Unfortunately, not everyone was on board with the idea, and those doubts would soon change the trajectory of the game. As the calendar turned to 1998 and Saving Private Ryan became a blockbuster that was also changing the conversation about World War 2, it suddenly felt like the DWI team might just have a hit on their hands. Suddenly, people were starting to buy into the idea that this whole thing could work and was very much worth doing. It may have been pieced together, but what DWI came up with was enough to excite Spielberg and, more importantly, excite the game’s developers. If the team wasn’t stunned yet, they certainly would be when Spielberg told them that they had one week to show him a demo. Intrigued by both his son’s fascination with that shooter, and the clear advances in video game technology it represented, he took time away from Saving Private Ryan’s post-production process, visited the DWI team, and told them that he wanted to see a concept for a WW2 first-person shooter set in Europe and named after the Medal of Honor. Legend has it that a lightbulb went off in Spielberg’s head as he watched his son play GoldenEye 007 for N64. That strategy obviously included Saving Private Ryan, but he was especially interested in reaching that same young audience that DWI felt would largely ignore a WW2 game. As someone who believed that WW2 was this event that shaped the generation that lived through it and those that came after, he felt this desire to inform people of the war’s impact and intrigue through the considerable means and talent available to him. Spielberg shared that concern, but he saw it slightly differently. Most studios believed that kids wanted sci-fi and fantasy action games, and many of them weren’t willing to invest heavily on the chance they were wrong. There were WW2 games released prior to that point, but most of them either made passing references to the era ( such as Wolfenstein) or were hardcore strategy titles typically aimed at an older audience. While it’s probably wild to think of a game designer that had a hard time pitching a WW2 game in the ‘90s, you have to remember that widespread cultural interest in WW2 at that time was still fairly low. Work on the project quietly ended months after it had begun. It seems that the DreamWorks Interactive team felt it would be hard to sell a game to kids that was based on a historical event as old as WW2. It was a great idea, but when Falstein took it to DreamWorks Interactive (the gaming division of the DreamWorks film studio that Spielberg co-owned), he was surprised to be greeted with a cold shoulder. Players would have swapped between the two brothers (try to push aside any Rick and Morty jokes for the moment) as they fought through the war and finally saw each other again. It would have followed two brothers participating in the D-Day invasion: one on the beaches of Normandy and one who was dropping in behind enemy lines. The project (which was known as both Normandy Beach and Beach Ball at the time) was fascinating.
In fact, in the early ‘90s, designer Noah Falstein started working on a WW2 game after a conversation with Spielberg reportedly piqued his own interest in that idea.
It was around that same time that Spielberg also expressed his interest in making a video game based on his fascination with WW2.
Spielberg even co-wrote a sometimes overlooked 1995 LucasArts adventure game called The Dig.
for the Atari (a game so bad that millions of unsold copies were infamously buried in a landfill) would have soured him on the format, Spielberg remained convinced that gaming was going to play a big role in the future of storytelling and entertainment. While you’d think that the reception to 1982’s E.T. In case Ready Player One didn’t make it clear, Steven Spielberg has always loved video games. Steven Spielberg’s Son and GoldenEye 007 Change the Fate of the WW2 Shooter That never quite happened, but the ways that the fates of those two projects began, diverged, met, and ultimately split helped shape the future of gaming in ways you may may not know about. After all, Medal of Honor was essentially pitched as the game that would do to WW2 games what Saving Private Ryan did for WW2 films. There was a time when the fates of Medal of Honor and Saving Private Ryan seemed destined to be forever intertwined. The former is sometimes referred to as a “Did You Know?” piece of Call of Duty‘s history or maybe just proof the PS1 had a couple of good first-person shooters. The latter is still thought of as one of the most influential and memorable movies ever made. The legacies of Medal of Honor and Saving Private Ryan have gone in wildly different directions since the late ’90s.
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