For a while it seemed like all we ever did in video games was shoot Nazis. In 1997, Steven Spielberg, post-Schindler’s List, pre-Saving Private Ryan and apparently in the midst of a second world war fixation, met with a team at DreamWorks to outline an idea for a first-person shooter set in 1944. In the resulting game, Medal of Honor, you played as protagonist Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson, who parachutes into Nazi territory in a bid to single-handedly turn the tide of war. In this way, Spielberg’s game was reminiscent of Hollywood’s most jingoistic postwar output. Like 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima or 1965’s Battle of the Bulge, Medal of Honor used the theatre and mud-flecked aesthetic of the war to present a revisionist, nationalistic yet deeply cathartic take on the war of our grandparents.
Medal of Honor wasn’t the first video game to drop into Nazi territory in search of a setting. It was, however, responsible for inspiring a charge of me-toos. Principal among these was the Call of Duty series, which between 2003 and 2007, produced three major second world war works, each casting the player as an American, British or Soviet hero in the un-nuanced battle against fascism. Other games looked to historical figures to lend them authenticity: 2005’s vainglorious Brothers in Arms attempted to tell the story of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, dropped behind German lines on D-day.
And then, like the Reich’s Hugo Boss-made uniforms, the Nazi-shooting simulator slipped from fashion. 2007’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare moved its setting to the near-future battlefield to great success. Most of the other first-person shooters soon followed its example. When Medal of Honor was rebooted in 2010, the setting was contemporary Afghanistan.
The switch was in part due to the technological limitations of the period. The guns of the 1940s were less accurate, enjoyed less range and packed less power than today’s arsenals. In video-game terms, that made the tools less reliable, flexible and enjoyable to use in sport-like multiplayer games. By choosing futuristic wars, such as 2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the game designers could give players access to powerful exoskeletons and sci-fi weaponry.
Be it due to gathering fears of fascism on the left or hardening fears of foreigners on the right, the second world war setting is undoubtedly enjoying a revival. In film, 2009’s Dead Snow and Inglourious Basterds offered their boisterous, humorous takes. 2014’s The Imitation Game and 2016’s Anthropoid gave us more serious takes on the war. Amazon’s 2015 series The Man in the High Castle was a prestige fantasy interpretation of a postwar world run by victorious Nazis. This summer will deliver the first second-world-war blockbuster in many years in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Nazis, in the form of exaggerated caricatures, zombie monsters, or historical figures ripe for assassination, are in vogue again. They offer us uncomplicated, centrally organised bad guys, a simplistic antidote to today’s dispersed, incognito pariahs.
The Nazi invasion will surely soon spread from Hollywood into video games. Sniper Elite 4, a British-made game released last month, in which you play as an agent of the US Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) fighting fascists in 1943 Italy, leads the charge. Time slows to a crawl when you fire a shot from your sniper rifle. The camera tracks the bullet as it spins through air, then cloth, then flesh and bone. It’s grimly pornographic, at once satisfying and icky. Perhaps we will never tire of this black-and-white conflict, on to which we can project our fears and anger, and feel the self-satisfaction of knowing that we were on the winning side.
