal for my buddies and i when it came out for its graphics and realism.. coming from operation flashpoint my friend and I were hugely psyched.. turns out operation flashpoint had the better story/more appeal to us
 
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ParaSeoul

Member
Donald Glover Reaction GIF
 

Dream-Knife

Banned
Didn't know it was free to play. I'll have to download it and give it a go. I remember reading about it in EGM back in the day, but I always thought it was a paid xbox game.
 

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
Only thing I remember of the game was that I couldn't get through the parachute trial and gave up frustrated :messenger_tears_of_joy:

But yeah, 20 years isn't bad at all. Well done!
 
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VN1X

Banned
I remember playing this a ton back in the day, then Counter-strike and Operation Flashpoint took over my life.

Kind of curious to give this a go now to see how it holds up these days.
 

CamHostage

Member
"Men, when we get inside that compound, I will take lead, and I want you to stick to me like a shadow..."

hqcDF4q.jpg
 
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01011001

Banned
I loved America's Army 2 back in the day. played it a shitton.
then AA3 came out and was a buggy unfinished shitshow of a game.

I stayed at AA2 like most people and eventually got bored of it.

later on my replacement for this type of game was ultimately Insurgency, the og Source Mod version.

I bet nowadays most people play Insurgency or ArmA when they want an army sim type of game. AA basically ran its course
 
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DeceptiveAlarm

Gold Member
I played the original in like 2001. We loved it. Some of my Tribes Shifter mod buddies got on Roger Wilco and pwned.

I haven't typed and of those words in 20 years. Lol.
 

Dane

Member
Fun fact, America's Army was the first Unreal 2 game released, months before Unreal Tournament 2003 and Splinter Cell.
 

Alexios

Banned
It was a solid PC tactical FPS for a while but with 3 onwards seems to have faltered and then dropped off a cliff. I dunno if it ever worked for recruiting as a foreigner but loads of people had fun with it and the propaganda wasn't too in your face outside always having the US pov on either team (which isn't a huge deal anyway, any game could have you as soldiers vs terrorists or whatever and then always give you the good guy pov, in fact I'm surprised more don't do this and instead actually let you to pick the bad guys like that's any better when the teams aren't presented equally good). They could probably just buy some existing game like COD for a modified version for the same purpose rather than try and develop it from scratch themselves, especially since realism seems to have gone out the window in recent editions just as it's sadly out of fashion for commercial projects.
 
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HTK

Banned
Good, the game ran like crap. Up until recently it was 30 FPS which made no sense because it's not like it was pushing anything crazy visually. This game was bad and it deserves to go away, everything else is nostalgia goggles.

Yes, every game has potential unfortunately for a lot of them including this one it's not realized.
 

speckz

Member
I remember this! I played it and promptly forgot it for some reason. It's not me; it's you, or is it me, not you? I forget. I'll stop rambling now.
 
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