Road to Hill 30 took WWII shooters in a different direction. This meant that while genre-mates flew you around the world during their campaigns, Road to Hill 30 took place only in Normandy as part of ‘Operation Chicago’, and its green fields, country roads and rural towns gave the plot some intimacy.

Its ‘Brothers in Arms’ moniker was a reflection of a story that closely followed a small group of soldiers immediately before and after D-Day. Put simply: they were era-standard shooters in WW2 skins and why, even now, I only vividly remember those beach landings and barely anything else.īrothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 - inspired by Band of Brothers in particular - seemed to hint at something more and, when it was released in March 2005, I was not disappointed. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and its console counterpart, Frontlines, had both replicated Saving Private Ryan’s shocking opening in enjoyably chaotic ways, but neither had any of its wider themes, happy to settle into standard FPS tropes.

I don’t think I was alone but they kickstarted my desire to learn more about WW2 and that, such is the obsessive way I’m wired, fed into my gaming time.īut, try as they might, video games could only capture the surface-level brutality of war but said nothing about it. Though one was a fictional story and the other a dramatisation of the real 101st Airborne that dropped into Nazi-occupied France before D-Day, both were incredible looks at WW2 and the people that served in it. Firstly, in 2004, video games were in full swing of aping Spielberg’s 1998 WW2 classic Saving Private Ryan and the terrific 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers. Using Antal’s military background, Gearbox put a lot of stock into historical, geographical and tactical accuracy. The video featured Pitchford and Gearbox’s then-military advisor, Colonel John Antal, showing off what made their World War II shooter series so different. Indeed, it was Pitchford’s passion that drew my attention to the Brothers in Arms series in 2004, when I stumbled on pre-release footage of the series’ first game, Road to Hill 30, while looking for info about Ghost Recon 2 on Ubisoft’s website. I remember when Gearbox felt like the most earnest development studio and studio-head Randy Pitchford seemed endearingly passionate. Before the whole Aliens: Colonial Marines fiasco and long before headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Before Duke Nukem Forever arrived a decade too late. I remember a time before Borderlands became a runaway hit.

Brothers of war 2019