In the many many years I’ve written about stuff for the blog, one of my biggest fascinations is the journey where TV and Video Games collide. Not just through the typical award show fare, but also sitcoms and police procedurals that feature a video game, either real or fictional into their plots. Stuff like the infamous “Urban Hellraisers” episode of CSI: Miami.
Yes, I know TV shows like these aren’t going to be perfectly accurate about video games. I want to say there was at least one instance of a writer for these TV shows spilling the beans and saying “yeah, we don’t write those to be accurate,” but I’m not having any luck in finding the source of that. (If you know of a source where someone said this, please feel free to leave a comment.)
Either way, I miss writing about them, and I figured now is a good time as any to come back to it, and sure enough, this one is a doozy. And it spurred from a suggestion from a random comment five years ago…
I talked about Soldier of Fortune Inc. back in 2021 when I covered the level packs for Quake and Quake II. These were made to tie into the aforementioned TV series, and were made by Neil Manke, future designer of the critical darling Half-Life mod They Hunger, another thing I wrote about way back when. I had gotten a comment from someone pointing out that the mod was featured actually on the TV show, which got me curious more about the show itself. Let’s see if that commenter is telling the truth or not.
I’ll give a quick summary of the show here: Soldier of Fortune, Inc. is an action TV series produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Aired for two seasons from 1997-1999, had a name change in season two (from Soldier of Fortune, Inc. to Special Ops Force), added athlete/actor Dennis Rodman to the cast, and then was mostly forgotten. Rag-tag group of mercenaries stop bad guys from doing bad things, akin to a Mission: Impossible or The A-Team kind of show but more your typical 90s action show. Definitely a show that would’ve aired at in the late night hours on your local independent or Fox station that didn’t have a local newscast and late night talk show.
We’re covering the fifth episode of season one, “Alpha Dogs.” Aired in most markets on October 25, 1997, this episode is significant as we feature a major video game as part of the plot. One that considering the future game tie-in I mentioned earlier, makes sense.
Apologies in advance for the low quality images. These came from an old VHS recording uploaded to YouTube in the early 2010s. This show never received a home video release outside of a TV movie that compiles the first two episodes together, which is common in many European markets. Also, this is not available on streaming services as of this writing. Not even Tubi, which tends to be the go-to place for deep cut movies and TV shows, has this. Here’s hoping that changes someday.
We start with soldiers in jungle environments being randomly shot by someone in first person, before cutting randomly away to badly played footage of Quake spliced in with the jungle footage. A super nerd named Jacob Fillmore (David Kaufman) is working for the Department of Defense on the hottest new game, “Alpha Dogs Quake,” before wrapping up the day, starting a “DOD Regional Combat Scenario” that would be the start of his major concerns.
Strangely, it does seem the producers went to some length in terms of getting proper Quake footage for this show. While the show does add in digital menus and scoreboards that aren’t in Quake proper, it does seem to use actual footage from Quake, at least in modded form. The models look different than vanilla Quake, the gun is modeled as if the player is left-handed, which is similar to what mods like Navy Seals Quake did. I wonder if Minh “Gooseman” Le had anything to do with this project, or the producers merely took the mod just to have B-roll footage for their dumb game plot.)
This also debunks what that commenter said all those years ago, as the screenshots look nothing like the aforementioned Soldier of Fortune Inc levels that Neil Manke made. I can recognize Quake‘s original maps anywhere, I played that game to death as a kid.
After grabbing his laptop, he heads out to his decked out Lamborghini – because of course our DOD game programmer would have enough cash to afford a Lambo – before luck would have him escaping a bomb trap activated by unlocking the door. We then cut to our mission briefing with Xavier Trout (David Selby) giving leader Matt Shepherd (Brad Johnson) a hard time while he’s fixing a car. It’s up to the SOF gang to protect Fillmore from this rival faction that wants to kill him. Cut to opening title sequence.
I didn’t talk much about it in the article for the game back in the day, but the title sequence for Soldier of Fortune Inc. is so cheesy. Shots of soldiers, the sun, American flags, alongside shots of the cast doing cool action-y things while their name appears in the title sequence. It’s kind of a lost art now that title sequences are required to be like a jaunty jingle that lasts 15 seconds. Fuck that, gimme those 1-2 minute title sequences, I wanna get pumped watching a show, damn it!
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