I remember the first time I played The Thing: Remastered, expecting to experience that same chilling paranoia from John Carpenter's classic film. Instead, I found myself running through icy corridors with a squad of characters I couldn't bring myself to care about. It struck me how much this mirrored the real Gold Rush era - we often picture it as this grand adventure with prospectors working together toward common dreams, but the reality was far more complex and isolating, much like my disappointing gaming experience.
The game's fundamental flaw lies in how it handles relationships between characters. You're never really motivated to ensure anyone's survival because the story arbitrarily decides when people turn into monsters. By the halfway point, about 60% of your squad members will have transformed regardless of your actions. This reminded me of historical accounts from 1849 California, where miners would form temporary partnerships only to have them dissolve when gold was discovered. There's this fascinating diary entry from a prospector named James Marshall that describes how his closest companion of three months simply vanished overnight with their collective findings - no confrontation, no discussion, just disappeared like those game characters at the end of each level.
What really fascinates me about both scenarios is how systems designed to build trust ultimately fail. In the game, maintaining your teammates' trust and fear levels becomes ridiculously easy - just share some ammunition and compliment their shooting occasionally. Similarly, during the Gold Rush, the mining camps established elaborate codes of conduct and claim systems, but these often collapsed when significant wealth appeared. I've read that in the town of Columbia, approximately 1 in 5 mining partnerships ended in betrayal or violence despite all the rules and handshake agreements.
The game gradually devolves into a standard shooter around the 12-hour mark, losing all the tension that made its premise interesting. This parallels how the Gold Rush settlements eventually became organized towns with proper laws and infrastructure. While this brought stability, it also erased that raw, unpredictable frontier spirit. The population in San Francisco exploded from about 200 residents in 1846 to over 36,000 by 1852, transforming it from a chaotic tent city into something much more conventional - much like how The Thing: Remastered becomes just another alien shooter.
Personally, I think both the game and our romanticized version of the Gold Rush miss what makes their concepts compelling - the human element. The game could have been brilliant if it had implemented proper consequences for trust decisions, maybe having characters remember your past actions or developing unique relationships. Similarly, we tend to overlook how the Gold Rush wasn't just about individuals striking it rich, but about the complex web of relationships that formed and shattered under pressure. The Chinese miners, for instance, created incredibly sophisticated mutual aid societies that supported over 15,000 immigrants by 1851 - now that's the kind of meaningful connection both the game and popular history often ignore.
What stays with me is how both experiences demonstrate that without genuine stakes in our relationships, any community - whether a gaming squad or a mining camp - becomes superficial. The Gold Rush's real legacy isn't just the economic boom or population growth, but these cautionary tales about what happens when individual gain overwhelms collective responsibility. And playing through The Thing: Remastered, with its disappointing mechanics around trust and consequence, gave me a strange new appreciation for those historical lessons about why we need systems that make caring about each other matter.
