Battlefield 1943 in 2022

In the beginning, there was Battlefield 1942. The 2002 first-person shooter pitted teams of up to 32 players against each other in gigantic online battles on large maps based around famous World War II battles—Guadalcanal, Battle of the Bulge, El Alamein, and so on. Each map contained multiple control points marked by flags. If you stood near a flag long enough, you captured it on behalf of your team. Capturing a majority of the map’s control points would deplete the number of times the enemy players could respawn, until that number dropped to zero and you won.

Besides running around on foot, the player could also drive a variety of vehicles ranging from jeeps to aircraft carriers. The large player count, the assortment of weapons and vehicles, and the physics engine combined to create a unique sort of chaos that defined the Battlefield experience. A chance shot from a bazooka or tank could take down a strafing plane. A pilot could parachute behind enemy lines to wreak havoc on their control points. A group of players, working together, could hurl a barrage of grenades into an enemy pillbox to clear it out. It was incredibly fun.

I played it on my iMac G5, which I bought after getting a job bagging groceries at a local Rainbow Foods circa 2006 or so. (Fun fact: my first-ever purchase from Amazon.com, made June 11, 2006, was for the game’s Secret Weapons of WWII expansion pack.) Having a game to play at all on the Mac was great—thanks, famed porting development house Aspyr Media!—and Battlefield 1942 quickly became a favorite. Eventually I discovered the fascinating world of modded multiplayer servers. Some, using the Desert Combat mod, replaced the World War II weapons and vehicles with Gulf War–style equipment, including powerful but tricky-to-control helicopters.

But my favorites were capture-the-flag modes on servers featuring what were referred to, if memory serves, as turbo jeeps. The server played normally, except that when you got into a jeep, you could hold the right mouse button to immediately accelerate to incredible speeds—soaring hundreds of yards in the air if you timed it correctly off a hill. In this server, the game was all about sneaking a jeep into the enemy base, capturing the flag, then escaping to a nearby hill, where hitting the turbo jeep jump just right could send you hurtling back to your own base in a few seconds. The jeep had no way to land safely, so you’d have to parachute back down to your base carrying the enemy flag, scoring a point for your team. I played countless hours of Battlefield 1942 online in these and other servers.

Then I went to college, where within a few months it was clear that late nights playing Battlefield were incompatible with actually studying, learning, etc. So I sent the iMac back home and instead began exclusively using an ASUS Eee PC at school in order to prevent myself from over-gaming. (The tiny Linux-based Eee PC had a few basic games preinstalled, but fortunately Tux Racer, a ramshackle downhill racing game starring Linux’s penguin mascot, was not nearly as enrapturing as Battlefield 1942.) When back home, I think I still played some Battlefield on occasion, but it wasn’t the obsession it had once been.

Cut to 2009. Battlefield 1943 released as an inexpensive download-only title on the Xbox 360, and as a big fan of 1942 I picked it up. It was great. It distilled the Battlefield 1942 gameplay to its barest elements—there were only 12 soldiers to a side, and players could choose from just three classes, four maps, and four vehicle types. But the game added new stuff, too, including a feature in which the player runs into an air raid bunker, triggers a bomber attack, and then controls a flight of slow and lumbering bomber aircraft from an overhead view, choosing where on the map to drop the bombs. The game also added destructible environments, which had been beyond the reach of technology when 1942 came out. If you were driving a tank and knew an enemy was in a nearby building, you could simply blow the building to smithereens, or drive straight through it, increasing the options for Battlefield–style chaos. Battlefield 1943 provided most of what I liked about 1942 in a neat, condensed package—I liked it a lot more than other Battlefield titles that shifted the setting to modern conflicts. I played the game a ton when I was back home, where the Xbox 360 was. At some point I stopped, and mostly didn’t think about Battlefield 1943 for many years.

Now, in 2022, there is Xbox GamePass. Microsoft’s Netflix-style subscription service lets users download a lot of new games, but it also features an extensive back catalog of titles—including many from Battlefield series publisher Electronic Arts. A few weeks ago, I was perusing the list of GamePass titles and stopped on Battlefield 1943. I thought there was little chance people were actively playing this 13-year-old game, so I likely wouldn’t be able to find a match. Still, I downloaded it. Maybe I could at least run around a map on an empty server to jog my pleasant memories of the game’s original release.

To my surprise and delight, there’s an active community still playing Battlefield 1943 online! Matches aren’t always full, but there’s usually a good 10 to 15 people playing on a map at any given time. I fell rapidly back into my old Battlefield 1943 muscle memory—I prefer engaging enemies at medium range using the Rifleman class—and found that I was still pretty good at the game. (Relearning the tricky plane controls took a little longer, but now I’m flying across Iwo Jima pretty decently, if I do say so myself.) It’s the simplicity that I really love about the game. In recent years, in my opinion, online shooters have become bloated with extraneous maps, weapons, characters, upgrades, perks, experience points, rankings, killstreaks, and a zillion other things. The clarity of Battlefield 1943 is something I can easily get my mind around—I can spend my time getting better at the game, not figuring out its complex meta-systems. Also: graphically I think the game still looks pretty good, at least to my eyes! The destruction technology continues to impress more than a decade after its release.

I’m hoping the online community for Battlefield 1943 sticks around for a good long time. Maybe that’s the benefit of a service like GamePass. Back-catalog games can be made accessible to a wide audience—crucial for online games that require a large player count to work properly, especially older ones. At the same time I’m a bit nervous, since Battlefield 1943 isn’t owned by Microsoft itself; it’s only available because of a deal between Microsoft and Electronic Arts. If that deal goes away and Battlefield 1943 disappears from GamePass, maybe the player base that is sustaining the second life of the game vanishes too. In the meantime, I’m going to savor my time with Battlefield 1943 while I can and reflect on its deep roots in my gaming history. If you’re looking for me, I’ll be spawning at the Airfield on Wake Island.