The Pentagon Goes to the Video Arcade - video games used as military training

Progressive, The, July, 1999 by Kara Platoni

For years, defense contractors turned out high-quality simulators the size of station wagons. Lockheed Martin estimates that its tank simulator cabins are accurate to within one tenth of an inch. But they also cost several hundred thousand dollars a piece. Because of their bulk, the simulators have to remain in one location permanently, and the military can't afford many of them. And it can take four or five years to build one simulator. It isn't unusual for a simulator designed to military specifications to be outmoded by the time it is finally plugged in.

So in 1980, the Army started dabbling in video games. It ordered a modified version of Battlezone, Atari's tank-driving game, to use as a practice tool. As any joystick jockey can attest, Battlezone didn't look or move at all like the real thing. It gave an aerial view of two boxy tanks slowly firing squarish pellets at one another. Amusing, yes, but not an adrenaline-pumping experience.

Since then, video game technology --from the computer chip level to the software--has improved tremendously. Games with extremely high graphic quality can run on desktop computers. Battle scenarios involving multiple players take place in real time, and the screen shows realistic images of the interiors of military vehicles.

"In order [for gamemakers] to sell their games, a big competitive difference is to say our game has a lot of functions, or our cockpit looks like the real thing," says Garth Smith, co-founder of the 3D software company MetaVR. "You end up having games that start to look like real simulators, if you will."

In 1997, MetaVR was given the task of replacing the simulators at the Army's Aviation Test Bed in Fort Rucker, Alabama, where pilots learn how to fly helicopters. The MetaVR team replaced the older simulators--each the size of several refrigerators--with personal computers. The magazine Military Training Technology hailed the installation as a sign that conventional training facilities were "smack in the middle of a PC-based invasion." With its usual acronym-for-everything approach, the Defense Department even developed a term for these products: COTS (commercial off-the-shelf).

Off-the-shelf video games can be modified for military use for under $200. This has allowed companies like San Jose's Quantum3D to get into the military contract business. Quantum3D spokesman Giordano estimates that the company now has a roughly fifty-fifty split between its video game and its military business. Customers range from coin-op kings like Midway and Atari to defense contractors Raytheon and Boeing.

"We have close to the same level of image fidelity and performance of a highend, $100,000 to $200,000 machine, and now this thing sells for $5,000 or $10,000," says Ross Smith, Quantum3D's general manager of the professional products division.

"In other words," adds Giordano, "if your Ferrari at $100,000 goes 180 miles an hour, your Chevy V-8 for $10,000 goes 165 miles an hour."

Smith grins at the analogy. "I'd like to think of it as a Honda," he says. "A little higher quality."