The Second Battle of Fallujah is one of the most infamous battles in the history of the Iraq War. The joint military effort of the United States and Iraqi Interim Government saw US, British, and Iraqi forces mount an offensive on the city in an attempt to remove the insurgents controlling it. What ensued was one of the bloodiest battles since the Vietnam War – an engagement that resulted in heavy losses for US troops.
The decision to turn this brutal conflict into a first-person shooter game was extremely controversial when it was first proposed in 2009, causing the game titled Six Days in Fallujah to be shelved for over a decade. While the project lay dormant, Peter Tamte, founder and CEO at Victura, never gave up hope. Having listened to the first-hand stories of combatants on the ground, Tamte had a story he felt he needed to tell, and he knew that videogames were the way to do it.
“In the early 2000s, the company I was running was making training systems for the US military and I got to know a lot of the guys that were going back and forth to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Tamte tells us. “One of them was blown up by a mortar in the battle of Fallujah and was transferred all over the world, from hospital to hospital, to patch him up. He called me and told me the stories of these things that had happened and I was embarrassed because I hadn’t heard about it. So he was the one that suggested the idea of creating a game to tell these stories.”
Untold stories
Fascinated by the stories of the fighters on the ground in Iraq, Tamte and his team set to work gathering testimonies of other Marines and soldiers who were present for the battle.
“I was in the barracks at Camp Pendleton, sitting down and recording these guys’ stories just months after the battle,” he says. “They have all these photographs they took during the battles, some of them had camcorders and gave us footage, we grabbed tactics documentation, and we also had a business making training systems. So we very clearly understood how the tactics are supposed to work.”
Tamte and his team used this vast network of military expertise to develop a concept for a military simulation game more realistic and grounded than ever seen before. Not content with just one side of the story, the development team also worked with an in-house journalist to source interviews with Iraqi soldiers and civilians.
Building the unpredictable
The game’s realism – or as some might describe it, difficulty – is intrinsically tied to the team’s dedication to creating an authentic experience where players feel the fear, dread, and uncertainty of urban combat. The intensity of the gameplay borders on survival horror, with even the tiniest move carrying the potential of failure and death.
“We want players to understand what it’s like to be a Marine because I think we all know we’re not getting that from Call of Duty, Battlefield, or Rainbow Six,” states Tamte. “They’re fantasy games at this point.”
“They call it a 360-degree battlefield,” he continues. “These Marines would clear a house, and 10 minutes later, insurgents would backfill it. There are no front lines, it’s up, down, below, and everywhere around you. Insurgents had three months to set up tunnels, create ambushes, booby traps – it was crazy.”
In order to faithfully recreate this uncertainty, Victura’s developer, Highwire Games, looked to a developing technology that has proved revolutionary in exploration and adventure games – procedural generation.
“We call it procedural architecture,” explains Tamte. “We’ve created lots of bespoke building blocks that are then assembled procedurally. So it all makes architectural sense, you just don’t know how it’s going to reassemble.”
Unpredictability is also built into enemy behavior, using technology dubbed Block Scale AI.
“In many games, the enemies are basically slightly mobile turrets,” he adds. “They depend on players stepping on a trigger, which then activates a series of scripts depending on the circumstances. That doesn’t work in procedural generation. Instead, we’ve built a group of behaviors into each of the AI enemies based on stories we heard about battle-specific tactics.”
Boots on the ground
Since its inception back in 2009, the game has naturally undergone massive changes. Some features were cut and many others added, but Tamte is quick to qualify that the early access version of the game will not deliver the complete vision that is Six Days in Fallujah. The early access version of the game comprises a set of missions, which are collectively introduced through interviews with Marines, soldiers, and Iraqis, and can be played with three other players in highly tactical co-op scenarios.
“The pieces that will come in the full release – and will be introduced throughout early access – will be more missions, times of day, weather, AI teammates, and AI civilians,” expands Tamte. “The two other big pieces are the campaign – full recreations of actual stories with narration and AI teammates – and our special operator missions.”
Six Days in Fallujah launches in early access via Steam on June 22, with the full release to follow at an unspecified date. Peter Tamte estimates its ETA to be a little more than a year out, but is careful not to make any promises – it’s clear the man cares deeply about the final product doing justice to the Marines whose stories formed its basis.