14 DAY TRIAL // How close to a real world conflict can a video game come without getting burned? Six Days in Fallujah, which was set to portray the bloody battles for the city in Iraq seemed to set the initial benchmark by being unable to get a publisher early after its official announcement because of the sensibility of the subject matter and allegations that insurgents were used as consultants.
The new Medal of Honor, developed by Danger Close and DICE and published by Electronic Arts, did much better, managing to launch and get more than 1.5 million copies in terms of sales in its first five days.
But the game also had to make compromises, the most public of them being the elimination of the name “Taliban” from the multiplayer section, to be replaced by something called an “Opposing Force”.
But that did not mean that for the single player narrative the developers at Danger Close needed to separate themselves as much from real world events as they did.
The story structure is based on Operation Anaconda, which is genuinely filled with tension in a way similar to the Somalia situation which formed the narrative heart of Black Hawk Down.
During Anaconda American soldiers are let down in terms of intelligence and a chain of mistakes and bad circumstances leads to a fight on the enemy's home ground with the coalition forces, for all the resources they can call upon, set as the underdog.
There are a few moments like that in Medal of Honor but the developers of the game did not choose to focus on the worst elements of the story, like the intelligence failure and the desperate fight at the top of Takur Ghar.
Instead they delivered a game where most of the time the American soldier is always one step away from success or salvation and circumstances and opposition are just speedbumps on his way to victory.
This tension between how close to Afghanistan the developers could go and how far they ended up with Medal of Honor is what makes the game less than it could be in terms of a gaming and dramatic experience.