// PC GAMER — GAMING
Discussing 20 years of Company of Heroes with the team carrying its torch into the future
"I'm really pleased that we're here, able to support the games, and able to celebrate this 20th anniversary."
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I still remember the PC Gamer cover from October 2006 featuring Company of Heroes as the vanguard of the "RTS Revolution." This was back in the day that I would walk down to the local grocery store to grab each new physical issue off of the news stand. I had just turned 17. I was already failing trigonometry. And in my free time, I was building a lightsaber hilt out of parts from the hardware store for Halloween… and trying to keep my airborne troops alive behind German lines on my first proper gaming PC.
At Relic Entertainment in Vancouver that same fall, as one designer recalled, Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' played over the PA system as part of a ritual when one of their games finally went gold. I didn't encounter anything quite that dramatic when I visited earlier this summer to talk with the team about the 20th anniversary of the franchise, but even through all the ups and downs, I did find myself surrounded by people very excited to be making a World War 2 RTS.
A lot of the earliest history of the franchise has been scattered to the wind, unfortunately. The genesis of the idea, I was told, was a story only recalled by a small number of people who have since moved on from Relic, if not the industry altogether. I did learn that the original prototype was created in the engine from Impossible Creatures, a very strange 2003 RTS about creating hybridized animals to fight for you. But Company of Heroes certainly wears its influences on its bloodstained sleeve in a way that remains apparent even today.
"We were highly influenced by Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers," principal programmer Ian Thomson recalled. "That was the era where big leaps in visual quality were arriving, with the Half-Life 2 presentations blowing our mind with characters and physics. We wanted to bring that to RTS in a World War 2 setting."
I was barely old enough to see an R-rated movie on my own, of course, and I hadn't, at the time, watched either Spielberg's epic or HBO's landmark series. I was very familiar with the visual language of them, though, having grown up on Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor, and the original Call of Duty. But even in shifting the perspective on those brutal D-Day landings from first-person to a bird's eye, I remember very little was lost in terms of drama and terror in the opening moments of the campaign.
Relic describes this phenomenon that got its hooks into me as "Humanizing the Battlefield," which they consider a core component to the franchise. In Company of Heroes, the audio and the animations, even outside of cutscenes, made me feel like these little soldiers I was ordering around were real people with lives back home they hoped to return to. They would take cover. They had morale, and could get pinned down or flee if they came under heavy fire.
Your average marine in Starcraft is basically an action figure. But when I zoomed in really close to an infantry squad in Company of Heroes, I found myself imagining: that one is Joe from Tennessee, and I could picture his cat, and the signed baseball on his dresser, and the kinds of pies his mom made for Thanksgiving. It sounds a little twee and overwrought, maybe, but they sold the illusion.
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