Gamertell

Welcome to Cut/Scenes, a new Gamertell-exclusive weekly series that will explore the interactions between film and videogames. In this first installment of Cut/Scenes, Danielle Riendeau explores the ways in which Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan was the genesis of the cinematic World War II shooter.

Check back each Thursday for a new Cut/Scenes column!

Hollywood Influence is everywhere in videogames. Games have liberally borrowed the language of cinema (the use of camera angles, for example), filmic storytelling techniques and characters and even subject matter. There are individual movies that have left clear footprints on the videogame world. Films that have a direct, tangible and well-documented influence on the industry, such as Alien and Blade Runner.

One film stands out for birthing an entire subgenre of games that emulate its style, content, and message: the 1998 war epic Saving Private Ryan.

WWII-themed games existed long before Ryan: 1980’s shoot-em-up’s 1942 and 1943 featured dog fighting straight out of the pacific theater of the war, while Castle Wolfenstein introduced the world to the joys of killing Nazis in 1981. Clearly, the Second World War has had a lasting stamp on our society, even without a singular cultural product that defined it for a generation.

Saving Private Ryan came on the scene in 1998 and redefined the way in which war was depicted in media. Using equal parts jingoism and gritty realism, the film’s tone was both cautionary and patriotic. It tapped into something deep, introducing us to our own modern version of the mythic warrior in the form of a hero who fights for justice in a dangerous, morally complex world. It did it with a distinct, visceral “you are there” style that haunted and exhilarated audiences. Game designers were eager and wise to translate that into the interactive medium.

It was Medal of Honor (MOH) for the Playstation that first took this aesthetic and created the template for the modern WWII shooter. The FPS successfully translated the heroics of the American army fighting the Nazis, with movie-grade sound design and gritty visuals. The success of the first MOH spawned a venerable litter of sequels (Frontline, Allied Assault, Airborne, etc.) and imitators, including Call of Duty in 2003 and Brothers in Arms in 2005. Each of these respective games is now a major franchise as well, going strong with recent titles such as Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 for the Wii, and the extremely successful (though not WWII themed) Call of Duty 4.

The movie’s dramatic Omaha Beach sequence, which garnered tremendous attention at the time of its release for unprecedented realism, remains one of the most horrific and powerful sequences in film. The scene has been recreated so many times it’s almost a cliché, so much so that comparing all the D-Day scenes of modern WWII shooters is akin to comparing all the videogame versions of the battle of Hoth (the ice world battle made famous by nearly every Star Wars videogame made after 1980) – different games offer different interpretations, but none stray far from the source.

Medal of Honor: Frontline, for example, follows the Ryan template down to the grayed-out color scheme, whizzing bullets, and shaky first person camera. Like in the film, the action begins as the soldiers wait nervously in the boats, awaiting orders. Chaos erupts as bullets and blood fly when the soldiers storm the beach, and the camera dips in and out of the first person perspective, recording the horror as one soldier sees it. He ducks underwater and runs up the beach, trying to avoid the carnage. The sequence in the game effectively allows the player to experience the movie’s grisly action first hand. The first person perspective reinforces the role-playing aspect: you are not watching soldiers fight for their lives; you are playing as a soldier fighting for his life.

The iconic scene also serves as popular fodder for parody (as is common for any far-reaching cultural product). It has been spoofed in other games, films and TV shows, but it’s Rare’s goofy Conker’s Bad Fur Day that pulls off the parody best. In the Conker level, teddy bears known as Tediz stand in for the Nazi forces, and cute cartoon squirrels are dismembered in a nearly shot-for-shot rendition of the film’s opening battle. It serves as an interesting counter point and proves the genre’s staying power – satire is one of the surest signs a work has made its way into the collective unconscious. The level simply wouldn’t be funny otherwise.

Surely, the cinematic WWII shooter has its special place in the videogame world, and it speaks to gamers who appreciate the morally unambiguous (no one objects to the killing of Nazis), patriotic theme of the genre. Saving Private Ryan brought a visceral realism to the business of war, and its interactive offspring have made sure that playing soldier is as much a gritty, ugly experience as it is fun.

Read [Gamasutra]