Remember this little game that you played HUNDREDS of hours on a tiny screen and made you get a CD drive for your computer?
Yes you do, it’s JAGGED ALLIANCE for me along with DOOM and Master of Orion, was the most influential pieces of media that I’ve ever consumed.
But this is not a post about Jagged Alliance. This is a post about what influenced this game from real life: Executive Outcomes. I was a history major in college, specifically due to my main Professor, Dr. Claude Sturgill, focused on low intensity conflict in American history. We studied Africa a bit as the West coast was having serious problems to put it lightly and while I was in school, Executive Outcomes, a mercenary company that spawned out of the dissolution of the South African Defense Force was heavily active. They work ONLY for legitimate governments and in their short time of activity, they settled two major disputes — until the UN forced those governments to stop using them and bring in UN ‘peacekeepers’ who got their asses handed to them and both countries went back into turmoil.
And now, after requests from African leaders, Executive Outcomes is back in business. It will be very interesting to see where they start operating first. “African solutions to African problems” to me says FUCK YOU to the UN who failed so badly in Angola and Sierra Leone (with catastrophic results) after EO was cut loose.
New website: https://www.executiveoutcomes.com/eo A good read (much better than the old one from the 90’s which was like 2 pages)
Journeyman Pictures film on EO:
https://www.journeyman.tv/film/6448/executive-outcomes
This is a deep rabbit hole to go down– I encourage you to read and weigh the issues as this is where matters become very grey and murky. While I definitely don’t think military contractors in general end up being the good guys– let’s see if EO is different.
….and time to bust out the Jagged Alliance!
