Evil Genius (video game)

Dungeon Keeper meets James Bond. You are the titular evil genius, and it is your job to construct a villainous lair in an active Volcano, recruit henchmen, steal priceless treasures, hold the world for ransom, and fight off pesky super agents. Also, you need to keep your minions well-trained and happy, because the looting and ransoming won't take care of itself.

Notable for a quirky sense of humor mixed with classically over-the-top megalomanical villainy. Everything has a '60s vibe to it, and the forces of justice are just as stereotypical as your own minions.

There's also a great deal of freedom and a wide range of methods you can use to complete your overarching goal. Want to run a fortress island with massive numbers of armed guards, machinegun emplacements, and horrifying freaks of nature, all emphasizing firepower? Perfectly reasonable. Want a deadly secluded island filled with martial arts disciples? Feel free! Want to beguile your enemies with squads of elite deceptive social minions who will leave their heads spinning and questioning their loyalty? That's also perfectly viable. Want to set a thousand deadly traps and twisty, mystifying corridors that will leave the forces of justice lost, confused, and very very dead? Nothing's stopping you. You're allowed to either discard the Villain Ball with prejudice or wrap both hands around it and run straight for the end zone.

Rebellion have recently announced a sequel. For Facebook.

This Game Provides Examples Of: "If a fire breaks out, the closest valet will not simply grab the nearest extinguisher and put it out. Instead, seemingly random valets all over your base will grab the extinguishers nearest them, and run to the fire, no matter how far it may be. Then, when they get there, they will put out one burning object (in a room after an explosion there can be over half a dozen objects on fire) and walk, with the extinguisher, past the other fires and put the extinguisher back."
 * Action Bomb:
 * Alliteration: When mousing over Shen Yu, he is described as "a mysteriously mystical maniacal man."
 * The Ahnold: Dirk Masters provides the over-the-top Stallone style gunplay, while Red Ivan provides the physical presence and exaggerated accent of Schwarzenegger (despite being Russian instead of Austrian.)
 * Arrogant Kung Fu Guy: Jet Chan.
 * Artificial Stupidity: You can't directly control the individual minions, instead only giving general orders and setting up security systems to alert them to intruders. This leads to hilarity. Feel free to shout "Why am I surrounded by these incompetent fools?!" at the ceiling.
 * You can use this to your advantage; there's a "bug" that allows you to stop a minion from leaving due to Loyalty zeroing: if you tag them for capture, then repeatedly zoom in to view their stat panel, they stop to salute you every time, giving your minions or henchmen time to catch up. Cue "re-education" via "Loyalty Restoration".
 * Only valets can use fire extinguishers. No one else can, including higher level social units (who apparently forget how). On top of that, valets have a distressing tendency to run right into the path of veteran kill teams, trying to pick up all the money and items dropped by your construction workers to fight off said kill teams. Which leads to them all being dead by the time the veterans start setting your base on fire blowing things up. And valets aren't very smart in extinguishing fires themselves:


 * Same with technicians when they earn their science degree. Apparently, they forget basic mechanics and won't repair your stuff anymore. Cue generators blowing up.
 * Awesome but Impractical: Red Ivan, who can be as much a danger to your base and your minions as to the forces of justice due to his preferred weapon being a bazooka. If you absolutely must use Ivan in game, it's best to keep him confined to a Topside Shack until he's needed. He can be quite useful in the right situations, but he needs to be kept on a tight leash and carefully micromanaged, which might push him into Difficult but Awesome territory.
 * Axe Crazy: More than half your henchmen, especially The Butcher and The Matron.
 * The Bad Guy Wins: Your goal, of course.
 * Bald of Evil: Both of the male Evil Geniuses.
 * BFG: The Mercenary minions carry immense machineguns. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. agent Dirk Masters carries two.
 * And then Ivan turns it Up to Eleven and has a RAWKET LAWNCHAIR! Most players refuse to use him since he's a bit trigger happy and will set most of your base on fire. Others swap it out for a machinegun, usually Dirk's.
 * Those that insist on using him unmodded take advantage of the fact that henchmen won't pass through level 3 or 4 doors unless specifically ordered to, and lock him in a topside shack until they need him.
 * Board to Death: The second objective in the game is to summon the crime lords of the world to a presentation where you present your evil plan,
 * Bodyguard Babes: You can get one (or a Bodyguard Hunk if you play as Alexis).
 * Brown Note: Several henchmen can do this. For example, Lord Kane's presence can cause people to cower in fear or flee in panic, while Eli Barracuda plays a boombox with hypnotic suggestion that causes people around him to uncontrollably break out into dance.
 * Bruce Lee Clone: Jet Chan (altough he might be more of a Jackie Chan clone).
 * To be precise, he's a Bruce Lee rip off named after Jackie Chan And Jet Li.
 * Busby Berkeley Number: in one of the menus, scuba diver models do a "synchronized swimming" variant.
 * Captain Ersatz: The entire cast in one form or another.
 * Card-Carrying Villain: You!
 * Cloning Blues: The doppelgangers sent out to fool the specialists.
 * Color Coded for Your Convenience: Your minions. Construction workers wear yellow, social minions wear red (except for the Spindoctor), military minions wear orange and science minions wear white.
 * Cool and Unusual Punishment: Most of the ways you torture prisoners.
 * Including forcing prisoners to watch a Mook do Michael Jackson's dance moves.
 * Now that's just uncalled for.
 * Contractual Boss Immunity - The Super Agents cannot be killed through any amount of minions, traps, gunfire, or interrogation. Only specific methods that don't become available until the second half can deal with them.
 * Contractual Genre Blindness: Why does your Elaborate Underground Base's entraces have slowly-opening doors? Why do your minions ignore Highly-Visible Ninja s unless you've specifically told them to do something about them? Because you're the Evil Genius. If you weren't Contractually Genre Blind, more than half of the gameplay would have to be changed.
 * Death Trap: Part of the fun in the game is designing a convoluted, Goldbergesque series of them.
 * Ironically, the most valuable traps are non-lethal. Lethal traps generate too much heat, and non-lethal traps can be made to sweep up enemies in endless loops of money-making combos.
 * Decapitated Army: You lose automatically if your Evil Genius is killed. Justified if your Evil Genius was kept deep in the base, meaning the good guys would have to fight their way through your traps and minions to get to you, but particularly annoying when your Evil Genius is watching an agent get tortured in the middle of an otherwise airtight base, and he escapes and kills the player while the guards were all elsewhere.
 * Denial of Diagonal Attack: Sentry turrets have very narrow firing arcs, and can only be placed on a grid facing one of four directions. This provides diagonal blindspots from which agents can attack any tightly grouped cluster of them. Thus, some staggering in their positions are needed so that they can cover each other.
 * Do Not Adjust Your Set: The penultimate objective is to hijack the airwaves with broadcast towers and deliver your ultimatum to the world.
 * The Dragon: Whichever Henchman the player favours most.
 * Each Evil Genius starts with their own. Industrialist Maximillian has the young Samurai Jubei. Narcissistic Socialite Alexis has New York gangster Eli Barracuda. Finally Chinese Mastermind Shan Yu has the sinister Lord Kane, the man (accidentally) responsible for sinking the Titanic, amongst other things.
 * Dumb Muscle: Freaks do a lot of damage and can take a lot of punishment before going down, but have one of the lowest maximum smarts statistics in the game. The value is so low in fact, that they will constantly be triggering the player's own traps when they pass by the trigger mechanism, even if their smarts are at full value. Some players take full advantage of this by instaling a Freak-trigger.
 * Elaborate Underground Base: No, really.
 * Enemy Civil War: Late in the game, you . Ultimately, this makes the Forces of Justice fight each other when they see each other... sometimes.
 * Even when it does work accurately, the fight generates Heat (and thus, more attention from the Forces of Justice) the same as if your minions shot them.
 * Fridge Brilliance: "PATRIOT intelligence reports seeing some of those evil HAMMER agents on the Evil Genius' island. A secret partnership is suspected, but more evidence is required."
 * Epic Flail: The Matron's morning star. "Time for their medicine!"
 * Even Evil Has Standards: Even the Evil Genius abhors country music, which is why
 * Everything's Better with Monkeys: The second island has native monkeys ambling around, and Col. Blackheart, bonus henchman, can sic his pet monkey on enemies as a special ability. You can also get a trap that sics a mind-controlled monkey on foes, but a glitch prevents you from researching what you need to get this.
 * Evil Genius: Duh.
 * Evil Gloating: Gloating at prisoners increases your Notoriety, even if the prisoner dies before he has the chance to tell anyone about it. The Evil Genius avatar will also automatically go over to gloat at a Super Agent being tortured.
 * Gloating falls under Awesome But Very Bad To Do against Super Agents (In their cells, not during interrogation), because they have a 100% chance of escaping when you do it.
 * Gloating increases notoriety because your minions then tell others about it. As for super agents escaping when you gloat over them during interrogation... that's part of the genre!
 * Evil Minions: No prizes for guessing.
 * Equal Opportunity Evil
 * More of an aversion really. Every minion is a white male. The only "equal opportunity" is in the henchmen and enemies.
 * While the character models are all white (due to limited game resources), looking at a minion's stat screen shows a wide variety of names, often in truly bizarre cross-cultural mashups.
 * The Martial Artist minions are pretty clearly Asian, and Guards look more South American than Caucasian.
 * Failed a Spot Check: Minions and foreign agents are both more likely to set off traps when their attention stat is low.
 * Also, the less-skilled agents fail to notice all but the most blatantly suspicious things (dead bodies, looted artifacts, prisoners, openly stored weapons).
 * Five-Bad Band: Most players will wind up with one of these. It's almost always the same group, too:
 * Big Bad: You!
 * The Dragon: Jubei
 * The Evil Genius: Lord Kane
 * The Dark Chick: The Matron
 * Five-Man Band: The five super-agents.
 * The Hero: John Steele
 * The Lancer: Jet Chan
 * The Big Guy: Dirk Masters
 * The Smart Guy: Katarina Frostanova
 * The Chick: Mariana Mamba
 * For the Evulz: Half the Acts of Infamy you can perform in the game are done solely to be a dick to Agencies, such as ruining S.A.B.R.E tea supply or ruining a S.M.A.S.H. attempt at bringing down ivory smugglers by replacing the stash of ivory with thousands of squeaky toy elephants. There are few legitimate evil acts, such as you publicly executing The Orsons, a family of pop singers.
 * Like destroying Nashville and country music, your evil genius considers that taking a break from evil.
 * Freudian Excuse: For a Card-Carrying Villain, Maximilian has a pretty strong one.
 * Fun with Acronyms: The spy organizations who are trying to stop you do have fun with this. Incidentally, neither the game nor the manual will ever actually tell you what the acronyms actually mean.
 * Strangely enough, a Console Command will let you in on what the acronyms mean.
 * Care to provide them?
 * Fur and Loathing: Alexis
 * Game Breaking Bug: Sadly, quite a few, more in the vein of Bugs That Will Make You Want To Break The Game CD variety:
 * Service minions escorting brainwashed Agents outside of the base have a habit of 'dropping off' the Mind Raped person right in front of the base. Bonus points if the drop-off zone is located inside a Camouflaged Door, meaning the door will stay open constantly.
 * Some people have reported that both two Super Agent's Karmic Deaths have caused crashes. The only fix? Don't look at them. Hope you weren't excited about acting seeing your enemies defeated...
 * After a late-game mission, the Forces of Justice have been convinced that each other is the problem. The game tells you that they'll fight against each other while on your island, freeing you from both worrying about Good Guy retaliation levels. For every one time this actually happens, there's a handful of times when the massively-armed soldiers drop the Idiot Ball and work together to deal with you.
 * Game Mod: The possibilities are limited, but it can be done to a certain extent. Ever wanted your own ninja henchman, for example? It can be done.
 * Other mods include replacing every view screen with porn and changing the values of said viewscreens so they increase minions' loyalty stat.
 * Genre Savvy: Let's just say you're going to need to be if you want to survive.
 * Giant Mook: The Freaks.
 * Good Is Dumb: Really, really, really dumb, sometimes.
 * The Guards Must Be Crazy: Your minions will happily let investigators, soldiers, and obvious, heavily armed ninjas walk into your base unless you tag them to be eliminated.
 * It is possible to establish "guard posts" by building armouries in key areas, plopping down a time clock, and setting it to have a few people always active in the room. Also, putting in a random door along a hallway and setting it to level four security ensures you will always have at least one military minion stationed there, usually including one or more henchmen. They won't attack an agent unless they're tagged or otherwise drawing attention to themselves, but you'll always have soldiers or henchmen there to intercept intruders.
 * Another good idea is to have a mess hall or staff room next to your entrances. Minions tend to congregate in these places when not busy. Rig up a loudspeaker in that room, and the guards inside will rush to any tagged intruders at your entrance.
 * The game handwaves this in several ways. First, the game says that your loyal minions would never -dare- attack someone or do something to draw attention to your schemes unless ordered to. So if an agent is breaking into your power generator room and you don't say anything about it, they assume you have a plan. Second, agents that investigate your base and find nothing incriminating, eventually leave and this will reduce the amount of heat on you. The implication is that your base is an open secret and part of the minions duties is to pretend the base is perfectly mundane (or at least, contains no evidence the agents can find).
 * However, your minions will fight back or run away if fired upon. Sentry guns? Not so much.
 * Great White Hunter: Bonus henchman Col. Blackheart.
 * Guide Dang It: There are so many factors to consider that it's very easy for henchmen to start randomly running around screaming for literally no reason, even when the game was patched. And that's before the freezer starts filling up...
 * Finding the locations of certain plot-critical Acts of Infamy.
 * The Gump: According to his backstory, Lord Kane has had a role in every major crime of the twentieth century, from the fire that destroyed the Hindenburg to assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He inists that sinking the Titanic was purely an accident, though.
 * He Knows Too Much: Any investigator agent who has gathered a heat rating will fall under this, and the player is expected to react accordingly...
 * Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Almost everyone wears brightly colored uniforms. Your neon yellow workers and the orange military minions are particularly obvious. Enemy spies and agents also come in full dress uniforms, some of them more glaring than others.
 * Highly-Visible Ninja: A.N.V.I.L.'s Infiltrator agents are ninjas dressed in various bright colors. Minions will happily ignore them unless they are tagged.
 * Hold the Line: Your final objective is to
 * Hollywood Voodoo: Henchman Montezuma
 * Hot Amazon: Mariana Mamba, whose status as such is lampshaded in her special power to woo your minions away from your service.
 * Human Popsicle: The final upgrade to the minion's bed is a cryogenic suspension unit.
 * I Have Boobs - You Must Obey!: How Mariana Mamba wins over your henchmen.
 * Instant Expert: A few minutes instruction is all it takes to upgrade a mindless construction worker into a quantum physicist.
 * Island Base: Two of 'em! The second even has a volcano for you to launch a rocket from.
 * Kick the Dog: The darkly hilarious Out Clubbing act of infamy involves sending your soldiers out to club baby seals on live TV.
 * Another highlight is neutering the worlds most fertile male panda.
 * Kill It with Fire: Several of the traps (and the flamethrower rack for mercenaries). Often a bad idea due to such weapons being indiscriminate.
 * Kill Sat: All the endgame Doomsday Devices are satellite-mounted.
 * Laser-Guided Amnesia: Most non-lethal traps and social minions all exist to keep enemy agents from remembering and reporting anything they see about your base. Super Agents can be mind-wiped and temporarily gotten rid of through what would normally be lethal torture too.
 * Literal Metaphor: The brainwasher, which sucks out and washes the brain of the person strapped to it with chemicals.
 * Made of Explodium: Everything -- from beds to fire extinguisher cases to doors. Worse, when something explodes, it sets nearby items on fire, which will eventually explode themselves unless someone puts it out. Also leads to Man On Fire.
 * Man in White: Henchman Eli Barricuda is never seen without his stylish immaculate white suit. Never, ever, spill something on it.
 * Monumental Theft: You are expected to pull off a few.
 * Mooks: Billions of them, on all sides.
 * Napoleon Complex: Maximilian
 * Nebulous Evil Organisation: Pretty much a N.E.O. management Simulation Game.
 * Never Live It Down: Lord Kane insists that he didn't mean for the Titanic to sink and that it was the slip of the tongue to an erstwhile minion of his. No one believes him.
 * No Body Left Behind: Dead bodies turn into body bags that will eventually fade.
 * Partially subverted in that body bags attract the attention of agents, and should one of them fade while "out in the open", the world heat level will rise. That's what the freezers are for.
 * Additionally, the presence of bodybags lying about your base gives your minion's second thoughts about being part of your Nebulous Evil Organisation, sapping their loyalty as long as they remain present. Stuffing Them In The Freezer keeps those bodies out of the minion's sight and mind.
 * Non-Action Big Bad: The Evil Genius can't attack enemies.
 * Noodle Implements: One of the Acts of Infamy concerns toppling a pointless monarchy with "Some spiked beverages, fluorescent duct tape, a set of inflatable farm animals and a crowd of paparazzi".
 * Obvious Beta: There are some bugs that really, really should not have slipped through. Examples include the persian rug being a barrier instead of a tile and science-related henchmen actually making your schemes take longer. Egregious in that many of these bugs can be fixed by an edit of text files.
 * Would you want anyone to step on your extremely rare and expensive Persian rug?
 * Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Some Acts of Infamy are heists of gigantic proportions, but you will only ever hear a short radio broadcast about them.
 * One Hundred Percent Completion: Sadly made impossible by certain mutually-exclusive Acts of Infamy, preventing you from filling the Region Completion bar of each area. There is no reward nor indication of completion, though.
 * Organ Autonomy: The Butcher was once a medical aid-worker until an emergency forced him to transplant a cannibal's cursed pancreas into himself.
 * Public Domain Artifact: Excalibur and The Ark of The Covenant are two possibilities when doing a Type A Gotta Catch Them All for special items, except you only "need" four out of six, rather than all of them. Players may opt to steal all six anyway, because let's face it, you might as well complete the set and rub it in the faces of the Forces of Justice, eh?
 * You may as well, as these six "Uber-Loot" items the most powerful morale-raising objects in the game. And who doesn't want to own Excalibur?
 * Redshirt Army: Your heroic opponents, and they come in different varieties, depending on the agency, function, and level of annoyance with the Evil Genius. They can come as regular inspectors, to ninja-like saboteurs, to outright invading with the military. Incidentally, there is a literal redshirt army in a brief Enemy Civil War you engage in; a rival sics red jumpsuit-clad minions to try and take you out.
 * Reward From Nowhere: Traps give you money you for combos with no attempt to explain where the money is coming from.
 * YouTube?
 * Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: As mentioned above you get rewarded with cash through using elaborate traps to dispose of enemy agents. The more elaborate it is the bigger the payout.
 * Rule of Cool: You can steal the Eiffel Tower. With helicopters.
 * You shrink it to a more portable size before making off with it. You can then put it in your office.
 * Which is a waste. Plop it down in a highly frequented room or corridor, let your minions be inspired by your evil!
 * The icing on the cake is the hilarious faux french accent though. MON DIEU! ZEY ARE STEALING ZE EIFFEL TOWERE!
 * Quirky Miniboss Squad: Your henchmen/women can be one of these, if you choose the right people.
 * Perhaps an In-Universe example of Real Time Strategy comes with the world map where you see models of your minions helicopter over the world to carry our your acts of infamy, as if on a real time game board: You can't pause, anything that interrupts an action will force you to start it over and, in a diabolical twist, if you look away from the board to do something useful, enemy agents are all but certain to show up and decimate your forces.
 * Real Time with Pause
 * Schmuck Bait: Some of the traps are quite obvious. Plus using stolen loot.
 * Setting a door to security level four draws in agents like bees to honey - even when the door is guarded by two giant henchmen. And has absolutely nothing of value behind it.
 * One trap is literally a Big Red Button in the middle of a bullseye with arrows pointing at it, saying "DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON" in lights.
 * Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Any minion whose loyalty drops too low will hightail it out of your base. Some of them will even steal gold from your safe before fleeing.
 * Shoot Everything That Moves: Red Alert status makes your minions arm up and/or immediately aggress (with intent to kill, unless tagged otherwise) any non-minion forces in their vicinity, and appropriately engage any tagged minions nearby. Under heavy attack? Go to Red Alert, Shoot Everything That Moves! This Is Not a Drill!
 * More of a Suicide Attack, since this will also cause defenseless and unarmed science and social minions to join the fray, and if successful will litter your island with attention-drawing corpses.
 * Shout-Out: Naturally, given the source material. Many of the Acts of Infamy are a Shout-Out to Bond movies and other spy films.
 * There is also blink-and-miss one: in first island choppers, there is a Novistrana symbol on the tail. Novistrana was in their earlier game, Republic: The Revolution
 * Lord Kane's given name, according to some of the more obscure game files? Kaiser Söze.
 * Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: Freaks are Type II, as their attributes do not degrade over time, but once lost they cannot be restored.
 * Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Under the player's management.
 * Spiritual Successor: To Dungeon Keeper.
 * Stealth Pun: The Micheal Jackson dance routine minions do while preforming an interrogation? It's from the video for Smooth Criminal.
 * Stuffed Into the Fridge: Literally what one does with Agents one kills, putting them into a large meat locker. However, this is a subversion, since the point of doing so is so that forces of justice do not find the bodies. If they do manage to get into the freezer, expect their horror to be quite genuine, and your heat rating to go up appropriately if they escape.
 * Supervillain Lair: Home, sweet home.
 * Take Over the World: Of course.
 * The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: While any agent will attack you if they get close enough, the Specialist agents are specifically sent to assassinate you. While you can dispose of them like any other agent, the proper way would be to send out a clone to get shot instead.
 * An alternate solution is to capture the assassin and not kill her, instead running her through torture devices over and over again. As long as the assassin is alive, they won't send another one.
 * Too Smart for Strangers: Apparently averted in America, since the radio announcement when you successfully kidnap someone in the Mid-West includes advice that people take "basic self preservation" steps like "not taking candy from strangers."
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: The traps are just asking for it. The game even rewards you for impressive combos.
 * Sticking fat people into the mixer.
 * Tossing female agents into the greenhouse.
 * The Bookcase's sole purpose is hilarious cartoony smashing.
 * You can even imprison, torture, and execute your own minions at a whim. Not to mention that the Super Agents can't die unless you use their own weakness on them, meaning you can torture your most hated enemy endlessly.
 * Come on, who hasn't put Jet Chan through a few rounds with the laser as revenge for all the times he's blown up part of your base?
 * One of the most extremely cruel examples is the way you can finish off Frostonova.  You Bastard.
 * Villain Protagonist
 * Villain Cred
 * We Have Reserves: Your minions are very disposable. And you will go through them. A lot.
 * So disposable, in fact, that the basic construction worker minions are free. Or you can pay out the nose to recruit as many as you need in mere seconds. Not to mention the game actually rewards you for summarily executing or torturing your minions in front of others.
 * Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: The only way to kill the super agents is to put them on some sort of torture device.
 * The most extreme example is the James Bond lookalike, John Steele. He can only be killed completely off if he is kept imprisoned until the very end of the game whereupon you strap him to the rocket boosting your Kill Sat into space!
 * You can, however, just shoot the regular agents and soldiers you capture, though why you'd do that when you went to all the trouble to capture them first is a good question. Usually it boils down to simple convenience.
 * The main reason to just shoot them is because being around bodybags causes the loyalty of minions to drop, so its usually more efficient to have them shot in the jail, and then take them 10 feet away to the freezer, so that you dont have to have them carry it all through your base lowering everyones loyalty.
 * Worker Unit: Construction workers.
 * Yellow Peril: Shen Yu
 * You Call That a Wound?: Henchmen reduced to zero health by combat against regular agents will only knock them out for a period, after which they will get back up again and recover their stats. Henchmen taken out during missions will disappear for a while, then finally make their way back to your island from the wilderness. The only exception to their Contractual Boss Immunity is if they are killed by one of the Super Agents, in which case they have three lives. After losing their last life to a Super Agent, they are Killed Off for Real.
 * You Have Failed Me...: The line is uttered by Maximilian just before...
 * You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: You can make your evil genius execute any minion at any time, and you don't need any excuse to do so.
 * Additionally, this comes with the benefit of giving a large boost to the stats of any minion who is observing the execution.
 * Each evil genius has his or her own method of execution. Maximillian shoots the minion, Alexis sets him on fire with a cigarette, and Shen Yu stabs him with a dagger.
 * Zerg Rush: if you've got the money, its possible to defeat even squads of enemy veterans by simply having waves of construction workers mob them with their fists.
 * Zeerust: despite all the bizarre technology, the game's timeframe appears to be somewhere in the 60s or 70s (Lasers and Pong cabinets are both described as brand new technology).
 * It is still "laser", not "LASER". In the 70s it was new enough that people still pointed out that it was an acronym in movies.
 * Per Word of God, it's the 60s, but if they liked something enough from another time period, they'd throw it in anyway, such as the very 80s Dirk.
 * Per Word of God, it's the 60s, but if they liked something enough from another time period, they'd throw it in anyway, such as the very 80s Dirk.