Earth is dead. A century of alien raids has hunted humanity down to almost nothing, and the few people left have one play: a prototype time machine. You go back. 1916 Greece. 1941 Java. 1966 America. 1991 Siberia. You stop the harvest before it happens, one era at a time.
That's what Body Harvest is all about. This title hit the Nintendo 64® in 1998, and it's one of the most ambitious games anyone has tried to pull off on the console.
The Studio Behind GTA III Made This First
Body Harvest was built by DMA Design, the Scottish studio behind Lemmings and the original top-down Grand Theft Auto. Three years later, the same team shipped GTA III, and today they go by Rockstar North. So, if you’ve ever wondered where GTA’s open world instincts came from, a lot of the answers are sitting right here on a cartridge.
You can feel it from the first mission. Body Harvest drops you into huge free-roaming maps, lets you walk through buildings, and leaves it up to you to find your own route to the objective. The rest of the industry wouldn’t catch up for years.
If It Has Wheels, Wings, Or Treads, It's Yours
There are more than 60 vehicles in the game, and you can drive every one of them. Tanks, biplanes, motorbikes, boats, civilian cars from whatever decade you happen to be standing in. Each era has its own set, so 1916 Greece and 1991 Siberia play nothing alike.
Getting around fast matters, because the aliens don't wait for you. They drop in waves, start grabbing civilians, and if you let too many people get harvested you've got a much bigger problem on your hands. Half the game is combat, the other half is getting to the fight before it's over.
Twenty Hours, Rumble Pak and All
This is a full campaign. Expect 20 or more hours across four time periods, plus a final stop we're not going to spoil here... Body Harvest supports the Rumble Pak, and it's one of those games where the IGN review from 1998 still holds up: they called it one of the most interesting and original games to appear on the N64.
