Last Remnants of the French Wild West: Remembering “Colorado” (1990)

Few settings are as quintessentially American as the Wild West. In games, the myth of the American frontier is the myth of American expansion. This myth explores, sometimes with enthusiasm, at other times with a tinge of regret, the conquest of the “wilderness” with its Native inhabitants and wildlife, and its replacement by “civilization” represented by settlers and railroads. Yet, European expansion on the frontier is not exclusively an Anglo-American story. It was the French explorers, traders, and trappers that first set out westward (and southward) along the rivers from Canada and the Great Lakes. The French experience of the frontier was radically different: for them, with the limited resources of their soon-to-be-sold colonial empire, the wilderness was effectively untameable, its Native inhabitants unconquerable: it was thus a place of permanent danger, where one might, with equal probability, eke out a living, earn a fortune, or simply perish. Only once has the French West appeared in a digital game, in Silmarils’s Colorado (1990). This paper examines Colorado as an artefact of French game development in the 16-bit era, as a unique depiction of the forgotten French West, and, finally, as a 2D predecessor of today’s sprawling 3D open-world games.