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Following the release of Rockstar Games’ seminal Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001, GTA clones of all kinds flooded the market, each one angling to capitalize on the sandbox game’s popularity. That era of gaming lasted well into the 2010s, giving birth to Mafia, The Getaway, and Saints Row. Even brand licenses imitated GTA’s winning formula—Scarface, The Godfather, and The Sopranos received video game adaptations in 2006 to varying degrees of success.

With 2005’s Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, developer Pandemic Studios delivered a GTA clone that bucked the common trend, sidestepping crimeridden urban environments to instead use a politically unstable Korea as its setting. The end result offered a revolutionary experience whose main rival made it to market in the 2008 sequel, World in Flames.

Rather than gangsters chasing the lap of luxury, Mercenaries starred gunsforhire caught in the middle of political upheaval. As opposed to crime bosses and kingpins, characters in Mercenaries more often than not conferred with factions that represented the interests of entire countries. Critics and players considered the series a nice change of pace, nicely punctuated by Pandemic’s unapologetically overthetop gameplay.

And though a third entry may have further expanded upon Pandemic’s militaristic answer to the openworld chaos of Grand Theft Auto, Mercenaries died with the unceremonious shuttering of the development studio. It was a death whose impact lingered as openworld games evolved beyond the parameters previously solidified by Rockstar and later adjusted by the likes of Pandemic Studios.

This is the history of Mercenaries.

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