Spec Ops: The Line cleverly dissects modern games’ fetish for violence. With the help of the original developers, we work through how the extraordinary story behind the shooter came about.
The blue Tupperbox lies buried under stacked drawings and sketches. Its floor is covered with reddish desert sand. In 2008, Yager’s art director Matthias Wiese secretly skimmed him off the dunes around Dubai while collecting impressions for a new shooter. A shooter that got on Yager’s development team’s nerves and sold poorly. But also a shooter that held up a mirror to the genre and revolutionized it with its story.
GameStar was able to speak to six developers who began the journey into the heart of darkness in 2006 and who, ten years after the 2012 release, still remember the turbulent time clearly. This is the story of Spec Ops: The Line.
The author
Denis Gießler was just born in East Germany. He made his first steps in the old camp, a decade later he became a gwent master in The Witcher 3. He is interested in the behind-the-scenes stories: Why are our basic instincts triggered in open worlds, how do save functions work? He works full-time for taz, the daily newspaper in Berlin.
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Behind the inconspicuous exterior of a third-person shooter, amazing story abysses yawn in Spec Ops: The Line.
From Berlin to Dubai
It’s 2005. The iPhone isn’t here yet, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is hitting the sales charts and Duke Nukem Forever is already a running gag. The small Berlin studio Yager hasn’t released a new game for two years. There are no new orders in sight and money is slowly running out.
“It was a difficult time for us back then, we needed a deal as soon as possible,” Timo Ullmann remembers. In 1999 he founded Yager with friends, the roots lie in the former GDR in East Berlin. The team consists of about a dozen people in 2005 and is working on various ideas, including an action-adventure game set in the Star Wars universe that is similar to Star Wars: Battlefront. But LucasArts is not interested and blocks. Time is running out.
A gameplay prototype called Stealth Ranger aims to turn the tide. Yager has been working on the sci-fi shooter for several months, in which the player commands a squad through a devastated Dubai. “We presented the 2K prototype in 2006 and they were immediately interested,” says Ullmann.
