PixelVixen707

Here’s a thinker: where do fictional characters “live”? That is, when you’re not reading them on the page or watching them on the screen? Do they go back to a design document? Are they stuck in a sketchbook? Do they lumber around your subconscious? When nobody’s thinking about them, do they vanish, until a trade paperback or a lost film reel brings them back to mind?

We know what happens to Matt Hazard when nobody’s playing him. He sits on his couch and gets fat.

I didn’t expect much more than yuks from Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard when I grabbed it off the promo pile at the Journal-Ledger. You may remember the PR campaign, which invented a 25-year history for the title character - making up a series of retro games from the ’80s and ’90s that allegedly starred this lunky, shaved-headed action hero, from Doom knock-offs to survival horror to a gag where he squeezes himself into Mario Kart. Some years he’s a big shot; other years he’s hanging around his pad, denting the couch and waiting for his next gig. You could look through Hazard’s past and see every hit and dud that led to this game, his eventual return. (A guy pretending to be Hazard’s game designer even runs a blog that tells the whole tale.)

I thought this parallel reality, where Matt Hazard was the hottest thing since Mario and Link, was just a marketing joke. Turns out, it’s the premise of the whole game. In Eat Lead, Hazard gets a chance at a comeback, in a modern next-gen game – the very one you’re playing. Trouble is, somebody wants to kill him. And if he dies in this game, he’s dead.

As Hazard shoots his way through level after level, his world comes apart. Somebody’s hacking the game itself, throwing Hazard from a deli to the Wild West to a Goldeneye-knock-off cold war spy thriller. You’re aware of the game in subtler ways, too: instead of bleeding when they’re hit, your enemies give off a spray of 0’s and 1’s, and the walls flicker and blip away. It gives a nod to The Matrix – imagine if Keanu Reeves’ Neo didn’t have a body to come back to – and also to movies about movies, like Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., where Keaton’s character walks right into the screen and flits from one flick to the next.

Yes, some of the game’s meta-references lean on corny, Mad magazine-type jokes of the “Oh, you know how games always have loading screen tips” type. We also got that in The Simpsons Game or Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, which mine exactly the same joke of watching game characters come to terms with the histories of their own franchises. But Matt Hazard is fundamentally weirder. And the reason is the star.

Matt Hazard is a character in a game. He knows he’s a character, who shows up to work every day the same way Bruce Willis shows up at the movie set. And he’s extremely independent. Hazard’s no silent protagonist: I’m about halfway through the game, and so far, he has not acknowledged me, the player, at all. Even during the tutorial, when the game teaches us which button’s the reload and which one’s the trigger, Hazard thinks it’s all meant for him. And he’s annoyed. Why is the game bothering to tell him how to shoot? He’s been doing this for decades!

But like I said, Hazard’s in trouble. He’s here to play a role in a game, but at the end of level one he learns that somebody’s trying to kill him. And they’re using the game itself to do it. This tells us that Hazard not only has a life outside of each of his games, but he can get trapped inside a game. And if he escapes, he’ll go back to … well, wherever he lives.

So where does he live? That question takes me back to a question I’ve noodled on here before: what makes a character “real”? What makes us believe in Matt Hazard? Why do we follow The Simpsons from the television to the console? And conversely: some of us faulted the first few episodes of Dollhouse because we looked at Echo, a “blank” protagonist, and we saw something missing. Okay: what was missing?

And somewhere on level three, while Hazard was shooting at a sniper with a water pistol, I figured it out.

Matt Hazard has a soul.

I’m not talking about the Judeo-Christian soul. Or actually, maybe I am. The “religious” soul isn’t real, yet we believe in it. It’s a handy word for the thing that makes us see ourselves as more than meat. And fictional people get a fictional soul - the essential, irreducible quality that makes a character more than a few lines and a catchphrase, that makes us recognize them from the novel to the movie poster to the television series. The heroes of your favorite books have souls. Every TV character, every comic book property, every action hero that’s ever stuck in the world conciousness has had a soul.

And Matt Hazard definitely has a soul. Even if it boils down to nothing more than shooting, swagger and shouting “It’s Hazard time,” he’s got one. And Eat Lead succeeds because of it - and because he’ll defend it with his last, virtual breath.