Body Harvest

About Body Harvest

Body Harvest (1998) is DMA Design's open-world Nintendo 64 action game in which a time-travelling soldier fights alien harvesters across a century, driving whatever vehicle he finds, a game Nintendo dropped over its violence.

Body Harvest in Depth

Every 25 years, aliens from an artificial comet land on Earth, trap whole regions inside shields and harvest the population within a day before moving on. In 2016 they board Station Omega, home to humanity's last survivors, and the genetically engineered soldier Adam Drake escapes in the time machine Alpha I. He must fight through five areas over a hundred years: Greece in 1916, Java in 1941, the United States in 1966, Siberia in 1991 and the comet itself. Stopping the aliens in the first area they attack in each period saves the rest.

Levels are open worlds built around a series of missions. Aliens teleport in by land, air and sea to attack towns, and a meter tracks civilian casualties; if too many die, including from friendly fire or being run over, the area is destroyed and the mission fails. If Harvesters take eight people in one wave, they create a dangerous Mutant that hunts the player. Vehicles are central, from cars, trucks and motorcycles to tanks, armoured cars, boats, planes and helicopters, each with its own speed, armour and fuel, and often needed to progress. Buildings hide weapons, ammunition, fuel and weapon crystals that combine into a powerful laser. Destroying Alien Processors opens new areas and save points, and destroying the Shield Generator leads to each level's boss.

Making Body Harvest

Body Harvest was intended as a Nintendo 64 launch title. Unlike DMA's previous publisher Psygnosis, which took little interest in its games, Nintendo frequently directed major changes to the gameplay and visual style, and the language barrier made its wishes hard to understand. DMA head David Jones called the relationship "very hard" because Nintendo's quality was so high, saying the team implemented everything it asked for. Nintendo eventually dropped the game over its violent themes, leaving DMA to find a new publisher; Gremlin Interactive acquired the rights and released it in Europe, and Midway published it in North America. Reviews were average according to Metacritic, though Next Generation gave it four stars, calling it less clever and polished than DMA's Space Station Silicon Valley but an unsettling and enjoyable game with many original features.