Body Harvest



A proto-sandbox game by DMA Design (now Rockstar North) released for the Nintendo64 in 1998. It is a spiritual predecessor to the Grand Theft Auto series.

The plot goes as follows: An insectoid alien race has harvested humanity over a period of 100 years starting in 1916, using shields to prevent anyone from leaving or entering the harvested country. The story begins when the aliens try to wipe out the last humans survivors on the space station Omega in the year of 2016. The player character, Adam Drake, escapes but not before being wounded by one of the boarding alien. He manages to get into the Alpha 1 and is transported to 1916's Greece, where the game starts.

It is quite notable for introducing many of the elements now used in most 3D wide open sandboxes. It is possible to explore the environment at will and do the objectives in non-linear orders. Many vehicles (planes, boats, cars) can be used to explore the land and complete the missions. It isn't quite a sandbox however: the interaction with the environment and NPCS is limited, there are no real side-missions and most of the landscape is unavailable if you don't progress in the plot. Rockstar would later take the ideas introduced here and refine them in Grand Theft Auto 3. The rest is history.

This game has examples of the following tropes:

 * Bag of Spilling: You lose most of your weapons and items when entering a new time period.
 * Boss Arena Recovery
 * Bug War
 * But What About the Astronauts: The last humans in 2016 are on a space station orbiting Earth.
 * Cool Shades: The Goliath bugs in level 2.
 * Colony Drop:.
 * The Dragon: The Man in the Black Suit. Later revealed to be . Becomes Dragon Ascendant after.
 * Dummied Out: This image gallery uploaded by a former DMA employee show there was going to be levels set in Hawaii, Japan and Antarctica.
 * The game changed genre quite a lot during development: It was first going to be a RPG, then a pure shooter before ending up in its current form. The completely different gameplay between the indoor and outdoor sections and the strange mapping of the landscape are relics of the different concepts.
 * Easy Mode Mockery: Good luck getting access to level four if you've played through the previous three on Easy mode.
 * Event Flag: In the first section of Java, you are supposed to take a lift to get back to your starting point. After completing the primary objective, going to the lift will trigger a jelly alien on the local electricity generator even though it was fine a few seconds before.
 * Evil Twin: The Man in the Black Suit..
 * Fake Difficulty: Getting stuck in any type of liquid will kill you in a matter of seconds, no exceptions. This is despite Adam being shown to have competent swimming skills. That lake over there? It may as well be filled with acid.
 * Fate Worse Than Death: The poor Russian train conductor during Siberia 1 who had been exposed to a dose of the zombie gas leak. He is seen leaning on the wall and sitting almost lifelessly on the floor of his home once you first meet him to get the train starting handle. Once Adam gets the train starting handle downstairs and tries to talk to the train conductor again before exiting, the conductor responds with nothing but groans. Instead of putting the poor man out of his misery (sadly, weapons could never be used indoors), Adam walks out of the conductor's home and leaves him to turn into one of the many zombies wandering throughout that area.
 * Giant Enemy Crab: Your first major boss fight, no less.
 * The Greys: One of them is found in Roswell, purportedly the one who had his Alien Autopsy videotaped; he gives you the key to his flying saucer.
 * Hive Mind: Revealed to be  during the game's final stages.
 * Implausible Deniability:
 * Invisible Wall: Subverted in that the walls are visible Deflector Shields, and one of the goals is to destroy the generator that powers them. Doing so creates a crater that serves as the boss arena, making the walls unnecessary at that point.
 * Lock and Load Montage: The intro movie shows Adam suiting up while the aliens are invading the space station.
 * Mission Control: Daisy and the robot who gives you instruction on the map.
 * More Dakka: Particularly noticeable during major boss battles in Alpha 1 and.
 * No Endor Holocaust: Even with Adam's help, it's likely that thousands of people died during each stage of the alien invasion. Luckily he time travels to the next level before we have to deal with it.
 * One Winged Angel:.
 * Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: All the bosses are named after mythological monsters and demons: Leviathan, Cerberus, Moloch, Beelzebub, and Tomegatherion.
 * Sequence Breaking:
 * There's a lovely part in one of the America stages where you're in a military base the aliens are trying to terraform. A fast-closing gate blocks your progress at one point, the intended solution being to, but if you can't quite pull that off, take a nimble car onto the high ledges and you'll be able to jump a gap at the edge of the level. You are then able to drive in a flat area the designers clearly intended to be inaccessible. Result: Skip almost the entire level and drive straight to the boss.
 * In the very first level, it's possible to get to the Alien Processor directly by using a motorcycle.
 * In Java stage 4, if you keeping running towards the fence, you can glitch through it to get inside a harbor base without having to.
 * Super Drowning Skills: Justified in game. Adam can swim but doing so drains his health very quickly, as the armor he's wearing is too heavy to swim for long periods of time.
 * Also applies to the Alpha tank in level 5, which will get stuck in what is most likely acid and take damage until it explodes... even though it's a hovercraft.
 * Time Machine: The Alpha 1.
 * To Serve Man: The aliens require human tissue to fuel their invasion force.
 * Unexpected Genre Change: The boss battles and takes place in the Alpha 1 vehicle. You can get out of it during the bosses but doing so is an exercise in futility.
 * Vaporware: It was supposed to be released for the launch of the Nintendo 64 but problems during the developments and issues with Nintendo (The initial publisher) delayed it for two years.
 * Very Definitely Final Dungeon:.
 * Your Princess Is in Another Castle:.
 * Zombie Apocalypse: The Siberia level.
 * Zombie Apocalypse: The Siberia level.