Mercenary: The Wireframe City You Were Allowed to Leave

You crash-land on Targ with no map, no quest log and a ship you cannot fly anywhere useful. A voice called Benson tells you there is a ship for sale nearby. Nobody tells you what to do next, because in 1985 the idea that a game owed you that much was not yet settled.

Paul Woakes wrote Mercenary for Novagen Software, first on the Atari 8-bit computers and then across the Commodore 64, the Spectrum, the Amstrad and eventually the Atari ST and Amiga. It rendered its world in wireframe vector graphics, the same technique Acornsoft’s Elite had used the year before, but pointed the technique at a different problem. Elite gave you a galaxy of discrete, procedurally-generated systems to trade and fight across. Woakes gave you one place — the city of Eron and the planet Targ around it — built as a continuous, walkable, drivable, flyable space with a fixed geography you could learn by heart.

A civil war that does not need you

Targ is fighting a civil war between the Palyars, coded as the planet’s rightful inhabitants, and the Mechanoids, coded as the invading force. The war does not pause for you and does not require you. Both sides want installations destroyed, resources captured, materiel denied to the other, and both sides will pay for help doing it. You are not the chosen saviour of either faction. You are a contractor who happened to crash there, and the fighting was already underway before your ship hit the ground.

That framing does real design work. Because the war has its own logic independent of the player, the economy around it reads as a system rather than a quest-giver’s whim. You pick up objects scattered across the landscape — components, weapons, unidentified cargo — and sell them to whichever side is currently paying more, playing the two factions off each other for margin. There is no morality meter tracking which side you have helped more. There is only a running total of credits, and credits are the only resource that gets you off the planet.

The vehicles are the geography lesson

Half a dozen craft are available across the game, from slow ground vehicles that can be walked to and simply taken, up to fast jets that need to be earned or bought. Each one changes your relationship to the same fixed map. A ground crawler makes Eron’s streets a maze you learn turn by turn. A jet makes the whole continent legible in a few minutes and turns the ground war into scenery glimpsed at speed. The vehicle you are currently using changes what the wireframe city is allowed to mean to you, and Woakes built exactly one city and let velocity redraw it.

This is the part that still reads as advanced thirty-odd years on. Most contemporary “open” games of the period were open in the sense of a level select screen with no walls between levels. Targ is open in the sense that the ground beneath the city continues, without a seam, into the ground beneath the Mechanoid installations several kilometres away, and you can choose to walk there if you are patient enough or reckless enough to try it on foot.

Benson, the only friend on the planet

Your actual interface to Targ is Benson, a portable AI unit the manual describes as almost-human and ninth-generation, who monitors your status, translates the Palyar and Mechanoid communications you intercept, and reports on his own display panel rather than an abstracted HUD floating over the world. Power, braking and reverse thrust are all handled through direct key commands rather than a control menu, so flying anything on Targ is a skill you build in your hands rather than a setting you select from a list.

Benson matters because he is the only voice on the planet unambiguously on your side. The Palyars and Mechanoids both talk to you, and both are trying to use you, but Benson has no faction and no war to win — his only job is keeping you alive and informed. That single-companion structure, one AI voice mediating a hostile world with no other allies, reads today as a direct ancestor of every game that has since given a lone protagonist exactly one trustworthy interlocutor rather than a hub full of quest-givers. It concentrates the game’s only warmth into one relationship and spends every other interaction on transactional wariness, which is a more honest model of an actual war zone than a friendly settlement would be.

The escape is the design brief, not the epilogue

The stated goal, “escape from Targ,” sounds like a single objective with a single correct answer. It is not. There are multiple routes off the planet, and the game does not flag which one you are pursuing at any given moment — it only tracks whether you have the resources and the access a given route requires. An orbiting space station is reachable by certain craft and offers one kind of exit. Buying or capturing a working ship of your own is another. Combining approaches, so that you leave with both your freedom and the wealth you accumulated getting it, is a further and harder problem the game never states as a goal but rewards if you manage it.

That absence of a stated critical path is the entire thesis. A 1985 machine could not afford branching dialogue trees or handcrafted mission scripting at any scale, so Woakes solved the problem of player agency the other way: build one honest, consistent world with real rules, and let the player’s understanding of those rules be the only walkthrough that exists. You do not fail a mission in Mercenary. You fail to understand the planet, and the fix is always to go back out and look more carefully, which is a different kind of failure state than anything a quest-marker generation would tolerate.

Why the wireframe is not a limitation

It would be easy to read the vector graphics as a compromise forced by the hardware, the same story usually told about Elite. That undersells what the flatness buys. A wireframe building has no texture to hide behind and no lighting model to fake depth with, so every shape you see is doing load-bearing communicative work — a tower reads as a tower because its silhouette is unambiguous, not because a texture artist dressed it up. On a machine budget where every polygon costs frame rate, Woakes had to make each one count, and the result is a city that is legible from altitude and legible on foot, which is a harder trick than it sounds.

The wireframe also does something to tone that a filled, shaded world would not. Targ feels abandoned and functional at once — an infrastructure without much ornament, built by people or Mechanoids who had jobs to do rather than a civilisation to display. That reads, whether intentionally or as a side effect of the rendering budget, as exactly the kind of place a civil war would actually be fought over: not a postcard, a resource. Magazines of the day were slow to warm to the look — a Zzap!64 reader recalled reading the review and thinking, why is this being praised, before actually playing it and finding it grabbed him and did not let go. That gap between how the game photographs and how the game plays is the whole review problem in one sentence, and it is a gap this desk still runs into with games whose interest is systemic rather than visual.

The ancestor line

The systems-first, no-quest-marker approach to a persistent world is the throughline to everything from Frontier: Elite II’s galaxy that fit on a floppy — which inherited the same commitment to a continuous, rule-governed space over scripted content — to stranger domestic experiments like Hunter’s open world in 1991, which took the vehicle-swap idea and set it on Earth with an actual island to drive, sail and fly across rather than a wireframe alien city. The lineage back to Elite itself is direct: both games arrived at almost the same moment with almost the same answer to the same hardware constraint, and both concluded that a consistent world beats a big one.

The stranger cousin is The Sentinel, which took the opposite lesson from the same era — that a landscape with no stated objective beyond “understand this place” can be the entire game, no dialogue required. Mercenary has more mechanical scaffolding than that, but the family resemblance, a world that trusts you to work out what it wants from you, is unmistakable. Every immersive sim that has since dropped a player into a level with a stated goal and no marked route is arguing a version of the same case Woakes made on a machine with sixty-four kilobytes of memory to spend on the entire idea.

Where to play it: the Atari 8-bit original and the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad ports are all comfortably emulator-friendly, and the sequels — Damocles and Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis — extended the same engine to multiple planets for players who want to see where Woakes took the idea next. The C64 conversion is the one most people remember, wireframe city rendered in that particular blue-on-black that every home-computer kid of the mid-eighties can still picture without trying.

Spoilers below

The space station route requires reaching orbit in a craft capable of the docking approach, one you either buy outright with accumulated Palyar or Mechanoid credits, or capture from a faction installation once you have worked out which one is undefended enough to take — the ship you start with and the ship Benson first offers you will not get you there. The richest ending is the one where you dock at the station with cargo still in your hold: the game does not force you to choose between escaping and profiting, but it also will not tell you that combining the two is possible, which is the whole design in miniature. Damocles, the direct sequel, keeps the civil-war structure but multiplies it across an entire solar system, confirming in retrospect that Targ was always meant to be read as a proof of concept rather than the whole ambition.