Remember that one game where that Russian guy beat the American guy and saved the day?
Really? Because I don’t.
I can think of a million and one games where the opposite happened, though. The Russian government has had enough of that type of game, however, and has decided to take matters into their own hands.
Yeah, you read that correctly. The Russian government is going to create their own video games that paint Russians in a positive light.
According to an article on the Forbes website, the Russian government is “fed up with video games that show Russian soldiers as killers instead of superheroes.” This is, I feel, an understandable position. I mean, when a character shows up in a game and speaks with a Russian accent, your first reaction is generally “Oh, hey, here’s the bad guy.” Am I right?
It’s not even necessarily a conscious thing, either. There are just so many games and movies where the Russian guy is the cold, heartless villain whom the hero must defeat in order to save the day. Russian characters are used as villains in everything from Air Force One to Iron Man 2. In school, almost everything students learn about Russia deals with Communism or the bloody executions of the Romanovs. Not exactly the makings of heroes, is it?
Unfortunately, it would seem that the wrong topic was chosen for this game. Instead of picking some important and heroic event in Russian history, the government decided to base the game on the Imperial Russian Air Service and their accomplishments in World War I. Not fighting Napoleon or their actions as Allies in World War II, but a relatively unknown air fleet that was active for only seven years.
Creating games like this is a great idea in theory. The Russian government has the chance to show a different side of their people. It’s just being poorly executed, and I’m not foreseeing this game selling very well.
