Video games can be a means of learning and help to perpetuate the memory of things. For a long time, the creators of video game works have seized on history as a theme. If some people sometimes make somewhat whimsical and rough use of it to serve a stage without any real concern for veracity, others are more inclined to revisit History as it actually unfolded, with its actors, its habits. and customs.
This is the case, for example, of Ubisoft, which intends to make “history its playground” with its franchise. assassin’s Creed that revisits history, but always with a truthful base in facts and environments. To do this, the French publisher has created a team of historians who spend months prior to the creation of a game collecting information to give life to an era, checking the elements that will be integrated and making sure that the game configuration corresponds well with the era they are supposed to represent.
Walk through history to learn it better
This prompted the studios to bring to life the discovery voyageshistorical and fun walks in the landscape ofAssassin’s Creed Odyssey (ancient Greece)origins (Ancient Egypt) and Valhalla (the Vikings). Without a game phase and therefore bloody fights that make the game prohibited for those under 18 years of age, these refined versions are strong educational tools widely used by teachers of history for their teachings as a documentation base for students.
Based on thousands of documents recovered from museums and other organizations around the world, but also on a great deal of faithful reconstruction, Discovery Tours make it possible to give a much more real digital life to a vanished era and often invisible among ruins, vestiges or even tangible documents.
Evidence, where appropriate, of the quality of reconstitution of theassassin’s Creed, images of Venice during the Italian Renaissance (assassin’s creed ii) had been used as an illustration in the historical show The shadow of a doubt (France 3, then RMC Story). Subsequently, the ultra-extensive modeling of Notre-Dame de Paris for assassin’s Creed Unity, that takes place during the French Revolution has been made available to the teams in charge of restoring the monument after the cathedral fire in 2019. However, the game has some compromises with historical reality for the purposes of the action (the Viollet – le-Duc spire built in 1859 was present in the game for the hero’s climbing needs…), the plans cannot be taken as they are.
But how Versailles 1685 before him (1996), designed in particular by the national museums, and many others, continues to be a way of highlighting French historical and cultural heritage through video games. To the point that even the Paris City Hall has also relied in the past on these virtual archives to some site visits.
fill in the gaps
But the video game can also make it possible to keep objects or elements destined to disappear in memory. Specialized in rebuilding tanks for your game needs world of tanks, Wargaming has extensive documentation and hundreds of modeled tanks. Digital files that are good: In 2017, the Cypriot developer was able to recreate in augmented reality the Sturmtiger, a WWII German tank that had decimated enemy troops. In the absence of owning one among its hundred cars, but also due to the small number of models left in the world, the Bovington Tank Museum (Great Britain) was able to add it to its exhibition dedicated to the German Tiger and offer a tour, helmet of mixed reality on the nose.
with his game flight Simulator, Microsoft and the studio that created the simulation Asobo Studio no longer have their proven track record in digitizing and rebuilding aircraft (there’s Charles Lindbergh’s ancient Spirit of St. Louis – 1927, and iconic 1st World Curtiss JN Jenny). War for the Americans – 1915) or even the world to fly over more real than life thanks in particular to photogrammetry techniques.
“Sometimes I look at screenshots and I don’t know if it’s the game or the real world,” enthuses Jorg Neumann, director of the franchise. flight simulator at Microsoft at Tech&Co. “Even I sometimes happen to be wrong. We look twice to check and realize it’s the game.” But what the director of the franchise flight simulator He is arguably most proud of his mission to digitally preserve aviation history.
“With this game and the modeling work done by Asobo Studio and other partner studios, we want to digitally preserve planes, airports and even cities,” he explains. Destroyed but iconic airports have been rebuilt in the game. as the First Flight in North Carolina which saw the first flight in history. The Spruce Goose is also a part of the story that takes place in the game and will no doubt be more widely known.
The Spruce Goose will finally fly thanks to Flight Sim
Certainly few beyond the American borders have heard of the impressive seaplane sought after by aviator and director Howard Hughes. Designed to transport troops avoiding the terrible German submarines of World War II, it had titanic dimensions (almost 100 m in wingspan, 66 m in length and 24 m in height), a wooden structure and 8 engines as well as endless technical equipment. for the time. But too long to see the light of day, he will only know a single flight on November 2, 1947, long after the fighting had stopped.
To celebrate its 40th anniversary, flight simulator brings the Spruce Goose back to digital life. Dumped in a hangar by Hughes, then owned by Disney, who wanted to get rid of it in the early 1990s, it landed in Oregon, where an aviation museum was built in 2001 for it. “I got a call from a guy at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum who said they had this unique aircraft, if we were interested in putting it in our simulation,” says Jorg Neumann. “It was obvious we needed it.”
Les équipes de Microsoft ont alors eu libre accès à l’appareil pour le numériser, aux ressources historiques du musée, aux différents composants de la structure et aux plans pour tout comprendre et le retranscrire dans le jeu. “On a mis au point des outils with flight simulator that make it easy to add devices to the base,” explains Martial Bossard, co-founder of Asobo Studio behind the game. “Then you just have to adapt the game code to a device that is very different in its piloting and its relationship with external elements. . “Other planes, whether missing or not, can be easily virtualized.
If the museum allowed flight simulator To add a choice piece to your gallery of gadgets, for Tyson Weinert, CEO of the Evergreen Museum, it’s a “win-win” partnership. “We help each other. Part of this digital preservation is not just the aircraft itself, but all the thought that goes into it and its history. The Spruce Goose is still considered one of the 50 Wonders of Mechanical Engineering in the It had its place in the game”, he greets, also seeing it as a way of publicizing the device and therefore his museum.
Players will be able to take advantage of the game to fly the Spruce Goose “as Howard Hughes had intended and designed this prototype.” It probably won’t be the easiest plane to fly, but the teams wanted to keep all of its specifics just as it would have flown today. A way to prolong memory and bring heritage to life through the eyes of players for a form of digital eternity.
Source: BFM TV
