Vigilante 8

The game spins out from an alternate history in which a worldwide oil crisis struck in the 1970s, pushing the United States to the brink of economic collapse. Strikes, riots, and crime ran rampant, and with every available officer pulled into the cities to keep order, the outlands were left exposed. Sensing opportunity, a foreign multinational oil cartel — the Oil Monopoly Alliance Regime, or OMAR — set out to corner the global oil trade. With the U.S. the last nation standing in its way, OMAR was willing to do whatever it took to bring the country to its knees. To that end, OMAR hired Sid Burn, a professional terrorist, to topple the U.S. economy for good. Sid gathered his forces in the remote southwest, and his crew — who called themselves the "Coyotes" — began striking oil refineries, commercial sites, and other vital industry across the region. With law enforcement tied up in the cities, desperate civilians started taking matters into their own hands; led by a trucker named Convoy, this scrappy band became known as the "Vigilantes" and soon grew into a serious thorn in Sid's side. All the while, an increasingly vulnerable U.S. government poured resources into developing a new military arsenal. Its most advanced weaponry — rumored to be reverse-engineered from UFO technology — was housed at Site-4, a secret facility at Papoose Lake. Sid caught wind of it, and the Coyotes raided the base, only for the Vigilantes to appear and stop them. In the chaos, both sides walked away armed with the most advanced weapons on Earth. What followed were no ordinary skirmishes: vehicular battles erupted from Colorado's Rockies to California's farmlands, building toward a clash like no other — events that, to this day, remain only a matter of speculation.