They see this internet as I saw my internet, as a place where identity can melt away, freed from what I now recognize as the constraints of flesh and capital. Just as it acts in the real world, the Electrosphere finds itself as a tool of radicalization a central plot point of the game being the emergence of a revolutionary terrorist group known as Ouroboros who believe the Electrosphere is the natural next step for humanity. A place to thrill and profit from shock videos - real tragedies and deaths commodified for bizarre contests of masculinity.Īnd it is within this internet that Ace Combat 3 exists. This slow, almost mystical internet was also an internet that gave birth and fostered radical right-wing politics, which insidiously propagated racism and sexism as memes to be consumed and internalized by kids. Identities, separations, discriminations can’t be thrown away so easily, even when rendered invisible. It only seemed that way to a naive, younger me. It was a place where race and gender and class didn’t matter, where anything was possible, where creativity and passion existed unchecked.Įxcept not. Surfing the web as a kid, especially when it was late at night or when the parents didn’t know, really did feel like all the cliches - like what it is like to log on Ace Combat 3’s internet equivalent, the Electrosphere. There weren’t tabs to switch to, a short video required an hours-long buffering before you could watch it, and text reigned supreme.
It was like going to Oz, or Wonderland, casting away your home of connections to find a new one, enveloping you at 26kbps. To go online was to at once isolate and surround yourself with others. A conscious effort was needed to use it then logging on meant cutting the connection to your phones, to the outside world. The internet when I was a child and when Ace Combat 3 was released was a very different one than what we have now. I was, without question, an indoor kid, and inside there was something far more expansive than the sky to me, more arresting than the planes overhead. I remember watching them all the time - black geometric shapes drifting through perfect blue - and like any child, imagining from time to time taking their place up there and doing daring stunts, acts of heroics. Living on the top of a lonely hill surrounded by nothing but open fields and farmland, where the horizon in all directions was a flat line, they seemed almost as common as birds.
When Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere released in Japan on May 27, 1999, I was four, living in a home in the middle of nowhere, close enough to a US Air Force training base that it was not uncommon to look up and see stealth bombers or helicopters or jets fly by to hear the soft boom of the sound barrier-breaking overhead.
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