1979 Revolution: Black Friday Reviews

A so-called masterpiece of propaganda, masked with a touch of deception and a blatantly one-sided perspective. Utterly disgraceful.

Well, that was a technical wild ride at first. It was extremely difficult to launch the game. On multiple monitors, I had to install an extra software so I could move the window to the main monitor, as the game was putting in on the first monitor it found, even though I had 3 and it wasn't the main one. It doesn't register any graphical settings you set, not matter what I do, when I confirm that I want to apply the settings, if I go back to the menu, they are still the same. Hats off to the anti-aliasing filter option, that allows me to choose between disabled, 2X, 4X, 8X, russian, spanish or turkish! During the tutorial, I accidentally click my mouse before I could read the instructions, they disappeared and I was blocked, I had no idea what to do to progress, I had to ALT + F4 the game and start the campaign all over. The game is quite clunky and buggy, like a Telltale game, only clunkier (if you can believe that), full of QTEs. In fact, at the end I realized it was a full-on copy of the latter. BUT, for all its clunkiness, 1979 Revolution is an important game for video game history, even "just" History for that matter. I've been categorizing all the games I own into, among other things, where they were made, or where the main people behind it were from. Needless to say that the vast majority of them is coming from North America, Europe, Australia and Japan. Africa in general and the Middle-East is sadly a rather empty zone on my map of games. 1979 Revolution is one of the very few Iranian games I know of (even though it was made in Canada/US, but by people that were mainly Iranian or of Iranian heritage). Not only that makes it already an important piece of art history, but it's also the only one that touches the subject of the history of Iran between the 50s and the 70s, and it's a precious account of the events that led to the Iranian revolution. This was pretty tough to experience, especially the scenes in Evin. What also makes it an important part of the duty of remembrance, is the many collectibles scattered throughout the game that will explain the history of Iran, the political landscape in 1978/1979, muslim traditions, culinary specialties, social etiquette, and more. That's what I spent the most time on, reading all I could to learn more about all of this. It's also full of real pictures, both of important events and family moments. There's a chapter where you'll get to watch pictures and movies of these moments that brought tears to my eyes because these happy, normal, carefree moments were contrasting so much with the seriousness of the events that the game documents and what life is in Iran nowadays. For all the aspects covered in my previous paragraph, I would highly recommend 1979 Revolution. Maybe not for its gameplay value, but for its invaluable account of what happened during that time, and how it led to the situation of the country today.