When it was announced, I bemoaned Treyarch’s decision to base their latest Call of Duty on World War II again instead of opting for continuing Infinity Ward’s quasi-fictional Modern Warfare setting. As somebody who’s been playing games for two decades I’ve played through a lot of World War II games, most of them shooters. If you’re like me, you’ve likely had your fill of them – and for good reason; there are almost as many World War II games as there are stars in the sky.*
* This may be somewhat of an exaggeration.
1up conducted a casual census of how many games have been made covering various 20th century wars. Unsurprisingly, World War II games topped the chart beating out its closest rival, World War I games but a factor of 10:1. The real question here is why? The reasons seem to be twofold; The first appears the be the proliferation of the FPS genre that happened in the 90’s; and the weapons and settings in WWII just make for a much more fun game – the trench warfare that punctuated ground fighting in World War I doesn’t really lend itself to fun gaming. The second is that it’s a war where the Americans came in towards the end, cleaned up the messes and were declared heroes.
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Last Updated: August 14, 2009
easy
August 14, 2009 at 11:07
i would think that a war that cost the lives of over 40 million people would be of interest… for a very long time.
of course the american’s won the war, then win all the wars they enter, with the exception of the bay of pigs…
spl0it
August 14, 2009 at 12:36
You forget their are plenty of new gamers who have not played a lot of WWII, I have a 25 year old friend only started gaming 3 years ago and he LOVES WWII games
Dark
August 14, 2009 at 15:05
WHat about the Zulu Wars ?
Geoff
August 14, 2009 at 15:09
SA developers Celestial had ZuluWar, a strategy game – but that got canned when the studio went under. Had America taken part in the zulu wars, you can bet games would have been made. 🙂
Dark
August 14, 2009 at 16:15
Yeap you are correct I actually followd that game quite closeley. But wouldnt be cool having an FPS type game in this universe.
MooDy
August 17, 2009 at 08:40
I love WW2 shooters – I hope they never stop making them.
al360rulz
August 17, 2009 at 10:58
bored bored bored of WWII shooters i wish they all get canned and gassed