Highlander is a canceled action-adventure game published by Eidos Interactive and developed by Widescreen Games, for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, from 2006 to 2008, based on the eponymous film franchise.
Initially, the attempt to develop a new Highlander game dated back well before this one. In September 2004, the company SCi Games managed to conclude an agreement with Davis-Panzer Productions, holder of the rights of the franchise. It was then Climax Studios which was responsible for developing a prototype for the Playstation 2. However, after the takeover of SCi by Eidos Interactive in May 2005, the project was, according to former Senior ProgrammerMarc Fascia, given to Widescreen Games before being put on-hold in August of the same year. The development was relaunched around the end of 2006, aiming for next generation’s hardwares, and officially announced in August 2007 during the Game Convention, although already in February of the same year, the preparation of a new Highlander game was leaked. During its official revelation, several details were disclosed:
“It will be a third-person action adventure that spans over 2000 years, giving you a chance to explore feudal Japan, medieval Scotland, a futuristic vision of New York and Pompeii before the historical volcanic eruption.
Similarly to the film, the aim will be to journey around the world and meet other immortal warriors in battle, lopping off their heads to win. You’ll have the choice of Katana, Claymore or Double to use, and be able to use various techniques to overpower your foe – like Resurrection, Chi Balance, Fireblade, Wind Fury, Stone Armour and other powered-up special attacks.
You’ll be the newcommer Owen Macleod, but come face to face with 77 other characters along the way – some familiar from the television series or films.
Widescreen is promising around 18 missions to tackle in general, and lots of ways to get around your environment: zip wires, dagger and traverse climbing, swan dives, free falls, cannonballs and beams.”
More information were shared in January 2008 alongside what was, for a long time, the only official video of the game:
“Publisher Eidos has officially announced that it will be bringing an Unreal Engine 3 game based on the popular movie and TV series Highlander to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC later this year. Eidos notes that the title, to be developed by Widescreen Games, will be written by TV series writer David Abramowitz, and will take series star Owen MacLeod “on a journey across multiple lands from first century fiery Pompeii, to futuristic New York to discover his destiny and explore the powers of immortality.” By nature of that immortality, Eidos says players will be able to exploit the unique powers it brings and “manipulate situations that death would normally prevent” such as channeling electricity and fire, impaling himself on enemy weapons to disarm them and falling from buildings to escape. The game will also feature “an advanced combat system, gamers will master a variety of Highlander swords including the Claymore, Katana, and Twin Gladius” which will “combine exciting swordplay with the Quickening powers of an Immortal.” MacLeod’s knowledge and strength will be enhanced with each other Immortal he beheads throughout the game.”
In March of the same year, it was an interview with ProducerGilles Baril, which explained in detail new points about the game, including its story, that appeared online:
Could you please reveal the beginning of the game’s plot, just a glimpse of the story?
G.B.: “The game starts in New York – large parts of the city are being evacuated but nobody knows why. The hero, Owen McLeod, is about to leave the city when several heavily armed men burst into his loft apartment. As the story unfolds, Owen finds out that a powerful immortal is the leader behind the attacks, searching for a mysterious artefact which was broken many years before into three fragments. Owen sets off after the fragments, sensing that his destiny is closely linked to this ancient artefact, he racks his memories for clues, memories which will plunge him into three different key periods of his past.”
Can you describe the different environments on the game and where it all takes place historically?
G.B.: “The game takes place in modern day New York where Owen must sift through his memories in order to unfold the story. These memory flashbacks take place in: Pompeii in the 1st Century AD, where, as a young gladiator, Owen meets his mentor who teaches him of his true nature and of the rules to the Game; The Highlands in the 9th Century where, in search of his origins, he befriends a fellow Immortal named Ryan, with whom he fights side by side against the Viking ravagers allied to the powerful Pict sorcerer Barak; and finally, Japan in the 14th Century, where, with his ally Methos, he protects the sanctuary of Kusanagi-no-tsurugi, a legendary blade, and fights Shinu, Lord of the Tengus, who seeks to make off with this sacred artefact.”
In the game will you leap between different time periods in history? Will the game also include an RPG element as you progress?
G.B.: “The game moves between New York to Owen’s memories in past time periods so you’ll be moving between different time periods as Owen tries to discover the key to what is happening to him in New York. We’ve kept to a good balance of navigation, combat and story. Each environment varies in terms of balance of these three elements. This is a tricky balance to get right but we’re happy with the outcome. There will also be an element of RPG to the game as you will be able to upgrade Owen’s combat and Quickening techniques as you play through the game, depending on the choices you make as you play.”
Can you explain how you will be able to upgrade your character?
G.B.: “The player can upgrade their player character, weapons and immortal Quickening techniques in two ways – by spending experience points earned in the game and by finding secret bonuses hidden in the levels. The player can earn extra experience points by using more skilled combat moves to finish off their opponents and by completing secondary objectives in the levels (for example, saving all the innocent Scottish villagers from being slaughtered by the Vikings in the Highlands). Upgrades enhance the strength of the weapons, the power and scope of the Quickening effects and increase the abilities of the player character.”
We understand that you can move both on rooftops and on the ground in the New York part of the game. Can you explain how this happens?
G.B.: “The game features levels where navigating deadly heights is crucial. One of these levels features a wind effect which will blow the character off unless the player is careful. The New York levels are pretty vast and do feature gameplay on the ground and higher levels/roofs, however we also have to take care to ensure the player doesn’t get lost, so there are some limits.”
How does the combat system work?
G.B.: “Each weapon has its own set of attacks and the player can create their own combos. This evolves further when Owen is in Fury mode which gives him much stronger attacks. Using the Weapon Mastery Quickening technique each weapon can also become even more destructive. We’re very confident that the combat experience will be easy for players to pick up and play and will also provide a real unique Highlander flavor.”
Will you fight other Immortals?
G.B.: “There are boss fights with other Immortals but we wanted to keep the Immortal fights special so in many parts of the game Owen will be fighting mortals. Some of the mortals are aware that Owen is an Immortal and have been hired to kill him, like the men invading his apartment in New York at the start of the game, whereas others are just generally up to no good like the Vikings invading the Scottish highlands in later levels.”
However, the game, initially planned for the summer of 2008, disappeared again from the radar and was no longer mentioned. We can see that several Widescreen employeesstoppedworking on it around the time when it was supposed to be released. In February 2009, following the economic crisis, Eidos was bought by Square Enix to become Square Enix Europe. In April of the same year, some sources declared that David Abramowitz, during a convention dedicated to Highlander told that the game was postponed indefinitely following disagreements between Eidos and Davis-Panzer. In parallel, Widescreen was already working on a new project, The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf, before filing for bankruptcy in July 2009. Oddly enough, it was not until December 2010 that Square Enix confirmed the cancellation of the game, which could imply that after the shutdown of Widescreen, the publisher planned to relaunch the development of the game with a new developer.
It was never officially revealed why Highlander was canceled. In this comment section, an anonymous source claiming to have worked on the game indicate that it was finished but was of poor quality and would justify the delay announced by Abramowitz in April 2009, but this remains to this day only pure speculation. On the other hand, Alexis Madinier, one of the former developer on the game wrote on his LinkedIn profile that it was:
“canceled due to clash between publisher and IP Owner. At 2 months of the release…“
Which could confirm the words of David Abramowitz during the convention. No further attempts to develop a new game based on the Highlander franchise have materialized after that one for now.
Special thanks to Wavy Mavis for providing all soundtracks initially composed by Richard Jacques for the game!
Article by Gil B.
Images:
Videos:
Official Highlander’ soundtrack by Richard Jacques. Thanks to Wavy Mavis and the timestamps, we can learn a bit more about the game.
Unsurprisingly, with so much quality for its time, beside being a critical success and earning numerous awards, F.E.A.R. was also a commercial success selling over two million units worldwide, across the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. It should therefore come as no surprise that a sequel was quickly put into development. This is where things get complicated. Officially revealed in May 2004 by Monolith, the first F.E.A.R., as mentioned above, was published by Vivendi whose contracts had already been signed. But in August of the same year, it was another publisher, Warner Bros. Games, which acquired Monolith. This will create for a few years a split regarding the ownership of the rights of the F.E.A.R. franchise. In broad terms, and as explained by 1UP back in 2007, Monolith and Warner owned the rights to the F.E.A.R. intellectual property and characters, and Vivendi owned the name “F.E.A.R.” As a result, any non-Vivendi game set in the F.E.A.R. universe could use the characters and events from the original game, but could not be called F.E.A.R. At the same time, any non-Warner game set in the F.E.A.R. universe could not use the characters and events from the original game, but could be called F.E.A.R.
In February 2006, Monolith began to work on a sequel of F.E.A.R. simply named Project Origin, in reference to a key plot element from the first game. It was not until September 2008, after 2 and a half years of development, that Vivendi made the decision to give back the F.E.A.R. brand to Warner. Subsequently, Project Origin was renamed F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, as stated by IGN:
It’s a bit funny how the corporate world works. In 2005, Sierra and Monolith put out an acclaimed first-person shooter called F.E.A.R. that blended elements of Japanese-style horror with kinetic gunplay. But prior to that, in 2004, Monolith was acquired by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, which meant that things would get complicated for any follow-up. Sierra owned the name F.E.A.R., but Monolith was the company responsible for actually making it. So what happened next was a bit comical. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced Project Origin, a game that would effectively be the spiritual successor to F.E.A.R., while Sierra would make F.E.A.R. 2 with another developer.
And then came 2008. Vivendi Universal Games, the parent organization of Sierra, merged with Activision to become the largest third-party publisher in the world. VUG’s crown jewel, of course, is Blizzard, the studio responsible for World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo. Sierra’s lineup was examined, and most of its games were recently dropped. Indeed, Sierra’s future is in doubt.
Senseing an opportunity, Warner Bros. and Monolith struck, and they are announcing today that they have acquired the F.E.A.R. name, meaning that the creator of F.E.A.R. once again has access to the name. To that effect, Project Origin is being renamed to F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
While a F.E.A.R. 2 was officially in development for Vivendi, it was, for many years, totally unknown what could it be and which company had the task to make the game.
It wasn’t until October 7th, 2021 that YouTuber Dead Domain uncovered and shared information about that F.E.A.R. 2. Through investigative work regarding initially a documentary about the troubled development of F.3.A.R., they were able to get in touch with Art DirectorHeinz Schuller and Narrative DesignerCory Lanham, both working at Day 1 Studios, the company chosen by Warner for the making of F.3.A.R., the final official game in the main series. Today, thanks to them, Unseen64 has the authorization to share the information collected by them regarding this F.E.A.R. 2 by Day 1, revealed in the documentary F.E.A.R. 3: Aftermath. We thank them very much and, mainly, keep in mind that all the credit goes to them.
The Day 1 game began its development somewhere between the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring 2007, was loosely inspired by the Philadelphia Experiment, and was to depict a new phasing technology falling into the wrong hands and being used to open up a passage to and from asupernatural parallel universe called the World Behind the Walls. To close it, a F.E.A.R. squad is deployed. The concept arts showing characters, enemies and environments that you could see in the video, alongside our gallery below were mainly the work of Character & Concept ArtistGrant Hillier. As Dead Domain pointed out on the environments of the World Behind the Walls:
The concepts for the World Behind the Walls show skeletal otherwordly structures and unreal geometry. There are even some that feature what appear to be ambient wildlife.
Another interesting piece of trivia about this F.E.A.R. 2 concerns the Phase Soldier, an enemy that would be able to shift between realities. The original concepts depict them as members of the US Navy, we could make an assumption that it was to emphasize the inspiration taken from the Philadelphia Experiment.
When the F.E.A.R. name was re-acquired by Monolith and Warner back in September 2008, the work done by Day 1 for F.E.A.R. 2 was cancelled by Warner as, mentionned above, Project Origin became the official sequel to the first F.E.A.R. They decided nevertheless to give the development of a third F.E.A.R. game to Day 1. Heinz Schuller explained:
(…) because of that, they decided ‘okay, we’re going to make Project Origin F.E.A.R. 2, and we’re going to make the game that you guys working on will become F.E.A.R. 3’. What our F.E.A.R. 3 started out as evolved quite a bit from when we started it until we ended it. Suddenly we had all the F.E.A.R. universe back: we could use all the characters from F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2.: Project Origin. So that was pretty much a total reboot of the narrative of our game. All of our sort of Phase Soldiers and sort of parallel universe stuff went away.
Still according to Heinz Schuller, the Phase Soldier is the only surviving element of their F.E.A.R. 2 that was transferred to the final version of F.3.A.R., although totally redesigned:
We did take along this idea of phasing and technology that would allow soldiers to essentially beam in and out of our world. So one of the enemies in F.3.A.R. is this heavy Phase Soldier. He can zap into a scene and create an energy field and spawn soldiers around him. I think that was the only element that really survived from our F.E.A.R. 2.
The rest of this documentary focuses on the entire development of F.3.A.R., based on various testimonials from former Day 1 developers. It is worth mentioning that the game still had some changes. Thus, we can learn that some levels never got past the concept art stage such as an underground level with the streets above viewable through holes in the ceilings, with hallways showing the Old City set up with mannequins for tourist attraction, or a ferry ride serving as the penultimate level of the campaign where the two protagonists were transported to the island where the Project Origin’s laboratory is located. According to the art style guide, this level should have been more oriented towards exploration and horror than action, with Point Man who would have been in spectral form just like Paxton Fettel. We can also add that the latter went through various design for his appearance, which was, in the beginning, more focused on a ghoulish aspect:
The narration was also modified on certain points, such as for example the opening sequence which, according to Cory Lanham, was to take place in the middle of the game, in what is the equivalent of Interval 05 – Tower in the final title, before returning the player back during subsequent missions to explain why we find ourselves in this situation. A narrative process called In Media Res, notably used in God of War: Ascension:
(…) I had written and pitched a whole idea for the opening of the game, I think it was originally supposed to open like somewhere towards the latter part of the game, it’s like a preview of what’s coming and then we take you and put you back 12 hours earlier or whatever. So I had written this whole sequence that bounced back and forth between that sort of high action huge moment like the one around the space needle, where it was supposed to open originally, and then it sort of goes back to the Favela at the beginning. It would go back and forth between a cinematic of Alma giving birth to the two brothers, and then cut, and then just keep coming back to the gameplay of lots of high action. And then, the whole idea was to carry the sound effect of the EKG through the transition between the cinematic with the giving birth stuff and the high action stuff, there would be always that sound effect in the background that sort of would be tied in. But it was too expensive basically. That was what it boiled down to, and I think also the guys from Monolith really had a vision that they wanted to execute on, so it really didn’t fit in what they were thinking about doing so.
Another idea that didn’t make the final cut was also to base the entire campaign in South America, especially in the favelas, but as Warner became more and more implicated in the development of F.3.A.R., that idea was dropped in favor of locations inspired by cities from the Washington state, such as Seattle. Heinz Schuller recollected:
Originally, we wanted to base the whole narrative in South America. At the end of F.E.A.R. the idea was Point Man went and holed up in South America for the entire duration of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. (…) We thought we were all really smart by coming up with this really cool original premise, and then Modern Warfare 2 came out and was based in favelas and then the Hulk movie came out which was also based there. But then, Warner had started to get, with T.J. Wagner, working out the locations and they wanted to move the game narrative up to Pacific Northwest, in a post-apocalyptic version of Seattle, where the original nuke went off at the end of F.E.A.R. We fought a lot of battles to try to keep as much of the favelas stuff in, but it ended up just being the first level of the game, so if you remember, you spawn in a prison in South America and you have to break your way out. Even though a lot of that was reworked, that was kind of still the anchor to our first draft of F.3.A.R.
As we can read on the old blog of Art ManagerStephen Langmead, it seems the art direction made by Day 1 was also reworked, this time by Exis Interactive:
(…) We weren’t happy with the quality so we were having them redone by our outsourcer Exis Interactive, who we incredible to work with.
In the screenshots in the last gallery below, we can see some redesigns here and there such as the HUD, the weapons or the airport level which would have made us move in a plane full of dead bodies and potentially what could be appears as an NPC.
F.3.A.R. was finally released in June 2011 after being delayed numerous times and received “mixed or average” reviews from the press. It seems the game’s sales were disappointing, and the F.E.A.R. franchise has been on hiatus since then.
Although considered as the black sheep of the franchise today, it is difficult not to feel a certain sympathy for the developers at Day 1 Studios who had to endure years of reboots in addition to crunches and burnouts. We may not like F.3.A.R. for what it is, but we can’t really blame the members of Day 1 who tried their best despite numerous setbacks hence the final result.
From then on,Unseen64 would like to thank through this article Heinz Schuller, Cory Lanham, Stephen Dinehart, Matt Mason, Chris Julian, Greg Ruddick, Matthew Singer as well as all the other members of Day 1 who were directly or indirectly involved in the development of F.3.A.R., and above all, a very special thanks to Dead Domain for having kindly accepted that we could transcribe certain parts of their documentary for this article.
Day 1’s F.E.A.R. 2 images:
F.3.A.R. Concept arts from cut levels:
F.3.A.R. screenshots’ version by Day 1 Studios showing cut or modified levels:
Videos:
Gameplay prototype before the art reboot made by Exis Interactive. Both videos provided by Art DirectorHeinz Schuller.
Enemy Front is a World War II First-Person Shooter released in 2014 for the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 by CI Games (formerly City Interactive). The game put you in the shoes of Robert Hawkins, an American war correspondent, caught up across Europe with various Resistance fighters, fighting during real World War II historical events that were largely never transposed in video games, particularly First-Person Shooters, such as the Warsaw Uprising. It features open-ended levels allowing for the players to have their own playing style, similar to the Crysis serie.
But before being available as such, Enemy Front had a slightly different approach that was eventually ditched following a small chaotic development leading to redundancies, restructuration and cancellation of some CI Games projects.
Everything began in November 2011 with the announcement of the project by City Interactive, with Stuart Black, mostly known for Black, as Creative Director, as we could read on Engadget:
Stuart Black’s “exciting new story-driven WWII shooter” will be called Enemy Front, publisher City Interactive announced today. The game will be powered by CryEngine 3 and will launch on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC with an expected 2012 release date.
The title got more coverage in the beginning of spring 2012, debuting with an interview of Black by Digital Spy where we could learn that he took inspiration of 60’s and 70’s World War II movies for the tone of the story, especially Where Eagles Dare, but also The Dirty Dozen:
We talk to Black about why he chose to work on this project, how Enemy Front takes its influences from classic war movies like Where Eagles Dare and its back-to-basics approach to multiplayer.
DS: Why choose this project and why choose City Interactive?
S.B.: “Well, City Interactive in particular, I was just really impressed with their attitude. When I left Codemasters and I was looking for another project to be attached to, I certainly didn’t want to do another modern-day shooter having worked on two. I was kind of, ‘I haven’t got any ideas to bring to the table for a modern-day thing’, so I was instantly attracted by the idea of a World War II game.
“As I said earlier, one of the first questions I always ask myself is: ‘Right, if I want to play this style of game, could I go out and buy it tomorrow?’ And when it comes to a quality World War II shooter, no I can’t.
“I’d have to go back to Brothers in Arms or World at War, but then World at War is very different because it’s a Pacific campaign and the Japanese fighting was very different, with the Banzai rushing and surprise ambush attacks, it’s not your typical Nazis in Europe.
DS: Is it the case that these games are a bit old now? Will you be introducing more modern elements?
S.B.: “We hopefully want to modernise it and take like a modern blockbuster kind of approach to it. And get out of that [Saving] Private Ryan rut. That being a front line grunt, with some sergeant constantly barking orders at you, saying, ‘Go here, take that machine gun, up that hill!’ You almost feel like a bit player in your own game.
“It’s like, ‘I ain’t the star’, this other guy, the guy that I’m following, he’s the f**king lead and I’m some secondary character. So we wanted to get you back to being the hero again in that way and to get out of that Normandy to Berlin run.
“Which you can understand why lots of games do it, because until then, most of the big battles, the Allies lost! Researching this and looking at all the historical battles it’s like, ‘OK, I can see why everybody starts at Dunkirk because until then there were no victories’, and who wants to take part in a game where you’re always on the losing side?
“So that combined with the idea, OK we want you to be the hero, we want to look back at the old ’70s war movies, that kind of man-on-a-mission flavour. Dirty Dozen, and in particular, Where Eagles Dare, that was a big influence. I was really surprised when I saw that movie at how well it stands up.
(…) So that kind of became our template. Getting back to that more action-orientated thing instead of that reverential approach to the war.
“Keep it authentic, authentic weapons, authentic locations, but get a bit more adventure spirit into the action, particularly in the story.”
DS: Was it a challenge having a realistic historic setting and having those adventure elements?
S.B.: ” We’ve taken some historical events, in Saint-Nazaire, France, there was a famous Commando raid on a naval base so we have that happening, you take part in that. But you’ve got your own objectives off to the side, leap-frogging or piggy-backing on this commando raid to do your own thing. There’s plenty of flexibility in that.”
DS: In the presentation, I believe a slide said it was ‘beat-based arcade action’; what do you mean by that?
S.B.: “What we mean that it is fairly linear, and it is split down into moments of specific action. What you played here was effectively the first beat of this game, with the beat being the action around the old house, right? There’s significant moments of action, a tank coming rolling in, bursting into a wall or whatever, that would be a particular beat of action.
“That’s what we mean by beats by that, it’s the pacing of the action. The peaks and troughs of it. As I said, it’s a demo we’ve got right now, it’s about keeping the intensity going. When we do our final there’ll be much more peaks and troughs.”
DS: And there will be opportunities for stealth?
S.B.: “You should always have the opportunity, in any given situation – well, not say any, but in the majority of given situations – it should be up to you how you approach that. If you want to take that quietly or want to lock and load and go in all guns blazing.
“Or say, ‘I’ve got a huge sack of smoke grenades here, I’ll just start tossing these around and get the planes in blowing the s**t out of this stuff’, and mix and match them, right?
DS: How are you approaching multiplayer?
S.B.: “We wanted to take a focussed approach to it, a team-based game. The closest equivalent would be Day of Defeat, that would be the shorthand way of describing it.
“It’s territory-based, the levels are sort of corridors. You’ve got the range territories up these corridors, two teams, eight a side we’re hoping. Each territory that you take has different equipment associated with it.
“What I can’t really do is go into a team-based game that doesn’t have that kind of stuff on it anymore, and just have this kind of pure skill-based game. So there will be different classes, your heavy guys, your scout guys, your typical grunt guy, engineery type guy and then different equipment.
“You all have starting equipment based on your class and there will be different movement speeds and characteristics of your classes. And then depending on which control point or territories you’ve taken over will unlock different equipment for you to use during that play session.”
The following month, numerous video previews were shared showing gameplay and the game was also present at E3 2012. Thus, Game Informer wrote a preview about the singleplayer and the multiplayer components:
(…) There are going to be 10 different enemy class types, with jobs spanning from typical armed opposition and medics running around the battlefield healing enemies you merely maimed, to enemies whose job it is to run off and call for back-up by blowing whistles or shooting off flares.
Another way Enemy Front focuses on gunplay is by offering three unique play styles that correspond to different types of shooters. You choose your style at the beginning of your game. Hope mode offers rechargeable health. Honor mode takes away rechargeable health but lets the player pick up and use health packs. Players also scavenge for health packs in Glory mode, which offers the purest cinematic experience by taking away your crosshairs and HUD.
In what is a surprising revelation for a first-person shooter with online multiplayer gameplay, the team at City Interactive is focusing one mode, and it’s not your standard deathmatch. The mode is called Conquest, and it’s a team based multiplayer mode where two teams work against one another to capture points in a corridor like level, as Black describes it. The corridor design of the stages, as opposed to the open environments typically seen in other online shooters, plays into the overall design of Enemy Front. Players are being fed into team versus team shootouts, as opposed to multiple miniature skirmishes happening all over the map. It’s all about playing tug-of-war with the front line of battle along the level.
With its presentation at E3, other websites wrote various previews. For instance, Gamerant wrote:
While still pre-alpha in construction, the demo shown at E3 followed the main character – referred to as ‘Alders’ – battling his way through a French village occupied by German forces. As an OSS Ranger dropped behind enemy lines, the players is not simply required to complete a straightforward objective as part of a larger offensive, but stumbles upon a conspiracy that will send him hurtling across Europe.
The game’s stages set within France, Poland and Germany may not exactly be untapped wells, but the studio’s commitment to CryENGINE 3 means that there will be some new features to experiment with. Enemy Front, like Black, will be placing an emphasis on the destructible environments and construction that the new engine makes possible. Enemy gunfire was shown to result in everything from splintered wood to pulverized masonry, so the moment-to-moment instances of spraying-and-praying do offer a satisfying amount of visual and audio feedback.
While the implausibility of the plot – sending a single soldier across Europe to do what an army cannot – may imply a suspension of disbelief in terms of danger and overwhelming odds, players won’t have to indulge themselves in invincibility. Occasionally the number of approaching enemies will mean that avoiding a skirmish is the best course of action. But, this being a game designed by Stuart Black, the game’s mechanics aren’t exactly beholden to a sense of realism.
A pistol with infinite ammo is set to keep the action moving forward, just one of many tropes of the genre set to appear. A proper English Commando and an alluring female French resistance fighter will be aiding Alders in his investigation, and those capable of dispatching German soldiers will be treated with a smart remark from Alders worthy of a wink to the camera.
The developers promise a wide range of period weaponry including lesser-known models of machine-guns and throwing knives, the use of vehicles in combat, and the ability to work with friendly forces as their missions align with that of Alders. Among the locations teased was the ‘Wolf’s Lair,’ Hitler’s base of operations on the Eastern Front, so expect the game’s campaign to depict a seriously grueling trek.
The basic gameplay of Enemy Front is not attempting to reinvent the shooter genre in any way, and while the footage shown was far from finished, the foundation seems strong. Artificial Intelligence behavior and hit detection all seemed to be well-tuned, and the design team’s decision to work all ammo and directional indicators into a single widget in the corner of the screen, thus leaving the rest of the screen free from obstruction, was a particularly nice touch.
On the other hand, French website Jeuxvideopc.com was far less impressed:
To be completely honest, we wonder why City Interactive unveiled its new title to the press. Not only does Enemy Front seriously smack of deja vu by offering us the role of an American hero whose goal is to sabotage the German lines all over Europe, but what we were able to see was perhaps one of the ugliest things seen at E3. When the developers told us that it was the Cry Engine 3 that was running their game, we had a hard time believing them. Not only are the environments absolutely sad, with a crying lack of life and vegetation, but the game also lag like a Doom 3 on a Pentium II. We were promised that the AI will be ultra-worked (it rushed at the player without thinking), that the environments will be destructible (it was only scripts) or that immersion will be the heart of the title (the player could withstand the bullets equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad without dying), it was hard to believe them. Finally, only the explosions made in Cry Engine 3 and the correct modeling – nothing more – of the enemies were the only good points noted during this presentation. For the rest, it is a question of shooting stupid Germans with imprecise weapons and without punch and of taking cover while waiting to see heads sticking out. The maps may well be of a large size (to be honest, I did not understand the layout of the level) and the weapons (25 in number, all from the period) varied, we do not really see what City Interactive wants to accomplish.
However, after those presentations, Enemy Front went silent for months. City Interactive announced that they wouldn’t be present at Gamescom 2012, and during August 2012, the company went to a major restructuration that led the studio to rebrand as CI Games, cancel projects that wasn’t targeting the AAA market such as a Sniper: Ghost Warrior iOS game, delay numerous times Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, and, finally, reboot Enemy Front. It was made official only in October of the same year, thanks to VG247:
According to Polish website Miastogier, citing an interview with City Interactive Chief Executive Officer Marek Tyminski, Black and the firm parted ways after his vision for Enemy Front was found to be “different from” the firm’s expectations.
As a result, the vision for Enemy Front, announced in November 2011 as a World War II first-person action-shooter, has changed direction.
“Following the first game shows, press releases, we decided to take into account the media attention and now we have made a number of quite significant changes in the game storyline and assumptions, including the main character,” Tyminski said.
“We’re currently working on these elements, among others, a very experienced person in the industry in the United States, Mark Bristol. Recently, [we] also decided to create an extensive multiplayer mode, in which our team in Romania is responsible for”.
A representative from City Interactive confirmed the changes made to Enemy Front with VG247, as well as Mark Bristol’s appointment and Black’s departure – which occured in August.
“We can confirm that Stuart Black is no longer working with City Interactive on the Enemy Front project,” Marshall Zwicker, the firms North American Vice President of sales and marketing told to VG247.
“Based on on early builds of the game and various internal and external feedback that we received, we decided to take a different approach to the gameplay, and the story and characters in the game than originally envisioned. We are now working with Mark Bristol, a very experienced cinematic director from the US and together with him we have been implementing what we feel are some really compelling changes.”
For his part, Black was rather hurt by this decision as we could read on Gamesindustry:
(…) Black was made redundant from his last project, WW2 shooter Enemy Front for City Interactive, just a few months ago.
“And I kind of felt, regardless of how they framed it as ‘we’re making you redundant because of strategic and financial reasons’ it’s inevitable, I would do the same, that people are going to think ‘he f***ed that up.’ The only reason you get rid of your Creative Director halfway through is because they f***ed up in some significant way,” he explained.
“So I kind of felt I looked really bad, my credibility is really going to take a hit from this when people start hearing about this and I just felt like I’ve got everything to prove. And it just comes down to making a game, so let’s just make a f***ing game.”
Last time anyone saw Black on the industry circuit was a press tour in May, where he was showing off his work on the City Interactive WW2 shooter Enemy Front. A game he thought was going well, and a game, he says, he was determined to finish. But just weeks after the press circuit he found himself suddenly and unexpectedly redundant.
“I don’t really have an answer for why, nobody ever really talked to me about any problems either with how I work, the quality of the work that was being done. It was kind of the opposite, everybody was really happy with the work.”
“The only thing that I can think is that when I was off doing my thing in the States telling people there’s going to be a Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare kind of vibe to the game rather than the Saving Private Ryan reverential vibe, and actually they were going ‘no, we actually want Private Ryan.’
It’s clear that the redundancy hurt Black. He explained that he felt it was blow to his credibility and his reputation.
Despite announcing two different projects back then, it seems Stuart Black didn’t really work in the video game industry anymore after this.
Enemy Front was re-announced during the Gamescom 2013 with, alongside Mark Bristol, Raphael Van Lierop as Freelance Creative Director. The final game retained some design ideas from Stuart Black’s version, but some weapons and levels were cut, with also a different tone in the story, a different main character, a different art style and features like the different enemy types, the vehicles driving, the partially destructible environments and the customizable difficulty levels were dropped. Enemy Front was finally released in June 2014 and was met with mixed to negative reviews by the press.
Enemy Front wasn’t the only victim of City Interactive’s 2012 August restructuration. Alongside the Sniper: Ghost Warrior iOS project by Vivid Games, the company had to axe their multiplayer Free to Play First-Person ShooterWorld of Mercenaries, and rebooted for the second time the game Alien Fear, which became Alien Rage.
Salient is a cancelled action-adventure game that was published by Disney Interactive and developed by Propaganda Games for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, around 2005-2006.
Few details are known about Salient, as it seems to this day that this project never reached the prototype phase, let alone playable state. The existence of this title was shared on the personal website of Nathan Cheever, who served as a Level Designer at Propaganda Games from 2005 to 2007, although it is indicated that he never worked on Salient:
When Propaganda Games’ formed in 2005, the project after Turok was going to be Salient, a futuristic game that deals with humanity and injustice. The owners of the studio (Disney) put the project on hold indefinitely a year later, despite the team’s seasoned experience, passion, and talent.
Salient was set in the far future after humanity suffered for centuries of conflicts and global warming. The action take place in a futuristic metropolis that housed surviving masses from around the world, created by a big corporation that also created the Salients, a robotic workforce exhibiting personality traits, emotions and human features, initially designed to serve humanity. But over the years, the Salients integrated throughout the society and become more and more powerful to a point where they took over the corporation and see the humanity as “obsolete”, seizing operations by placing human beings in ghettos. Gamers would have played the role of a hybrid between a human and a Salient, hunted by the corporation and rejected by humans. In his quest, he would eventually flee the metropolis and joined a group of other rejected Salients in the wasteland, before saving humanity.
The art and visual direction was inspired by futuristic science-fiction movies and space opera such as Star Wars, Matrix, Equilibrium and I, Robot, while the gameplay had some platformer elements mainly inspired by the Prince of Persia series and Role-Playing Game mechanics retained from games such as Mass Effect. It also seems that combats would have been similar to the Devil May Cry franchise.
In the end, Disney didn’t take the pitch, and the small team dedicated to Salient joined the one behind Turok as stated by Nathan Cheever:
It was the big main project they wanted to do. There was a small team working on it when they were folded into Turok to help production. Disney didn’t really want to do mature titles like Turok which probably contributed to some of the results.
Six Days in Fallujah is a modern militarytactical first-person shooter video game developed by Highwire Games and published by Victura, that was released in Early Access exclusively on PC, in June 2023, with future versions planned for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One.
But before being known in this form, Six Days In Fallujah was a very different project having experienced a very chaotic development which aroused controversies, the departure of its first publisher, and ultimately, the closure of its original developer, all the way back from 2009.
Initially, Six Days in Fallujah was a Third Person Shooter developed by Atomic Games and published by Konami, for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. The background of the title was already identical to the final product. It was officially revealed in April 2009 by Konami, and Joystiq managed to get an interview of some people involved in the game:
Six Days in Fallujah is clearly a very big deal for the publisher. Light on actual footage, the segment was focused on the high level of realism and accuracy its developer hopes to instill the title with. Just how accurate? That’s what we wanted to find out, so, along with fellow bloggers, we sat down with Atomic Games president Peter Tamte, creative director Juan Benito and US Marine Corps Corporal Michael Ergo, a veteran of the battle and adviser on the game.
You’ve said you have Marine veterans who fought in the battle actually working on the title. How exactly?
Tamte: It’s important for us to say, you know, that there are actually three communities that are very affected by the battle for Fallujah. Certainly the Marines. Certainly the Iraqi civilians within Fallujah, and the insurgents as well. We are actually getting contributions from all three of those communities so that we can get the kind of insight we’re trying to get.
When you say insurgents are “contributing,” what do you mean, exactly?
Tamte: I need to be careful about the specifics that I give. There’s a much broader context to that. I should answer it this way: I think all of us are curious to know why they were there. The insurgents [came from] different countries. And I think we’re all kind of curious about you know – they went there knowing that they were going to die, many of them knew that they were going to die, and they went there to die. And I think that that’s a perspective that we should all understand.
Have you actually spoken to insurgents?
Tamte: They’re involved in the creation of the game as well, as are Iraqi civilians. That’s important to us. It’s true. The game — the influences for the game came from the Marines that returned from Fallujah. But quite frankly in talking with them, it’s um, many people would just like this to be a recreation and we can’t recreate that without getting the perspectives of all the people who were involved.
How exactly are the soldiers contributing to the game? You’ve mentioned maps and battle plans, but do they point to a place on the map and say, “This went down right here?”
Benito: Absolutely. In certain cases we’ve recreated the battles and engagements of the Marines involved to an extremely high level of detail. Including incorporating some of the Marines who were there at the time during the operation in the location that they were in. And you as a Marine can experience an interact with them and fight right alongside them in the actual event in which they were fighting in the battle of Fallujah.
So the actual troops who are advising you will be in the game?
Tamte: You will interact with Marines who were in Fallujah in those particular locations.
Benito: We’ve scanned and recreated their faces and replicated [them] and put them in the game.
Would you say the game is actually going to be “fun”?
Tamte: The words I would use to describe the game — first of all, it’s compelling. And another word I use — insight. There are things that you can do in video games that you cannot do in other forms of media. And a lot of that has to do with presenting players with the dilemmas that the Marines saw in Fallujah and then giving them the choice of how to handle that dilemma. And I think at that point, you know — when you watch a movie, you see the decisions that somebody else made. But when you make a decision yourself, then you get a much deeper level of understanding.
Benito: And that’s a really important point because we recreate the events as factually and as accurately as we possibly can. And there will be a broad range of reactions and opinions on the experience itself. And for some, they may have fun. They may enjoy it. We are recreating and presenting these events and people, I think, will have their own individual reactions to it and those will be across the board. And that’s what we want. We want people to experience something that’s going to challenge them, that’s going to make them think and provide an unprecedented level of insight into a great military significance.
Will players encounter situations like friendly fire or accidentally shooting civilians?
Benito: We wanted to recreate the pressures and conditions the Marines faced and that includes adhering to the proper rules of engagement. So for example, as you may have seen in the demo, there’s an unarmed individual at the start and the Marines didn’t fire on him because he was unarmed and that was in accord to the rules of engagement at the time.
Further details were shared in the Issue# 248 of Gamepro Magazine in May of the same year, but as I was unable to find it on dedicated website nor Archive.org, I decided to take the following information on the dedicated Wikipedia page of the title:
The team at Atomic Games interviewed over 70 individuals, composed of returning U.S. Marines, Iraqi civilians, Iraqi insurgents, war historians, and senior military officials, and learned the psychological complexity of the battle. The game’s director, Juan Benito, elaborated that “Through our interviews with all of the Marines, we discovered that there was an emotional, psychological arc to the Battle of Fallujah.” According to one of the developers who worked on the game, the development team also consulted non-fiction books about the battle as part of their research, such as Patrick K. O’Donnell‘s We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah, incorporating their recollections into the game’s events and story-line.
Atomic Games described Six Days as a survival horror game, but not in the traditional sense: the fear in Six Days comes not from monsters or the supernatural, but from the irregular tactics and ruthlessness of the combatants in Fallujah. Benito stated that “Many of the insurgents had no intention of leaving the city alive, so their entire mission might be to lie in wait, with a gun trained at a doorway, for days just waiting for a Marine to pop his head in. They went door-to-door clearing houses, and most of the time the houses would be empty. But every now and then, they would encounter a stunningly lethal situation… which, of course, rattled the Marines psychologically.” GamePro stated that for Benito, depicting the fear and misery of the battle was a top priority: “These are scary places, with scary things happening inside of them. In the game, you’re plunging into the unknown, navigating through darkened interiors, and ‘surprises’ left by the insurgency. In most modern military shooters, the tendency is to turn the volume up to 11 and keep it there. Our game turns it up to 12 at times but we dial it back down, too, so we can establish a cadence.”
Atomic Games stated that Six Days would feature destructible and degradable environments using a custom rendering engine, which they claimed surpassed the destructible environments of the Battlefield series, let alone any game released or in development at the time. Atomic Games clarified these destructible environments were not a “goofy, out-of-place marketing gimmick”, but a deliberate feature to reflect the actual Battle of Fallujah, during which U.S. Marines used explosives to breach buildings and demolish structures insurgents were hiding in. Tamte stated the game would feature “a meticulously recreated in-game version of Fallujah, complete with real life Marines lending their names and likenesses, as well as recreations of specific events from the battle. It’s almost like time travel. You’re experiencing the events as they really happened.”
Only two days after its announcement, project was already met with controversies as we can read on Gamesindustry:
Six Days in Fallujah, has drawn in calls for its ban by British military veterans, family members of soldiers and anti-war groups.
“Considering the enormous loss of life in the Iraq War, glorifying it in a videogame demonstrates very poor judgement and bad taste,” Reg Keys, whose son Thomas was killed by a mob in Iraq while serving as a Red Cap, told the Daily Mail. “It is particularly crass when you consider what actually happened in Fallujah.”
“These horrific events should be confined to the annuls of history, not trivialised and rendered for thrill-seekers to play out, over and over again, for ever more. Even worse, it could end up in the hands of a fanatical young Muslim and incite him to consider some form of retaliation or retribution. He could use it to get worked up and want to really finish the game.
“I will be calling for this game to be banned, if not worldwide then certainly in the UK,” he said.
Tim Collins OBE, a former colonel famed for an eve-of-battle speech in 2003, agreed.
“It’s much too soon to start making videogames about a war that’s still going on, and an extremely flippant response to one of the most important events in modern history,” he said. “It’s particularly insensitive given what happened in Fallujah, and I will certainly oppose the release of this game.”
Best-selling author and former SAS soldier Andy McNab, however, defended Six Days in Fallujah. War, he said, has been peddled as entertainment by the media for years.
Furthermore, he argued that the UK does not understand the Fallujah conflict in the same way as the Americans – a nation that lost “more soldiers [in Fallujah] than the whole of the British Army has in Iraq and Afghanistan combined”.
“Culturally it is totally different in the US,” McNab told TechRadar. “In America it is not as if this is ‘shock horror’ – everybody has been watching it on the news for the last seven years. The hypocrisy is in the fact that when the media wants a ‘shock horror’ story they will focus on something like this.
“In America a 90-year-old and a 12-year-old will know what happened at Fallujah. It’s on the TV, there are books about it. The game is a natural extension to that; it is folklore. The only difference being that it is presented in a different medium.
“If the game stands up and offers Americans those soldiers’ stories, then, why not?” he said.
Plus, added McNab, America’s Army has been simulating real-life events for years, and really this is no different to “killing Nazis or drug dealers” in other games; games that he has seen soldiers playing on laptops while on tour in Basra. “Culturally they are more up for it,” he concluded.
In direct contrast to his approach, however, was the Stop the War Coalition peace group, who said glorifying the Fallujah “massacre” is “sick”.
“The massacre carried out by American and British forces in Fallujah in 2004 is amongst the worst of the war crimes carried out in an illegal and immoral war,” spokesperson Tansy E Hoskins told TechRadar.
“It is estimated that up to 1,000 civilians died in the bombardment and house-to-house raids carried out by invading troops. So many people were killed in Fallujah that the town’s football stadium had to be turned into a cemetery to cope with all the dead bodies.
“There is nothing to celebrate in the death of people resisting an unjust and bloody occupation. To make a game out of a war crime and to capitalise on the death and injury of thousands is sick.
“There will never be a time when it is appropriate for people to play at committing atrocities,” added Tansy. “The massacre in Fallujah should be remembered with shame and horror not glamorised and glossed over for entertainment.”
“We’re not pro-war,” he added. “We’re not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience… At the end of the day, it’s just a game.”
All these reactions pushed Konami to officially leave the project on April 27, just 21 days after its announcement:
According to an article out of The Asahi Shimbun, Konami has dropped out of publishing controversial shooter, Six Days in Fallujah. The article blames Konami’s decision on the overwhelmingly bad reception the title received from Western audiances after its announcement.
“After seeing the reaction to the videogame in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it,” a public relations official of Konami said. “We had intended to convey the reality of the battles to players so that they could feel what it was like to be there.”
Although Atomic announced that it would not give up on the development of the game, things did not improve as the months went by. So, in August 2009, we learned that Atomic was laying off its entire workforce:
We recently reported on layoffs at Atomic Games, which followed after Konami pulled out of its partnership with Atomic Games for Six Days in Fallujah. The company blamed its inability to secure full-scale funding for the project, which forced a reduction in size at the studio.
Atomic did not comment on the number of affected employees, simply stating that development would continue with a smaller team funded by sister company Destineer Inc., which purchased Atomic in 2005. However, IndustryGamers has heard from an anonymous source who claims, “Out of 75 people, less than a dozen are left and about a third of that isn’t even developers. The remaining team is basically a skeleton cleanup crew that will be gone soon too. They are trying to downplay the extent of these layoffs, but the reality is that Atomic is pretty much dead.”
We’ve put in an inquiry with Atomic Games to find out about the current state of their business but have not heard back yet.
Strangely enough, contrary to most of people thought back then, Atomic wasn’t still dead, and some more information was shared by IGN in March 2010:
A source close to the game’s development confirmed to IGN this morning that Six Days in Fallujah is still planned for release, though no expected release date or publisher was named.
“I can promise you that game is still coming out and it is finished,” the source said.
Six Days in Fallujah got off to a rocky start last April when then publisher Konami dropped the title just weeks after revealing it to the press. Our source said Konami was “too scared” to publish the title after the negative reaction the title garnered.
In August, Atomic Games suffered layoffs due to the studio’s inability to secure a funded publishing deal. While the total reduced headcount was never confirmed, reports at the time suggested nearly 80 percent of the staff was let go with only a skeleton crew remaining.
The fate of the studio was very much left up in the air, but this news seems to indicate Atomic Games is still open in some capacity.
During the PAX East that took place in the same month, Atomic revealed a totally new game, Breach, which was a team-based first-person shooter multiplayer game that featured destructible environments, just like Six Days in Fallujah. It was released in 2011 but sold poorly and definitely killed Atomic Games and Destineer a few months later. In the credits of the game, 23 people worked on it, counting Human Resources. A special thanks section dedicated to people who worked on Six Days in Fallujah can be found. That section contained a total of 51 persons, including former Creative Director Juan Benito.
In the following years, Six Days in Fallujah occasionally came to our memory here and there in the press. Thus, in August 2012, more than a year after the closure of Atomic Games, we could read on PlayStation Lifestyle that at some point, SIE Santa Monica Studio could have been implicated in the game as it was hinted by David Jaffe:
Sony might have once considered publishing Six Days in Fallujah (…)
The reveal comes from David Jaffe, who tweeted about Sony developer Allan Becker, saying [emphasis added]:
Very proud this week of Allan Becker, my former Sony boss and the man who started Sony Santa Monica.*
He toots his own horn so damn rarely I bet the man doesn’t even know he has one to toot! So allow me to do it for him:
A few years back, Allan left Sony Santa Monica to take over Sony’s Japan Studio after a very, very successful run as the SM studio head. When he was at Santa Monica he spearheaded a lot of amazing games, (…). He also was the guy who funded and supported L.A. NOIRE for a long time before that game left Sony and went to RockStar, along with SIX DAYS IN FALLUJAH and bunch of other very imaginative, cool games that never came out but clearly carried the banner for ‘games as art/games-being-more-conceptually-meaningful-than-games-as-action-movies’. (…)
Jaffe’s language isn’t totally clear that Becker funded Six Days while at Sony (hence this being a rumor), but considering Becker joined SCE in 1997 and hasn’t worked anywhere else, it’s unlikely he meant otherwise.
That information was eventually confirmed, nearly 10 years later, in April 2021, by the way.
In September 2012, Peter Tamte was reached by Gamespot and shared some more information about what was going on back then:
Tamte’s vision for Six Days in Fallujah remains unchanged. (…) Authenticity comes in the form of video interviews of Marines recounting their experiences of the battle, interspersed throughout the game, as well as near-perfect re-creations of Fallujah neighbourhoods using satellite photography.
Atomic wants everything in the game to be destructible, from individual bricks to entire buildings, in order to accurately re-create the intensity of urban combat and the complications that arise from situations that involve fighting in close quarters in a civilian-heavy environment. To achieve this, the development team built the game on a new game engine designed to handle realistic structural damage to infrastructure. (However, this engine was built for the current generation of hardware, which Tamte said will end before Six Days is ready. Atomic said it is not yet ready to reveal how this will affect the game’s design.)
Three weeks later, Konami cancelled its publishing deal with Atomic. Tamte said that the decision came as a shock to Atomic, which up to that point had received nothing but support from the publisher.
“There were literally no disagreements between Atomic and Konami’s American team. We all saw Six Days in Fallujah the same way. It was the board of directors for Konami’s parent company in Japan who just got freaked out about the controversy.”
Tamte said that the board of directors of Konami’s parent company in Japan ordered the US unit to pull out of Six Days because Konami “didn’t want its brand associated with the controversy”. He still believes this was a mistake.
“I think if they had waited longer to let our story be heard, they would have benefited from the outpouring of support we’ve received for Six Days in Fallujah as people began to understand more about what it really was contemplate new ideas about what a video game could be. This takes time. Unfortunately, Konami’s board of directors didn’t seem to understand.”
More surprising than Konami’s decision to walk away from Six Days in Fallujah was the amount of encouragement and feedback Atomic received following the loss of its biggest financial backer, including more offers of help from Marines who were eager to take part in the game’s development. The challenge that Tamte and his team now face is gathering the money needed to finish the game, although not necessarily from another publisher.
“I would not say that we’re focused on finding a publisher. Our focus is on finding adequate funding. The rest can get worked out.”
Last year, Tamte started a new company, Theory.io, specialising in productivity software for tablets, mobile phones, and computers. While Theory.io won’t be involved in Six Days in Fallujah, Tamte will still be involved with the project until its release, for which there is still no set time frame. While Tamte recognises that there will always be some people who don’t want to see Six Days in Fallujah get made, the outpouring of support that Atomic has received has convinced him that the team’s efforts will not go to waste.
“I know that the story we’re going to help people experience is compelling. And, ultimately, this is what matters the most.”
The game resurfaced in April 2018 when former Level DesignerNathan Cheever shared his work on Gamedeveloper. We learned that development began in 2005 and that the project had to be reduced in scope. In his personal website, we also can read:
I didn’t originally join Destineer to work on Six Days in Fallujah (SDIF). After Turok I wanted to contribute to projects that had a longer shelf life than two months. I found that with Destineer’s new sister studio in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was focused on Serious Games.
The first project was Judgmental Shooting Simulator (JSS) — a program used to help government agencies like the FBI and CIA deal with dangerous situations. The second project was code-named Magic Bullet — a fictional espionage game, but grounded in reality with assistance directly from the CIA for authenticity.
The experience of our Raleigh team was getting noticed by Destineer’s home studio near Minneapolis. At first, several of our senior members were flown there to consult, support, and become familiar with SDIF. The title had been in production for two years already, building technology from the ground up. SDIF eventually eclipsed Magic Bullet when the company President transferred the project to the Raleigh studio. The majority of Minneapolis studio was asked to move to Raleigh and join the JSS team to complete SDIF. (…)
(…) As with any game production, the original goals evolve over time. These typically involve some form of scope-reduction to help focus the project and elevate quality over quantity. Over the course of four years, SDIF went from 30 missions to 8.
2005 Version
The original campaign for SDIF had 5 missions for each of the 6 Days — 30 levels total. The game world was based on the actual city, so each gamespace was huge, at roughly 40,000 game units (most tactical shooters feature less than half of that).
Vehicles were the remedy for this scale. My impression was a game that rivaled GTA in scope and complexity.
2007 Version
Reality checked in and the campaign was reduced to 19 missions. With the exception of the 1st Day, each Day now featured 3 missions each. Vehicles were relegated to special cases or as backdrop. No freeform driving allowed.
The gamespaces themselves were reduced in size as well, shrinking down to a manageable 12-20,000 game units (the size of an Uncharted Level if folded into a sandbox). This change allowed the team to have more control with moment-to-moment action. At the original scale, the only way to populate non-critical areas would’ve been procedurally, which risked being repetitive and uninspiring.
2008 Version
The third iteration occurred when the project moved to Raleigh. The total missions were only reduced by one, but the scale of each gamespace was downsized to 10-12,000 game units (somewhere in the ballpark of a Gears of War level). The change was due to technical reasons. With all of the sheer destruction we were estimating, anything larger wouldn’t fit in tech performance or memory.
2009-Q1 Version
When Konami entered the picture in early 2009, the project was now bound to a schedule. To ship in 2010, SDIF was reduced to 12 levels. Their physical size remained the same. Each Day had 1-3 missions. Each mission was to be introduced and/or followed by an interview with a Marine who was there.
Previously scope-reduction hadn’t disrupted the highlights, events, or people met in the game. During this last change however, I had to start picking the best events and put aside less dynamic ones. Like previous versions, the experience featured 2 Fire Teams (mixed with real Marines) the player switched to depending on the location and event.
This campaign happened to be my favorite version. It had the right amount of distinctive events and variety to make the experience dynamic and memorable. One thing that set it apart from the other versions were several detached sequences that took place before each Day began. The player was thrown into the middle of intense situations lasting 60-120 seconds, playing a different Marine each time.
In contrast to regular Campaign pacing, there were no tutorials or forgiving second-chances, no reloads. Experienced players would be quick on their feet, recognizing their position and gear. Inexperienced ones would be caught in the chaos and fear of the moment. You dealt with whatever the outcome was. Did you survive? Were you wounded? Did you save your team?
Order Revealed
When players began the final level of the game, they would realize those sequences were flash-forwarding to this final location. Familiar buildings, sights, and sounds from those frantic moments were now all connected.
Several Fire Teams were present during Hell House. Each flash-forward recorded your choices and assigned them as goals to supporting AI Marines. They now retraced your decisions while your own Fire Team attempts to suppress the conflict.
In a multiplayer session, each player would experience these flashes individually. The game would randomly choose which “recording” to use, based on the number of participants in the final level. When the game was complete, players were allowed to replay these series of events and attempted a different outcome.
Like the rest of SDIF, this feature was not meant to trivialize the tragedies or heroism of the Marines who were there. It was developed to teach players the choices and reality of war. Training simulations have been doing this for quite some time. SDIF was an attempt to add an emotional narrative within in a high-quality product.
The Action and Fear chart was something I learned from Turok. It helps the story arc maintain a rhythm of emotional highs-and-lows. The remainder of the information pictured was how real events were applied to each mission. They either directly influenced the encounter(s) or provided bookend moments between them.
2009-Q3 Version
The last change reduced the game to a total of 8 levels, with only 1 Fire Team. The individual scenarios would be based on the real events, but the transitions between them would be an mixture of anecdotal moments from interviews and written accounts. The player would continue to meet real Marines throughout the game, but they wouldn’t be playing with them.
Conclusion
When SDIF was first announced, modern warfare in mainstream games were still relatively new. Since 2009, it’s been full embraced (some would say exploited to sell more games). I hope the stories behind SDIF are presented in some meaningful way in the future. If production was restarted, technical concerns and controversial issues would be less of an issue now. SDIF was always about the real people and their stories, rather than flashy explosions and body count.
In June 2018, Variety wrote an article summarizing several development anecdotes and possible problems encountered by the team:
(…) “The idea started with a Marine sergeant who had been medevaced out of Fallujah during the battle. I knew him well because he was one of the Marines who had been sent to our offices to help us build training systems. He called me just a few weeks after the battle and told me stories from Fallujah that were just incredible. … Then, he asked me whether we could build a game to recreate these stories,” Destineer and Atomic Games founder Peter Tamte told Variety.
(…) With the primary platform being PC, an Xbox 360 port and later PlayStation 3 edition were planned. “Six Days in Fallujah” would carry the Atomic Games brand, not Destineer. “Peter [Tamte] was telling the team, ‘Look, this is a very powerful brand and web address because it was really desired. We’re going to bring this brand back to life and we’re going to use this brand for a big AAA commercial game,’” says Nathan Cheever, lead campaign designer.
Self-funded development began in early 2006.
(…) Initial design opened to a square mile of city space, around four to five blocks. Faced with combat uncertainty, players would need to make snap decisions as to how, where, and when to attack as the urban scenario made it difficult to separate enemy from civilian. Key to this endeavor was destruction.
“There were options that the marines themselves faced and utilized because they have this concept called shape the battlefield where they don’t really care about walls. They want to get the best tactical position so walls come down all the time. We wanted to give the player the opportunity too,” says Creative Director Juan Benito.
“The engine could destroy everything. It was beautiful. Everything could fall apart almost down to the brick,” says producer James Cowgill.
(…) Destruction, however, is difficult to display in video games. This involves physics, graphical changes, processor horsepower, and other complications. While “Six Days in Fallujah” did progress, many of the issues faced by the team stemmed from this destruction, leading to a development that lasted years with slow progress.
“Nobody had done destruction to this extent and still hasn’t. … Unfortunately, this decision inadvertently caused us to spend the first three years building an engine instead of a game. Building the technology or a fully destructible game world created all sorts of complications that are hard to see until you’re very far into development. Everything falls out from this one decision to create a fully destructible game world, and I’m the one who pushed for it and authorized it, so it’s my fault,” writes Tamte.
Consider the location: Alongside destruction, cultural concerns enter the discussion, particularly religious sensitivities. “Even though it was a fully destructible game, we’re not going to allow anyone playing the game to destroy mosques. We don’t want that to be recorded, videoed, and then put on YouTube and it shows people laughing. Suddenly, you’d trivialized a nation’s culture,” says Cheever.
“Everything around [the mosque] can be destroyed except that. Then it looked like we were almost making a religious statement. The power of that structure and that religion,” says Benito. We had a cutscene that was based on a real video clip that we had where Marines had destroyed a mosque and a tower was falling. Very dramatic footage. We recreated it with motion capture and animation. That had to be cut because it was seen as too religiously sensitive,” referring to a decision made by unspecified higher-ups at Destineer/Atomic.
Another level involved a firefight inside a cemetery. Although finished, that level was cut because of potential insensitivity toward grave sites. Other changes became necessary for the format.
“In the real world, you might have 200 meters of flat ground to get to the next building. In a game, that’s a lot of nothing. We shrunk things and shaped things a little bit, but they’re all based on the original locations and condensed into a game,” says Cheever.
Accuracy was tantamount to the team. Benito stated he collected over 80 hours of interviews with Marines who fought in Fallujah. Infantry Officer Read Omohundro came on as a consultant. “I started talking with the software engineers and the other programmers that were making sure some of the city aspects as well as the architecture as well at movements and behavior characteristics for the weapon systems, as well as some of the marines behavior characteristics, were in line with reality of the events,” says Omohundro.
Cowgill explained a basic scenario set-up in “Six Days in Fallujah.”
“The example we used quite a bit was you’re a squad leader and you’re clearing the left side of the street down Fallujah. You see civilians on the other side of the street in their house as you clear houses. Later, you start taking fire from that house. You have three options. You can turn around and clear that house, kick down the doors and do what you need to. Maybe get some marines injured, maybe injure some civilians, but you’re taking fire from the house. The second option is to leave it for the next squad behind you to clear so that they take the risk. The third option is to call in an airstrike. Of those three bad options, which do you choose?” says Cowgill.
With technical burdens building, a decision was made to bring “Six Days in Fallujah” entirely to Destineer’s Raleigh, North Carolina location. Cheever remembers four or five levels in an alpha state after a year or more of development, and once the Raleigh team was set, “Six Days in Fallujah” underwent a reboot.
Gone was the open approach and levels condensed into tighter designs, both for the sake of destruction and scheduling.
“At the end, because the events happened on different phase lines that happened north to south, we decided to have two different fireteams [of four marines],” remembers Cheever.
In addition to a shift in focus, Cheever recalls a “death by demo” process, where the team is pulled off the main game to develop demos or proof of concepts for trade shows or potential publishers. “That halts development of the complete game because people keep getting sucked into expressing things that will not be done in the full game,”he says.
“The view at the time was always to put the best foot forward. …. that drains away resources from the main development. We’d often find ourselves creating an important demo for a specific aspect of the project, but it created quite a drain on the team,” says Benito.
Tamte disputed this schedule, however. “The game was self-funded for the first few years and then found funding very quickly the first time we needed it, so there were only 3-4 times during 4 plus years of development that we built a one-off so we could market the game to someone.”
Those someones varied over the years. Destineer/Atomic Games sought a variety of publishers, from industry giants like Electronic Arts (who potentially viewed “Fallujah” as an extension of its Medal of Honor series) or Bethesda Softworks. Atomic even approached console makers Microsoft and Sony. None of their pitches were successful. “The biggest challenge was that most of the ones that could afford to publish ‘Six Days’ already had their own military shooter franchises either in development or on the market,” says Tamte.
EA, for instance, did reboot its Medal of Honor series but did so on their accord in 2010. Others were concerned by the content and how this could impact their market share outside of the U.S.
“Some of these publishers were headquartered in Europe or Asia that have completely different geopolitical frames of reference on the Iraq war,” says Benito.
One publisher did take on “Six Days in Fallujah.” That was Japan-based studio Konami who signed on in 2008. For a year, Konami supported “Six Days in Fallujah’s” development, if not in the way the developers hoped. Announced at Konami’s Gamer’s Night in 2009, “Six Days in Fallujah” featured alongside the likes of horror games Silent Hill and Saw: The Video Game. Konami brought out a Fallujah veteran to speak, then pushed out a sizzle reel of real-world Iraq war footage combined with run-and-gun gameplay footage, muddying the message.
Basing “Six Days in Fallujah” in reality brings up a number of difficult questions. In a hunt for accuracy, a debate began internally regarding the depiction of actual soldiers. The answer was not to include real named soldiers as playable characters, although this didn’t end the debate.
“Would there be support characters that were real characters in the game? And if they are there, how do you deal with them being killed or is it just a game situation where they don’t die? Or, everyone is made up and it’s just the interviews that express the idea with the real people,” explains Cheever.
“We eventually arrived at a place where we had all of the reality in the book-ended video documentary pieces and we had it in the reality of a tactical situation, but the marines themselves were somewhat abstracted. … We worked with over a dozen marines during the entire phase of development. They inspired marine characters in the game. We didn’t show any real individual or simulating them losing their life. That would have been beyond the pale,” says Benito.
For full accuracy, Destineer’s team asked an American Iraq-based journalist to interview people in Fallujah, to hear their side, even some insurgents.
“I probably had sixty hours of marine interviews and another 20-25 hours from Iraq itself. … the real problem was we were going for a real documentary which meant more than one viewpoint in trying to get the whole story, being real journalists,” explains Cowgill.
That job, of an Iraqi reporter, was not an easy one and put some people in real danger. “Iraqis in Fallujah assumed he was CIA. He couldn’t go back into the city after helping us because they thought he was a spy. He had hired a couple of Iraqi journalists to get the stories and talk to people but it became dangerous for all of them after that because of that environment,” explains Cowgill.
Between a failure of pre-release marketing to tell the public about the documentary approach and the idea of insurgents being involved, “Six Days in Fallujah” came under fire. (…)
The general public’s perception of a video game, along with the content of “Six Days in Fallujah,” made marketing problematic.
“Everybody had some form of Call of Duty in their head of just a run and gun shooter, nothing but fun. The storytelling and documentary aspects were completely lost in the messaging,” says Cowgill.
“It felt like a siege. We knew what was happening in the studio. We knew the validity of the content we were making, and the vision around it. I was convinced and I think the team was as well. We weren’t able to articulate that to the outside world in the way we wanted to. It all felt like a big, unjust misunderstanding,” says Benito.
Development continued until late April 2009, the same month as the Gamer’s Day demo. On a day when Benito completed negotiations with Evan Wright, writer of the book Generation Kill, to pen the story, the phone rang. “I had just started lunch, then I got the call that Konami was pulling the plug. Then I had to go back in and finish lunch.”
“I got a phone call from the EVP at Konami who oversaw our project to explain that Konami of Japan was going to announce it was pulling out and that it would be in the next day’s Tokyo newspapers,” writes Tamte.
Fear over “Six Days in Fallujah’s” real world content and media coverage scared Konami higher-ups. “Basically, once Konami Japan realized they had a controversial game on their hands, everything just went quiet from Konami. The support just dropped,” says Cowgill.
This did require Konami to renege on their contract, using a ‘termination for convenience’ provision. “This allowed them to pay us a fee to terminate the agreement, in which case 100% of the rights to the project would revert back to us,” explains Tamte.
Back into the publishing waters Destineer went, funded by the termination agreement, and on another hunt for a potential publisher. However, by this time, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare turned into a blockbuster, and publishers had their own counterparts already in development. Destineer even sought a studio in Russia. “Fallujah” didn’t fit their schedules, and Destineer was denied.
“After it became clear that none of the big publishers could do ‘Six Days,’ we wound down the team to just a core group and created a new game called Breach with our game engine,” writes Tamte.
“Breach was essentially the multiplayer child of ‘Six Days’ in the effort to save something,” says Cowgill.
“Breach” debuted on the Xbox 360’s digital Xbox Live Arcade service in January 2011, breaking even financially, not enough to sustain the studio. Destineer shuttered in May 2011.
With the advancement of technology and distance from the Iraq war, something like “Six Days in Fallujah” might carry market value today.
“I think now enough time has passed and people have seen the diversity particularly with virtual reality games and how that technology is so different. I’m hoping one day we’ll be able to get to a point where this documentary type video game, or this reenactment through gaming technology, will allow people to experience something that wasn’t physically possible 10 years ago,” says Omohundro.
“You would have learned something. That was the biggest thing I was excited about. If people played through it, they would have realized wow, military, war is not something to be completely trivialized,” says Cheever
To Tamte, not all is lost. Atomic Games is still a brand and he holds all of the necessary pieces.
“I archived all of the assets for ‘Six Days in Fallujah,’ including the interviews we conducted with Marines just weeks after the battle, terabytes of video, photos, and documents from the battle, as well as all the game code and art assets,” writes Tamte.
“Someday,” he said, “we are going to finish what we started.”
In February 2021, the game was officially back on track. It was released in Early Access in June 2023, exclusively on PC, with a Roadmap and future releases planned for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, XboxSeries X/S and Xbox One.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience, by continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to the use of cookies. Find out more about cookies.Hide
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.