Studio Profile
Charles Games’ journey from university-based educational studio to fully fledged publisher
History is at the centre of everything Charles Games does. Its work has received acclaim for applying a historian’s eye to the Second World War, an era picked over by many games. But Charles Games prefers to avoid big action sequences in favour of recounting the firsthand accounts of ordinary people who experienced the horrors of Nazi occupation. Following the release of its debut, Attentat 1942, the studio also played a part in a momentous change in German law, one that saw Attentat become one of the very first games tackling such topics that was allowed to be released in the region without major changes.
Stepping back to the studio’s origins, though, the focus on history comes as no surprise. Initially formed as an educational venture between Charles University in Prague and historians from the Czech Academy Of Sciences with the aim of teaching history in Czech schools, it struck out on its own in 2020. “This will be the second year for Charles Games as an official game studio, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t worked together for a longer time,” project lead Lukáš Kolek explains.
In fact, the studio’s founding came almost three years after the release of Attentat 1942. Originally developed as part of a university project, that game built on the foundations of an earlier project, 2015’s Czechoslovakia 38-89: Assassination. That was designed as an educational simulation for high school students, but Kolek and his colleagues wanted to make something that could be played by the public.
The subject matter of both games, though, was the same: the Nazi occupation of what is now the Czech Republic, specifically the events surrounding the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a highranking SS official and Reich-Protector of the occupied territory. Combining black-and-white comic-book art with FMV sequences, the adventure game told a much more human narrative than we’re used to seeing in most games set around the Second World War. Instead of focusing on the soldiers who ambushed Heydrich, which might have been the most obvious route, Attentat 1942 is rooted in the story of a grandchild in the early 2000s, slowly uncovering their grandparents’ experience of the occupation years.
In order to tell this story, accuracy was vital. Collecting firsthand accounts, diary entries and interviews, the development team worked with academics to capture the spirit of the time. “From the start, there were six historians within the team,” lead designer Vít Šisler explains. “Two from Charles University and four from the Institute Of
Contemporary History of the Czech Academy Of Sciences.” While the academics initially offered historical counsel and background information to the game’s designers and scriptwriters, they quickly became much closer to the rest of the team. “We invited the academics to serve as the game designers themselves, writing the dialogue which we would later tailor to the game.”
This approach meant Charles Games could tap into some of the fascinating oral histories and personal stories of those who experienced the occupation firsthand. “The reality is often much
ATTENTAT 1942 LANDED A SUCCESSION
OF HONOURS, STARTING WITH THE
CZECH GAME OF THE YEAR IN 2017
more interesting and much more unpredictable than what we would think of,” Šisler says. While the game characters are fictitious, their stories are made from multiple oral testimonies given to the historians, an approach Charles Games also used while preparing Attentat’s sequel, Svoboda 1945: Liberation. Some of these testimonies are partly inspired by the academics’ own family histories, including the case of one grandfather who boarded a gunboat led by resistance fighters set on liberating the city of Ústí nad Labem.
The team’s efforts paid off. Attentat 1942 landed a succession of honours, starting with the top prize at 2017’s Czech Game Of The Year awards, right through to this year’s Apple Design Awards, in which Attentat was a finalist. The path from release hasn’t been entirely smooth, though, as the game found itself at the centre of a difficult debate in Germany.
Because it is recounting real events from the Second World War, Attentat features lots of Nazi imagery. Such symbols remain outlawed within
Section 86a of the German Criminal Code, with an exception for their “socially adequate” use in arts and education. Yet until August 2018, this clause did not include videogames, effectively requiring the replacement of such imagery with alternate symbols – one notable example being Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, where swastikas are replaced by inverted triangles, and Adolf Hitler with the moustacheless Mr Heiler.
Given Attentat’s historical setting and use of archive footage, replacing these symbols was impossible. Despite the game being released worldwide in October 2017, when it featured at Berlin’s A MAZE games festival the following April (where it was judged ‘Most Amazing Game’), the developers were unable to show it to attendees. “At the festival, we couldn’t actually present the game,” Kolek says. “We had an empty booth there with a sign saying that the game can’t be published or shown [to the public] in Germany.” While the jury was allowed to play the game, they had a limited two-hour window prior to the festival’s opening to see the game in action.
This finally changed in August 2018, when Germany’s USK ratings board announced it would start considering games on a case-by-case basis. “We were one of the first games to be released in Germany with such a topic after this rule change,” Kolek says. Other games that have benefited from this decision include the strategy game Through The Darkest Of Times, which puts the player in charge of a resistance group in 1933 Berlin, and My Child Lebensborn, in which you take care of the adopted child of a Nazi soldier in 1950s Norway.
Even in light of this change, the process of publishing a game on the topic is complicated, with Charles Games having to apply for exemptions on mobile platforms. “You can plan
a release date,” Kolek says, “but if the game build or the game itself gets the green light remains quite unpredictable.”
In spite of these challenges, Charles Games didn’t shy away from exploring this era with its next release, Svoboda 1945: Liberation. Set in the former Sudetenland, a Czech border region with a historically large German population, the game sees a character in the early 2000s unravelling the historical traumas of a small village. Telling the story of the end of the Second World War, as well as the subsequent expulsion of ethnic Germans from the region and the rise of Communism in what was then Czechoslovakia, Svoboda 1945: Liberation depicts yet another crucial period of the country’s history.
As that description suggests, it’s a sequel of sorts to Attentat. “As part of the original project, we have set out three games, and Svoboda 1945: Liberation is the second,” Šisler says. But in terms of presentation, he adds, it is “completely different”. While the activity in, and structure of, Svoboda is similar to that of Attentat, Charles Games has become much more confident in its approach.
“In some ways, Svoboda 1945: Liberation is much more professional, especially in terms of us knowing what we are doing, and what works and what doesn’t,” Šisler says. The game gives more control to players, with more choices and more opportunities to guide the narrative. Unlike its predecessor, Svoboda also boasts a cast of professional actors, something intended to serve the more “dramatic” story.
Depite these new ambitions, Charles Games has continued its work with academics, again using firsthand accounts and oral histories to build its story. Svoboda explores the individual experience of different people within the village through what Šisler calls “playable memories”, reflecting the complexity of the historical period at hand. Once again, much of the game has been partially written by the historians themselves, or at least with their advice in mind.
While Charles Games may now be a fully fledged studio in its own right, its work nonetheless remains tied to academia and Charles University. It was co-founded by the university’s Innovation Prague subsidiary, and some of its key staff also work as academics. Šisler, for example, serves as an assistant professor of new media studies at the university, dedicating “a great deal” of his academic research to the topic of videogames.
While finishing Svoboda has been Charles Games’ recent focus, the studio already has its sights on several other projects – including one that could not be much further from the historical realism of its releases to date. The Legend Of The Spirit Bird is a hand-drawn pointand-click adventure with a fairytale setting.
“I first thought of this game almost 11 years ago, with the birth of my son,” graphic designer and art director Eva Necasová says. “It’s inspired by the work of Robert Holdstock, who wrote several books set in a forest inhabited by Mythagos, creatures born out of mankind’s collective subconsciousness.” Substituting realworld history for a magical world of ancient woodlands, the game follows protagonist Mr Tree Branch on his quest to save the forest. The Legend Of The Spirit could help Charles Games diversify from what Necasová describes as “serious games”. The same could be said of its first foray into publishing, with Silicomrades, a quirky 2D top-down co-op shooter in which robots team up to take down an evil bureaucratic regime, developed by a team of students from Charles University’s Faculty Of Mathematics And Physics.
Not that the studio has any intention of putting serious or historical subjects aside for good, though. Charles Games has worked with the Czech nonprofit People In Need on a short educational game, Digistories: Nela, a teaching tool for Czech schools dedicated to issues around cyberbullying. It is also collaborating with the museum at Sachsenhausen, a former concentration camp outside Berlin. The result is Train To Sachsenhausen, a ten-minute mobile game telling the story of some of the Czech university students who were sent to the camp during the Second World War, with “swiping gameplay” similar to that seen in Nerial’s Reigns.
And then there’s the matter of closing off the series that has defined the studio to date, which is planned to be a trilogy. While much depends on
Svoboda 1945: Liberation’s fortunes, the studio already has plans for a third instalment in the series, shining a spotlight on another aspect of Czech history. Known by the working title of
Exil 1968, the sequel is set to focus on the events surrounding the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. “For me, finishing this trilogy is one of the key reasons why we have decided to create Charles Games,” Šisler says. “There are so many strong stories in our history, and games are a great medium in which to tell them.”
“THERE ARE SO MANY STRONG STORIES
IN OUR HISTORY, AND GAMES ARE A
GREAT MEDIUM IN WHICH TO TELL THEM”