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 after the presses had gone past the point of no return in the Monday bulletin production process, the Medal of Honor series won an Oscar! Kind of. Development studio Respawn co-produced Colette, winner of the Best Documentary Short. The documentary was a product of archival work undertaken to support Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. Let Rob Zacny explain.
This week's episode of "Oh! What a Lovely Podcast!" - a podcast discussing World War I in popular culture and the media - takes an in-depth look at how video games have depicted the Great War. They discuss, among other things, the game Valiant Hearts, the subject of one of our early History Respawned episodes.
Some fun: the Video Game History Foundation showed off some pretty cool history of games swag this past week. They are a great follow if you are on twitter, not least for sharing absolutely fantastic links to old magazine interviews like this one from 1988 from Koei on designing historical games. Extra cred here for the references to the original Nobunaga's Ambition (1983).
More fun: Civs 101 continues! This past week Bob spoke to Dr. Kate Cook about Greece. Dr. Cook talks us through Greece as the supposed cradle of civilization, the interactions of that concept with Civ's famous game mechanics, and the new Greek leaders in Civilization VI.
Finally, sad news this week as John Tiller, a hugely influential game designer in the world of wargaming, passed away. Tiller is one of those people who has been such an important force in his field that if you are interested in strategy war games and have not played a John Tiller game, you have played a game influenced by his work. The games themselves, such as the well regarded Musket and Pike series, are detailed, in depth hex affairs. PCGamesN wrote a nice obituary for Tiller. I also recommend this fantastic interview with Tim Stone on RockPaperShotgun back in 2014.
