Body Harvest

Aliens have arrived to literally harvest humanity like a crop, and as the sole time traveler you must prevent the destruction across the entire twentieth century. Such is the strikingly grim idea behind Body Harvest, one of the boldest and at the same time most underrated titles on the Nintendo 64. The game combined action, vehicle driving and an open world back when no established name existed for such a mix.

Behind the project stood the Scottish studio DMA Design, the team that later became famous for the Grand Theft Auto series. And that is exactly where Body Harvest is fascinating: it offers sprawling levels you roam freely on foot and in all sorts of machines, from cars through tanks to planes, defending the population against waves of insect monsters. Many today see in it one of the conceptual seeds of GTA's later open world.

In play it is a battle against time and space. The aliens attack inhabited areas and you must wipe out their waves before they devour enough people. Between missions you also solve simple puzzles and search for a way forward, so the action intertwines with adventure-style exploration. This genre elusiveness was both the game's strength and its weakness.

The development of Body Harvest was notoriously complicated and drawn out; the game changed publishers for a long time and finally came out in 1998 courtesy of Midway. Perhaps that is why it remained more of a cult affair than a big hit, although it earned respect for ambition and originality of a kind rarely seen on consoles of the time.

Today Body Harvest is a reminder of just how far the creative appetites of a studio reached, one that soon rewrote the rules of the entire industry. It is a rough, slightly unpolished game, but with ideas that were well ahead of their time.

Why play: For a glimpse into the laboratory of GTA's creators and for the open-world freedom that was a rarity on the N64.