Food Force

» see foodforce.konami.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 14 April 2005 the United Nations World Food Programme released a video game. It was not a browser toy bolted onto a campaign page but a downloadable PC title with six scored missions, built for Linux as well as Windows, and it cost nothing.

The setting was Sheylan, a fictional island nation in the middle of the Indian Ocean, wrecked by war and drought. You joined a WFP team and worked through the jobs in order: finding hungry villages from a helicopter, assembling a balanced ration inside a budget of thirty cents per person per day, dropping pallets while correcting for wind, sourcing food on world markets, driving a convoy past landmines, then spending a simulated decade getting a village to the point where it could feed itself.

Development was done by Playerthree in London with the Italian studio Deepend. It went out in ten languages, Hausa among them, and the figures the WFP circulated put it past six million downloads and somewhere near ten million players across eighteen countries. For an educational title with no marketing budget and a UN agency's name attached, those are numbers a commercial studio would take.

None of those ten languages was Turkish, which is about how much of this reached me. I was 21 in 2005 and downloading a great deal of free software, but the free things in my orbit did not come from UN agencies. The reason this one deserves a grave is that it worked. Most things in its category do not get downloaded six million times.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the japanese version ~

Konami Digital Entertainment put out a Japanese build on 17 October 2005, and it is the strangest object in this story. Konami hired Hiroshi Fujioka, the original Kamen Rider, to voice the relief team leader, and Aya Hirayama to voice a team member.

There were two editions of it. The standard one, and a children's edition aimed at ages five to thirteen, written mostly in hiragana so that a Japanese child who could not yet read kanji could play a famine logistics simulator. Konami stayed attached to the game for the rest of its life.

~ food force 2 ~

A sequel arrived in 2009 under the WFP's name, written in Python, cross-platform, and released as free software under version 3 of the GPL. It is the only part of this lineage that anyone is legally free to rebuild, and it is also the part that left the faintest trace.

~ the facebook one ~

On 30 November 2011 Konami launched a Facebook version worldwide. It added other players to cooperate with, and it added paid items, with the revenue going to the WFP once operating costs came out.

A social game with microtransactions funding real food aid is a 2011 idea in every direction it points.

~ 30 november 2013 ~

The Facebook version closed at 23:59 Japan time on 30 November 2013, two years to the day after it opened, and Konami's official site for it went with it. The original 2005 download pages had already been pulled once a newer game started shipping under the same name, which means the version six million people actually played was the first one to become unavailable.

What survives is header art and a set of screenshots in the Internet Archive, plus copies of the 2005 build passed around on abandonware sites. The wordmark at the top of this page came off a Konami page captured in October 2013, six weeks before the servers went off.

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