Commander of the Resistance: Amerli Battle: A Video Game About the Popular Iranian Revolutionary Guards General Qasem Soleimani
Technology has been political in Iran for decades. The government in Iran banned cassettes and video players, chess, card games and secular sports after the 1979 revolution to install Ayatollah Khomeini as the country’s supreme political and religious leader. The state started to relax its control over technology in the 1990s, and then began to figure out how to increase it.
The revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered the creation of the Revolutionary Guards force that same year to defend against coups or defections by the regular army.
Iran’s most powerful military force as well as major players in its economy are the Guards, which now has hundreds of thousands of members. Analysts say that Iran is no longer a theocracy as it used to be, but a military state.
Along with the domestic police forces, a plainclothes militia known as the Basij, a volunteer force under the umbrella of the Revolutionary Guards, has been on the front lines for weeks, using brutal tactics to try to quash the protests, as it has done in past revolts.
Commander of the Resistance: Amerli Battle is a first-person shooter set in Iraq. A real-life event that took place in 2014, when the game was launched, gave the game its name. The leader of the title is Qasem Soleimani, a general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who is part of Iran’s theocratic leadership.
Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020, was a powerful figure in the regime—and a controversial one, declared a terrorist by the US and accused of overseeing human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings in Iran, Iraq and Syria.
The developer who spoke under a pseudonym about his work on propaganda titles said the games showed how the regimes wants the youth to think. “Modern games showcase the weakness that the government feels. General Qasim Soleimani never plays the game because he might fail and die. The picture is different from how most of the Iranians feel about him, but the state wants to change that by using video games.
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves of Baghdad, is considered to be the first game in Iran by an independent developer. The state launched its first game a year later. Called Tank Hunter, it was a simple shooting game in which the player took the role of an Iranian soldier, destroying Iraqi tanks during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war—a foundational event in the Republic, and one which is still used by the regime to create a sense of fear that the country is at risk of invasion.