Keeping Score: Slave Zero

This is Keeping Score, a series about games and their soundtracks. This entry qualifies as an honorary member of the History Lessons series too. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

When I first started the Keeping Score series, I viewed it as one way to sort through my massive backlog of games. I figured that instead of looking through the entire thing for something to play, I could pick games for which I also had their soundtracks, and write about them both. Before long, however, the series became a place to catch any particularly cool soundtracks I’d stumbled upon, from games I’d played for entirely separate reasons. I’ve been wanting to get back to the original spirit of the series, though, and have finally done so with Slave Zero.

Released in 1999 for Dreamcast and PC by Infogrames North America (formerly Accolade), a year before they were fully absorbed into French firm Infogrames, Slave Zero is an action game about a giant robot attacking a massive cyberpunk megacity. I played a demo of it back then, in the era when demos came on CDs bundled with game magazines, and I thought it was cool, but not cool enough to spend my limited game-buying budget on. The press seemed to agree, giving the game middling reviews. Yet, it stuck in my memory. When it was released on GOG, I picked it up, but didn’t play it right away. When I started the Keeping Score series I noted that GOG’s version of Slave Zero includes its soundtrack, and I considered playing it for the series, but got distracted by other games instead. Now, I decided to go for it.

Why now? I’m not entirely sure. It was a rare moment of clarity, in which I was absolutely certain that Slave Zero was the next game I wanted to play. Perhaps I was influenced by recently playing Out Live, which is also a game about giant robots battling each other, albeit in the form of a first-person dungeon crawler with turn-based combat. Perhaps I was just reminded of it by the surprise release of Slave Zero X in 2024, a mere 25 years after the original game. It’s a prequel in the form of a short 2.5D platform brawler, of all things, and also got middling reviews. I suspect, however, that the real reason I chose it was in response to current world events. We have an openly Nazi tech executive tearing apart the United States government with wanton abandon, and apparently he and his friends want to run the government like a corporation. It seems like the cyberpunk dystopias we read about in the 1990s, where megacorporations crush the populace under their heel, are about to become a reality.

So, I reached for a game in which I can inhabit a heavily armed 60-foot robot and rampage through a gigantic symbol of capitalist excess. It’s not subtle. I’m not in a subtle mood.

First, however, I had to get Slave Zero to work properly. The late 1990s were an awkward time for 3D games. It was the era when graphics cards were invented. Early 3D games had to run entirely on the CPU, and as such could not push 3D graphics very far. In the mid-90s, however, several companies started releasing discrete hardware cards designed to handle 3D graphics, freeing up the CPU to cover other tasks. Known at the time as “3D accelerator cards”, these were the progenitors of our modern graphics cards that are used in any gaming PC. Back then, though, they didn’t all just work. Each company’s card — like ATI’s Rage series, or the Voodoo series from 3dfx — had their own proprietary API (that’s Application Programming Interface), which meant game developers needed to decide to specifically support the card in their games. This saw many mid-90s games, like Mechwarrior 2, release initially as software-only titles, then subsequently get multiple special versions, each of which only worked with a specific 3D card. Eventually, people realized the wisdom of a single standardized API that would work with all 3D cards, and everyone shifted to using Microsoft’s Direct3D (part of the DirectX package), which we’re all still using today. But for a while there, things were pretty crazy.

ATI eventually got acquired by AMD, and 3dfx by Nvidia, so in some sense they are still the major graphics cards companies today. Back in the 1990s, 3dfx’s Voodoo cards were the clear winners, and by the late 1990s most games supported their Glide API so players could use Voodoo cards when playing. But Glide is, of course, deprecated now. So running a Glide game — like Slave Zero — is tricky.

To be fair, GOG made a good effort. Their version ships with the nGlide Glide wrapper (which lets players run Glide games without a Voodoo card), and it does work. But with a few problems. First, there’s a bug in the original game when using any resolutions higher than 640 x 480, that causes the aiming crosshair to be misaligned, making it really hard to play effectively. GOG’s version uses widescreen resolutions, so not only is the crosshair misplaced, the image is stretched horizontally. Then there’s the fact that on newer versions of windows (10 and above, I think?) the gamma settings get all messed up, so my screenshots look like this:

Too dark.

Even though while I’m playing, the game looks like this:

Correct.

That’s maybe a bigger problem for me, someone who writes a hobby blog full of screenshots, than it is for the average player. But if you want to fix it, I did eventually find a good solution for all of these problems, with advice from a helpful GOG user. The details are in that link, but I’ll repeat them here for posterity:

1) For some reason I couldn’t adjust the resolution in-game easily, so I opened szHardware.ini in a text editor and manually set “Width=640” and “Height=480”. Don’t forget to save the file when you’re done. This will solve the crosshair problem.

2) Download the dgvoodoo2 Glide wrapper and unzip it. Find the “3dfx\x86” folder, and copy the three .dll files and “Napalm” folder from there into the folder where Slave Zero is installed, overwriting all files.

3) Copy the executable “dgVoodooCpl” from the unzipped dgvoodoo2 into the folder where Slave Zero is installed, and then run it. On the “Glide” tab there’s a “Resolution” drop-down menu that lets you set the actual resolution you want. But they’re all 16:9 widescreen resolutions that will stretch the image, so…

4) Open dgVoodoo.conf in a text editor, find the line reading “Resolution”, and manually set it to “Resolution = h:1920 v:1440” (or insert any other resolution you want; this is the correct 4:3 aspect resolution for a 1440p screen) and save the file.

Voilà! The game now runs with a correctly positioned crosshair, a non-stretched (but letterboxed) image at high resolution, correct gamma settings so it’s not too dark, and screenshots work. Now, on to the actual game!

One of the most common complaints about Slave Zero is that it fails to make you feel like you’re controlling a giant robot. But in many ways, that isn’t true. The robot’s footfalls land with huge bass-heavy booms that shake the camera. Stomp along one of the many elevated roadways of Megacity S1-9 and little cars will whizz past the robot’s feet, swerving out of the way and often crashing in the turmoil. There are even tiny pedestrians wandering about, who — like the cars — can be picked up and hurled at foes. Enemy helicopters buzz around like pesky mosquitos, easily swatted aside. Battle tanks, many times the size of a car, are nevertheless small and insignificant next to the robot, and can be crushed underfoot. At the start of the game, players can immediately fill up their full complement of 50 rockets, fired from a shoulder-mounted launcher that’s bound to the right mouse button at all times. What would be a late-game weapon in a typical action game is the starting point in Slave Zero, because of course a giant combat robot is going to fire rockets constantly.

In other ways, however, Slave Zero makes players feel small. Most enemies are also giant robots, so battles start to look like regular-sized infantry scraps. Primary weapons are actual rifles that the robot operates with its articulated hands, which doesn’t really make sense. You can’t just take a human-sized machine gun, scale it up to the size of a jumbo jet, and have it fire bullets as big as motorcycles. That would not physically work. These handheld weapons contribute to the feeling of playing as a normal-sized human rather than a huge robot.

But the biggest factor is Megacity S1-9 itself. Even a 60-foot robot is dwarfed by it. It towers above, its buildings stretching out of sight into the sky, uncountable elevated roadways twisting between the spires. Even its sewers (and you better believe Slave Zero has a sewer level) are huge enough to house entire citadels full of resistance fighters. As I explored a section of the sewers, I was warned not to get lost; there’s thousands of miles of tunnels down there.

The thing is, I actually like this. To a human, Megacity S1-9 must seem incomprehensibly vast. How could anyone hope to resist such a thing? A person is a mere ant milling about its streets. It takes a massive mecha to even be able to see the city for what it is. Only as a building-sized war machine does Megacity S1-9 start to make sense. And to see it, to comprehend it, makes it possible to defeat it. It’s like the prospect of opposing the corporate stranglehold on our capitalist world: impossible as an individual, only achievable if people come together to form something bigger. Even so, it won’t be easy. The giant robot is still outnumbered and outgunned. But it has a chance.

Not that I think Infogrames North America had any such lofty meanings in mind when they made Slave Zero. It has a very 1990s brash attitude. I can feel the designers’ excitement as they made each aspect of it as over the top as possible. The manual tells me that Megacity S1-9 spews out so much toxic waste, it’s surrounded by a floodplain miles deep. Those sewer tunnels I was fighting through are called “The Suck”. The team clearly wanted to make everything bigger, crazier, more action-packed, purely for the excitement of it. Aren’t colossal megacities awesome? With robots battling through the streets? They borrowed the aesthetic trappings of cyberpunk for the cool factor, because futuristic dystopias were all the rage at the time.

And yet, some of the social commentary of cyberpunk comes through anyway. When the genre-standard villains embody the ethos of unchecked capitalism, of constant growth at all costs — leading to things like megacities that drown the land in pollution for miles around — it’s impossible to avoid a central message of resistance against such excesses. And there are some details of Slave Zero’s setting that I like a lot. It’s set somewhere in Asia, for one, which is refreshing given that a lot of cyberpunk fiction indulges in a bit of Orientalism by depicting futuristic cities as essentially just modern day Shanghai or Tokyo. Such places only seem futuristic to Western audiences. Slave Zero puts these places back where they belong, at least, although it’s not completely free from Orientalism.

The villain is the Sovereign Khan (or SovKhan for short), who has cemented his control over the Asian conglomerates by seizing control of Megacity S1-9. The only ones who dare oppose him are an ancient sect of warrior monks known as the Guardians. Here we have some exoticizing of Eastern philosophy and religion such as Shaolin, but I do like the implication that the Guardians are ancient protectors of the land. In most cyberpunk, the heroes are denizens of the giant cities, adoptees of futuristic technology who are fighting back against (or simply just trying to survive under) their corporate oppressors. In Slave Zero, the heroes are diametrically opposed to the megacity. Players are encouraged to destroy buildings, to hurl civilian vehicles (or even the civilians themselves!) at enemy robots. Collateral damage is not a concern. Megacity S1-9 itself is the enemy. The Guardians do not want to liberate it, they want to destroy it.

The urgency in Slave Zero comes from the titular Slaves. The SovKhan’s army, you see, mostly consists of Sentinels, who are your classic mecha, big and boxy. Players will spend most of their time fighting Sentinels. But the SovKhan is growing a new breed of mecha — the Slaves — who will be far more powerful. The Guardians must take action before the new Slave army activates, or the SovKhan will truly be unstoppable. The Slaves are no mere robots, however. They’re grown from cybernetic embryos, then fused with high-tech endoskeletons, resulting in a disturbing mix of the organic and mechanical. The SovKhan refers to them as his children. The Guardians, in desperation, have stolen a Slave unit and activated it ahead of schedule. Protagonist Ch’an, the strongest warrior in the Guardians’ ranks, irreversibly merges his consciousness with it, in the hopes that his strength of spirit will give him an edge over the rest of the SovKhan’s forces. Ch’an becomes Slave Zero.

Slave Zero (the game) is hardly a transhumanist manifesto, but I appreciated the way the Slaves are depicted. They’re weirdly alien colossi, with bodies composed of strange fibers and metal carapaces. Many seem to be unique designs, unlike the ranks of identical Sentinels, and they are terrifyingly powerful, often serving as climactic boss battles. And yet for all their might, they are — as their name implies — slaves. Made to serve the SovKhan’s will. Only if Ch’an, who has permanently transformed into Slave Zero, is able to defeat the SovKhan will these new creatures be free to explore their own destinies. Assuming the Guardians let them, of course. Much of the game is focused on securing the cybernetic embryos and endoskeletons for the Guardians. Will they set these creatures free? Or enslave them once more?

I wish that the ending did more with this idea. I made the mistake of playing on the Hard setting, which seemed like a good idea early on, but turned out to make boss battles tiresome slogs that often saw me running out of ammo before I could whittle down their health bars. The final boss, in particular, seemed impossible on this setting, but I found some advice online to revert to earlier weapons — which required reloading an earlier save and playing through the final level again just to pick them up — and finally managed to win. But I found an anticlimactic ending with vague sentiments about Ch’an being “the future”. This squandered the potential that Slave Zero had built up to that point: the growing sense that Megacity S1-9 is the last gasp of the old world, and the Slaves are an inevitable new breed who will emerge from the ruins. Just as long as they can slip their bonds.

This, I think, is part of why I like the way Megacity S1-9 can make the player’s 60-foot war machine feel small. I wrote above about how it takes a giant robot to truly see the city for what it is, and as I progressed through the game I started to forget that it’s a place originally built by humans. The city feels like it’s made for giants, and it is giants who fight over it. A segment in the middle of the game sees Ch’an raid the facilities where Sentinels are built, and here any sense of scale falls away. These places are warrens of giant-sized corridors and ramps, a reminder that the city has moved beyond human concerns. The blocky factories are much less interesting to fight through, however, so I was glad to return to the raised roadways, even if those are just glorified corridors too.

I haven’t really talked about the fighting yet, because it’s fairly standard action game fare. Ch’an can pack one ballistic weapon and one energy weapon, along with his ever-present shoulder-mounted missile launcher. All three can be swapped out for better versions over the course of the game, and while early upgrades are underwhelming (machine guns become… better machine guns), there’s more variety later on. Energy weapons, in particular, tend to behave quite differently from one another, letting players use close-range shotgun type blasts in claustrophobic sewer tunnels in one level, and switch to powerful sniper blasts in another. Missiles also give interesting options, including homing versions that must lock on to enemies, or a powerful but slow unguided cluster bomb. It’s very satisfying to use upgraded weaponry to easily dispatch heavy mecha that were extra-tough minibosses in earlier levels, and Slave Zero is adept at keeping things action-packed. There are always missiles flying, guns blazing, and explosions going off, as is fitting for battles between giant war machines.

Combat is fun enough, but ultimately less interesting to me than the setting and the hints at deeper themes that occasionally poke through the action. Ultimately, I don’t really disagree with the contemporary reviews that judged Slave Zero to be a middling action game, and it’s hard to recommend today given the hassle of getting it to run properly. But I’m glad I played it nonetheless. Sometimes, as I wrote in the very early days of this blog, it’s better for a game to be interesting than good, and Slave Zero did enough to interest me that I saw it through to the end. Even though it’s too long, and the ending was very frustrating on the Hard difficulty that I’d foolishly selected. Honestly, I might even check out Slave Zero X, to see if it has some interesting elements too. I’ll be sure to write about it here if I do.

The Score:

The soundtrack to Slave Zero, by Randy Atkins, spans 29 tracks and clocks in at just over 40 minutes. Like the game itself, it feels very much a product of the 1990s. It’s techno, often acid techno and sometimes veering into industrial. Electronic music was having something of a moment in popular music in the 1990s, with artists like Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy, and The Chemical Brothers topping the charts. These artists were exploring different musical directions, but they were all starting from a techno base. And at the same time, artists like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson were bringing industrial into the mainstream. Randy Atkins was clearly tapping into the popularity of this music — particularly its “futuristic” sound, which meshes well with a cyberpunk setting — in his score.

When Slave Zero released, CDs had only been the standard media format for PC games for five years or so. The extra storage space meant game composers were experimenting with fancier music, but it would still be some time before game soundtracks were taken seriously enough to get their own dedicated releases. This shows in the work-in-progress-style titles for tracks from Slave Zero: “135Mix”, “ChugBossMix” and “TrainStoppingPt4Mix” are some examples. Many are clearly intended to be looped in game, but simply stop abruptly in the soundtrack. There’s little consideration given to track order either, with most tracks just arranged in alphabetical order. It’s pretty clear that GOG created this soundtrack offering by extracting the audio files, rather than sourcing from any sort of official channel. But to me that’s part of the charm; it brings back memories of sticking game CDs into a CD player, skipping over the first track (which was the game data) and listening to the music like an album.

I find the music itself nostalgic too, especially the acid techno tracks. Most of them (“BeeBop140Mix” and “Gravel2Mix” are two examples among many) feature the iconic squelchy sound of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. A fun aside: the TB-303 was originally intended as a replacement for live bass guitars, but it didn’t really sound much like a bass guitar, and was a commercial flop. Remaining units were sold off for cheap, so aspiring musicians on a tight budget picked them up and started experimenting. They came up with a way to manipulate the sound of the TB-303 to make the now-classic melodic patterns that defined the new acid house and acid techno sub-genres, and the synthesizer is now considered a critical part of dance music history.

I have a soft spot for that acid sound, and am a bit sad that electronic music has generally moved on from it. So it was a treat to hear some acid techno here, and honestly quite good acid techno at that. It’s not just the TB-303: the tracks are filled with classic 1990s synth pads, which sound a bit like strings or voices but mostly like their own thing. These are the sounds that seemed so futuristic in the 1990s, and to my ears they still sound pretty cool, filling out the sound and offsetting the staccato melodies. A few tracks, like “Lite90Mix” or “StealthMix”, use slower tempos and emphasize the synth pads more, offering a nice change of pace compared to the generally upbeat music elsewhere. A few even drop in some surprisingly spare guitar, as a nice little accent.

I’m less enamored with the tracks that focus on the guitars, though. Industrial-leaning tracks like “ChugMix” and “DaThangMix” have prominent distorted guitars layered over programmed beats, which sounds a lot more like generic action game music to me. They’re fine enough when in the middle of a frenetic mecha battle, but not that interesting to listen to on their own. Fortunately, these tracks are outnumbered by the acid tracks, and a few combine the two styles: “FinalHiveMix” sees the guitars trading off with the TB-303 for the lead melody, while “GapMix” goes all out by layering acid patterns, synth pads, and chugging guitars on top of each other. These are kind of cool, but I still prefer the tracks where guitars are used sparingly, if at all.

There are a lot of those, though, so the Slave Zero soundtrack will stay in my musical rotation for the foreseeable future. If you’re a fan of acid techno, the soundtrack is an easy recommendation, and it may be worth a listen for any who are curious about the genre too. I believe it’s only sold bundled with the game, but you can preview it on YouTube too, in slightly shortened, rearranged form.