For those of you who don't remember it (Christ, you might actually be too young), Six Days in Fallujah was going to be a realistic shooter set in the Battle of Fallujah. The game itself was announced in 2009, approximately 5 years after what we now call The Second Battle of Fallujah, and also about 5 years from would be around the war's approximate end.
The game was originally going to be developed and published by US Marines who had fought in the Battle itself. The purpose of the game was to be a decent tactical modern military shooter, but also to be a vehicle for telling the stories of the Marines on the ground who had actually fought in the battle.
Back in 2009 I was well aware of this game, and I said that video games as a way of bringing the stories of real people to life would likely be a real concept that could be done going forward. It may not be exactly "With The Old Breed", but for servicemen who grew up playing video games, this might be one of the best ways to really explain what it's like.
As I slowly age, I realize more and more as a veteran now, that these stories that are the most important moments of your life will be lost to time and will only exist as distant memories that only you, your brothers, and your enemies, will ever truly understand or even remember. The most intense moment of your life will be at an intersection that didn't have a name, and no one could recognize today.
I feel like after Medal Of Honor: Warfighter was released, and one of the Special Forces operators negatively sanctioned for releasing classified information to the game developers in order to develop a level (I think it was a literal Black Op mission in the streets of Pakistan that was never supposed to be known about), I've always felt that video games as a story telling medium for real events would be something that has a provable creative demand.
However, Six Days was canceled, and I've been surprised to see that people are not mentioning why it was canceled.
Simply put, Fox News, along with the Corporate Media Establishment (and possibly with what I suspect were elements of the US government not wanting to have any potential embarrassment for a war that had not been going well) created a moral outrage about the game. Fox News did a hit piece on the developers and accused them of trying to dishonor and trivialize the the lives of the soldiers and Marines who were killed in the battle... despite the fact that the game was explicitly being developed with veterans of the battle to tell their stories. And despite the fact that the developers did not want to make the game explicitly political.
11 years later, and the developers are trying to republish the game, and IGN... who originally made passive attempts at reporting on the game and defending it, seem to be aiming to do what Fox News did a decade ago.
Six Days in Fallujah is the most concrete evidence I can imagine of how full circle the Culture War has come. I consider it a vindication of my choices so far.
After Six Days was effectively cancelled and the project dropped, the game's core structure was released as a game called "Breach" on Xbox Live. The game was tactical in nature, but you could tell it was the developers desperately trying to re-coup the losses of cancelling Six Days with what they had.
It was a multiplayer only cover based modern military shooter, with objective points and team battles. The maps didn't have too much thought put into them because it feels like they were mapped out for regular FPS, or an arcadey cover based shooter that was popular at the time. Breach's mission could basically be won early on if you established dominance over specific areas quickly early on. If you didn't, the game became a bit of a slog because taking territory was so difficult considering the high lethality of bullets. Cover, concealment, maneuvering to new positions, and marksmanship were absolutely critical simply to move forward. If the players were functioning more as an organized fire-team, it could have worked better, but the players were effectively not told how to co-operate as fire teams. As such, I tended to find gamers taking up every last inch of the map trying to get a couple good angles on an enemy strong point.
It was clearly competent, and it clearly looked like Six Days was trying to go down the right path, but Breach just kinda proved how much damage the media had done.