Unfortunately, the game itself was ill-fated.
Players who have followed the Soviet sci-fi title Atomic Heart may have noticed that just last week, a new trailer was released for the Russian game, which has been on the air for five full years.
Indeed, a sentence to express the resentment of the game to the players is “the last time I watched the trailer of this game was just going to college, and now I’m going to graduate”, and we still don’t know the exact time we can play it. We still don’t know the exact time we can play it.
These “Lifetime” series have been making players wait for years
For those who saw the trailer for Atomic Heart for the first time (or had seen it before but had long forgotten), like the group of people who noticed the game five years ago, apart from its weird and creepy trailer content, which was not clear whether it was scientific or metaphysical, many people were attracted by its unique art style after just a few glances, and quickly became excited about the game.
As we all know, you can always trust the Slavic aesthetic. Magnificent and avant-garde architecture, beautiful statues, and a refined and eerie no-man’s land that runs completely counter to the American wasteland …..
The atmosphere alone, you can smell its strong distinctive flavor. And this appeal is undoubtedly irresistible to players who are used to seeing American-style Japanese games.
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Atomic Heart is set in a parallel time in the Soviet Union, where robotics and AI technology are developing rapidly. The protagonist, a KGB agent, is sent to a factory that has fallen silent because it has gone out of control, and there he sees all kinds of strange creatures and robots that originally served humans but now aim to kill them.
Although not yet released, you may already feel the special cultural status of Atomic Heart among some gamers – it is already considered a masterpiece of the “atomic punk” genre.
Unlike cyberpunk and steampunk, which are classic and familiar art styles, most people know very little about atompunk. Because of its overlapping elements with the general post-apocalyptic wasteland style, atomic punk seems to have a hard time finding a distinctive identity.
But “atomic punk” is not difficult to understand. A more common and simple definition is that atomic punk is a vision of a future world driven by nuclear energy.
This imagination stems from the U.S.-Soviet Cold War nuclear arms race of the last century, where the competition in science and technology spawned by the idea of war might have given humanity the opportunity to develop more rapidly from nuclear energy. By the time of the U.S.-Soviet space race, people’s bold imagination of a future that was not out of reach had already broken out of the galaxy, as reflected in the science fiction works that flourished in that period – “Base”, “Dune” in which humans have become the rulers of the universe.
The imagination of the future fell into details that formed the imagination of the future based on that era, with transparent covers with a good view, circular or curved designs that were considered to be technological, and shiny metal …. These features actually constitute the visual elements of today’s atomic punk as well.
Extreme Racing: Horizon players may be familiar with this old race car, known as the “Bubble Car”, which is based on a modern-day Formula One car assembled from 1950s parts, known as the PLYMOUTH ATOMIC PUNK BUBBLETOP, or Plymouth. The “Atomic Punk” bubble top car.
In reality, this bubble-top car is loved by dreamers around the world and is considered an icon of the future.
These same characteristics are reflected in Atomic Heart – the use of transparent materials and clean tones represent the ultimate in futuristic thinking of the era.
This “atomic punk” artistic imagination was inseparable from the Soviet aesthetic.
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As early as two years ago, Atomic Heart announced a version of the game’s setting: the Soviet Union was at the top of its technological game world, and robots were used in almost every corner of society, including industrial and military robots, and civilian robots, such as cleaners, caretakers, guards and forestry robots. In the game, they are also transformed into different types of bosses.
Industrial robots that can grab boulders and attack
Such a design existed in Mundfish’s previous game “Soviet Moon Park VR” – a game in the same world as “Atomic Heart”, which unfortunately has been taken off Steam – but some of the robots that have appeared in the game’s trailer can be seen through the videos left by early players BOSS.
Forestry robots that appeared as early as “Soviet Moon God Park VR
These designs did not come out of thin air, but were actually taken from reality. The Soviet Union began theoretical research on robotics development as early as the 1950s, and by the 1970s, they had included the development of robots in their national science and technology development program.
The futuristic architecture of the Central Institute of Robotics and Technological Cybernetics in St. Petersburg, built during the Soviet era, is also an element of the atomic punk vision
And thanks to the rapid development of spaceflight during that period, sparked by the U.S.-Soviet space race, enthusiasm for robotics continued to grow – people fantasized about migrating to other planets and living a life served by robots.
So, at the same time as the Soviet Union’s Mars exploration program began, many Soviet people saw it as their duty to develop robots with the vision of “migration to Mars,” and some young students and workers took to building them.
Children examine and run a robot at the Soviet Children’s Creation House in 1973
People wanted to develop not only civilian robots, but also to bring them into their own lives and make them part of everyday life.
A bottle of beer is handed to a robot on the streets of Kaliningrad in 1969
From 1972 to 1983, the annual production of industrial robots in the Soviet Union grew from 120 to more than 10,742, making it the second largest producer of robots in the world at the time, after Japan.
It is worth noting that in 2011, a series of such designs were posted on the design-sharing community Behance – the poster claimed that the Soviet Union had conducted a bio-robotic experiment in which animal heads were transplanted onto machinery to control robots to create the perfect weapon.
However, in reality, all of the above pictures and so-called information are fake, and are only the creator’s imaginary story settings for the author’s own dead dog, based on the famous Soviet dog head transplant experiments in history. But because the story of the Soviet Union’s research and development of biological robots matched the impression of the Soviet Union’s technological sophistication in the eyes of many people, it was once taken as fact and spread around the world, and was also popular material for domestic marketing numbers.
The past trailers of “Atomic Heart” also featured the appearance of a combined biological and robotic boss, which was perhaps also a vision of what would happen if Soviet robotics technology was not interrupted.
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In 1972, the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction novel Roadside Picnic was published, presenting a pessimistic approach to science fiction and future technology at a time when the entire Soviet population was hopeful about the future. This is what has led many people interested in the concept of atomic punk today to regard it as the founding work of atomic punk, and the Mundfish staff, in a press interview a few years ago, said that this novel was one of their inspirations.
The subject of Roadside Picnic has nothing to do with nuclear energy, but rather with the first type of human contact with aliens, i.e., human eyewitness contact with the remains left behind by aliens. In contrast to the high profile science fiction style of human colonization of the universe, the story is presented at the other end of the spectrum – a roadside picnic where aliens have left a forbidden zone on Earth that is difficult for humans to tread, and the “stalkers” make their living by selling the “junk” left behind in the forbidden zone. The “stalkers” make their living by selling the “garbage” left behind by the aliens. From the author’s point of view, humans become small and humble, searching for the meaning of their existence inside and outside the restricted areas.
A few years later, Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky adapted the novel into the film Stalker – which likewise became the prototype for the FPS game series Stalker in the new century. Tarkovsky used extremely obscure cinematic language to define the image of the “forbidden zone” and even the “post-apocalyptic” for future generations.
The high-tech weapons drowned by plants and corroded buildings, while telling the powerlessness of human technology in the movie, reminded the optimistic people that the development of human technology is far from solving all the problems, and is not as optimistic as everyone imagines.
Ironically, a few years after the film was made, Chernobyl broke out, and the whole of Chernobyl resembled the forbidden zone under Tarkovsky’s lens.
Chernobyl occurred at a time when the nuclear energy boom was in decline and put an end to the fond illusions about atomic energy. A few years after the nuclear power plant, the Soviet Union was headed for dissolution, and the once-dreamed-of visions of life-changing robots and migration to Mars were hastily ended.
Perhaps in a sense, the Soviet Union itself was an interrupted rendition of atomic punk.
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Returning from the art style to the game itself, Atomic Heart does surprise players because of its unique art style and worldview setting.
But a closer look at the development history of Atomic Heart shows that the game itself is full of uncertainties and unpromising factors that make the game itself likely to make a big dent in players’ expectations.
Atomic Heart opened for pre-order back in 2018 and was announced to be available in the fourth quarter of 2019, yet players who pre-ordered the game early have spent four full years in doubt of experiencing fraud, with the earliest pre-order pages now long unopenable.
In early 2019, the game’s arrival was overshadowed by the appearance of a post on ResetEra, a foreign gaming community, claiming to be an anonymous insider. The content of the post shows that the game will eventually meet with players, but much of the content in the trailer is not true, the game itself is not open world, but a linear process-oriented. The more notable bad news is that, similar to many fallen masterpieces, Mundfish’s CEO at the time “did not know anything about game development”, and it was their profit-driven philosophy that led to the release of “Soviet Moon Park” as a VR game in the early days, which was quickly abandoned.
In addition, the post also reveals that the game “has no real design” such a frightening-looking information, the anonymous source said that the developers have no idea what they want to do, everyone’s preferences are different concepts.
All this unpromising information triggered extreme skepticism among players, and the negative public opinion at the time could be imagined, but the official continued to develop, stabilizing the situation with the continuous development status and annual trailers. This also led to the early trailer in some settings were abandoned, the early trailer of the game and now I’m afraid it has been very different.
Now, the players flirted with the “Schrödinger state” of “Atomic Heart”, the extra years of development time, who knows whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.
Thankfully, without the attention of Cyberpunk 2077, the future of Atomic Heart, even if it is not as good as it should be, will not attract a lot of criticism like “fall from grace” – you know, the anonymous post that year also mentioned The anonymous post also mentioned that it was “almost impossible to find experienced C++ and UE4 developers in Russia”, so much of the game was outsourced.
