The Bus Yard: Why Resistance: Fall of Man Was My Best Time in Gaming

The best nights I ever had in gaming happened in a lobby where one shot from a shotgun was enough.

I grew up on Nintendo. Then the Nintendo 64 came along, and nothing has topped it for me. GoldenEye with a few friends staying over, all of us trying to stay quiet so we wouldn’t wake somebody’s parents. We didn’t know those were the good days while we were in them.

Years later I had a factory job and, for the first time, money I could spend on what I wanted. I bought a PlayStation 3. It came with a launch game, Resistance: Fall of Man, made by Insomniac Games and released in North America on November 17, 2006. You play Sergeant Nathan Hale, who fights alongside the human resistance to drive an alien invasion out of Britain with World War II-style weapons. The campaign was good. I liked Nathan Hale so much that I once thought about naming my first-born after him. Online play is the reason I’m writing this.

Online had the usual ranked and unranked lobbies. It also let you build custom games, and that’s where my friends and I lived. There was a map called the Bus Yard. It was wide open with only a few places to hide, just enough to keep it interesting. Someone would set the lobby to one shot, and then it was a question of who was best at it. I started with the carbine, did all right, and then tried the one-shot shotgun lobbies. I never left.

Here’s what made it fun. You ran, dove, dodged, rode the air vents up and jumped off to close the distance. You learned where people spawned and exactly when. If you hit a spawn at the right moment, the other player came around the corner with their spawn shield still on and ran right into the butt of my gun. I could run that map backwards. I made a lot of friends there and started a few clans (a clan is a group of players, like a club, that plays together and represents itself against other groups), and some of them followed me into Call of Duty later.

Then it started to shrink. A patch shortened the shotgun’s range, or that’s how our group remembered it. I couldn’t find a patch note that spells it out, so take that as how it felt from our side, not as the developer’s record. It affected one-shot lobbies most, because you had to get a lot closer for the kill to work. We adjusted. Our clan moved to other maps and other modes like capture the flag, just to put enough people on both teams. Call of Duty came out and, as far as I could tell, took most of the player base with it.

The servers for the Resistance games, including the first one, were shut off on April 8, 2014, as Stevivor reported. A part of me went with them. In that game, I mattered. Rival clans challenged me to 1v1s to settle whose clan was better, and I carried my own clan’s name into every one of them. Sometimes a lobby would empty out when I loaded in, and I’ll admit I enjoyed seeing “player X left the game.” Resistance 2 and 3 came later, and neither the story modes nor the online play brought me back to the Bus Yard. That game was the only time I felt like I was the best at something, and then it was gone.

Here’s what I take from it for the people at the table, or in the lobby. Custom games meant the players set the rules, and that kept the community alive longer than the developers expected. Nobody sold us a pass for it. When the servers went dark, so did everything we had built, and nothing we owned was left to play. I’d like to see more games keep a way for players to host their own.