History and Games This Week
Welcome to the week in history and games, a short collection of links to stories and news that we hope you find interesting.
Last week, just as I dropped the weighted acorn on the first step of the Rube Goldberg Machine that eventually posts this article to the website later that morning, Imogen Beckhelling at Rock Paper Shotgun posted her piece on Isu, a fictional language that features in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Imogen spoke with Antoine Henry, an associate director at Ubisoft Singapore who worked to design the language as a "fictional ancestor to Proto-Indo-European." If that floats your boat - and it should, this is cool stuff! - you should check out our episode on Far Cry Primal where John talked to Professors Andrew Byrd and Brenna Reinhart Byrd about their work developing two fictional but linguistically and historically plausible languages. That episode is also available as a podcast here.
GOG had a sale on Kingdom Come: Deliverance this past week and as part of that push gave free copies of the game's making of documentary to subscribers of GOG's newsletter. I knew that one day my mornings of deleting tens of emails instead of just unsubscribing would pay off. This might spur us to have a look at the game finally; it caused a bit of a stir when it came out in 2018. Developers Warhorse Studios being clear that historical accuracy had been a major goal for them in designing the game, but some felt that was an impossible task and others saw potential political overtones.
Total Warhammer III will soon exist! Okay, the history connection is a little tenuous. But hey. I'm excited.
Classes start for John tomorrow; Bob has been at it already for a couple of weeks. Remote students taking John's classes should be ready for lots of this.
Finally, Bob shared a cool thread on Twitter with a little bit of insight into how History Respawned has grown in the last year or so. Thanks for the support everyone!
