TITLE
WWII Games Become a Vital History Lesson as the Greatest Generation Dies Out
AUTHOR
Samuel Horti
PUBLICATION
Rolling Stone
YEAR
2018
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Charles Scot-Brown, 94, is watching Call of Duty: WWII’s soldiers storm Omaha Beach. “It’s basically authentic,” he says. “Whoever designed that knew something about what they were doing.” And he’d know: at just 20 years old, he left his native Canada to take charge of a platoon of soldiers in the 51st Highland Division of the British Army, leading them onto Sword Beach on D-Day. He then fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and I show him the game’s depiction of that, too. “I would say it should sell,” he says.And how right he is. Despite releasing late in 2017, COD: WWII was the best-selling game of the year in most markets, and made $1 billion in sales in its first seven weeks. It’s hardly an anomaly – World War I game Battlefield 1 sold an estimated 15 million units during the quarter after it launched.
But as war games continue to rack up huge numbers, the number of World War II veterans dwindles. In the US alone, nearly 400 die every day. With direct family ties to the war all but severed, experts believe that video games will play an ever-increasing part in shaping our knowledge of what happened in both World Wars, in the same way that war films have in the past.
So how should developers face up to that reality? Should they change the way they make games about war? And do they have a responsibility to talk about war in a certain way? I spoke to World War 2 veterans, historians, academics and developers – including Call of Duty: WWII developer Sledgehammer games – to find out.
GAMES MENTIONED
Battlefield 1
Call of Duty: WWII
Spec Ops: The Line
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Martyn Bignold
Mac Joyner
Debra Ramsay
Glen Schofield
Charles Scot-Brown
Matthew Seelinger
Timo Ullman
TOPICS MENTIONED
Historical Studies