THE HISTORY OF COMMANDOS
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“A t the time, there wasn’t anything like Pyro Studios,” says Javier Arévalo. “Pyro was created with the goal of making games that would be sold everywhere around the world.” Plenty of developers in Nineties Spain were producing games for the domestic market, and some of these games eventually went on to international success. But Pyro, the Madrid-based studio behind the Commandos games, was founded in 1996 with an international outlook from the start. “It was the first time that the exclusive goal [was] making games not just to sell first in Spain and then elsewhere,” says Javier, who was technology lead on the first three entries in the Commandos series.
When it came to deciding on the studio’s crucial first game, there were a number of contenders, recalls Jon Beltrán De Heredia, lead programmer on Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, Commandos: Beyond The Call Of Duty and Commandos 2: Men Of Courage. “They were actually working on three separate projects,” he says. “There was a World War 2 game, which would become Commandos, and there was also a pirates game – I don’t think it had a name, ‘Corsairs’ maybe. And there was a third game, which was not as well defined – it was a Conan The Barbarian kind of universe.
“So the Commandos prototype had a lot more work put in than the others, then they went to pitch the games to several publishers in the UK, and Eidos, on some whim, decided to buy the rights to Commandos, which was the one they really liked. I think Ian Livingstone was a key figure deciding to buy into the project.”
Javier reckons it was the uniqueness of Commandos that piqued Eidos’ interest: “I imagine that the difficulty to categorize Commandos was one of the things that they saw as a potential strength.”
And Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines really was a strange beast back then: it was nothing like a hex-based war game, but neither was it anything like the real-time strategy games of the day. And its stunningly detailed graphics were a cut above. “The way it played or felt was very unique,” says Jon. “Back then, Command & Conquer existed already, but it was a lot less detailed – I mean, obviously, it’s a different genre, it’s an RTS, but it didn’t give you this feeling […] like, wow, this is like a lead model figure brought to life. It felt like a little world that was alive.”
The developers dubbed it ‘real-time tactics’, and
Jon cites the tiny soldiers of Sensible Software’s Cannon Fodder as an inspiration, along with The Lost Vikings, an early title from Blizzard Entertainment (then known as Silicon & Synapse). In Blizzard’s game, the player has to switch between three characters with unique abilities to complete a level, and Pyro’s offering uses a similar mechanic, demanding that the player utilises each of the commandos’ individual skills.
Another huge inspiration was WW2 movies of the Sixties and Seventies, highlights Javier, mentioning films like The Guns Of Navarone, The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Eagle Has Landed, The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes. “That was our biggest inspiration,” he says. “And that was something that the creative director [Gonzalo ‘Gonzo’ Suárez] always pushed for, like this has to remind you of those movies.”
In terms of actual game design, Javier reckons that the Commandos secret sauce was a mixture of set
routines and surprising knock-on effects. “One of the main pillars of the game was the ability to have a very, very controlled environment where Commandos could be seen almost like a puzzle game. […] But at the same time, [Gonzo] wanted to have very organic reactions,” he explains. “[The enemy soldiers] have a brain, they have a memory where they remember the last few things that they had seen, levels of anxiety, and things like that. That meant that the game could react in unexpected ways.” Jon adds that the plans for enemy AI were even more complex at the start of development: “In the end we simplified it down, because it was complicated. But some of the complexity lived on and actually brought some of the funny behaviours of the enemies when they would do weird things.” Javier says that we’d now call this kind of stuff ‘emergent gameplay’, but no one had heard of the term at the time.
But creating something this unique came with its fair share of problems. “It felt like everything was a very difficult challenge because we were breaking new ground in almost everything,” explains Jon. “The graphics engine was difficult to put together and make it work. There was no previous reference for this kind of engine, so it was challenging.”
Jon adds that the physics of Commandos came from a surprising source: “We had been trying to make another game, which was kind of a Doom clone. It didn’t pan out, but then I turned this into a simulation of creatures moving around in a sector map – I call it a sector map – which was like a freeform scenario, not grid based. And that became the Commandos physics.” This new physics engine wasn’t without its issues, however. “It was very problematic when units got stuck on corners – that was a problem throughout,” Jon notes.
Javier says that in terms of the user interface and control scheme, they took a lot of inspiration from real-time strategy games like Warcraft – but if anything, Commandos was far more complicated. “Commandos had all these abilities to split the screen and change views, so you could have multiple
“One of the main pillars of the game was the ability to have a very, very controlled environment where Commandos could be seen almost like a puzzle game” JON BELTRÁN DE HEREDIA
points of attention as a player. It had a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Probably the lesson from Commandos was there is a lot of potential to have a very, very big ability to control with a lot of precision, but a lot of people are just not going to use that. A lot of this complexity is not really necessary.”
Yet despite its weirdness and complexity, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was an unexpected hit on its PC release in 1998. “The sales exceeded not just our most optimistic expectations, but even our hopes. It sold like crazy!” enthuses Javier. Jon was just as surprised: “It was like one of these sleeper hits. I think it got to number one in the UK on the second week it was out, and then it remained there. That was big, and it was very unexpected.” The game was a particularly huge hit in Germany, and by the end of 1998, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines had sold over 700,000 copies, smashing all sales expectations.
Pyro quickly signed a deal with Eidos to produce more of the same: what became 1999’s Commandos: Beyond The Call Of Duty. “It was labelled like a mission pack,” says Javier, “but it wasn’t really a mission pack because it was a standalone product.” But Jon reckons that not everyone was happy about the decision: “I think that the team didn’t want to do it. The team wanted to go straight to Commandos 2. But the company wanted to do it […]. I’m sure it made sense financially, but in other regards, not so much.”
Even so, the team decided to make the best of it, and the project ended up becoming much more ambitious than expected. “I specifically remember the creative director saying, ‘Look, this is the biggest map we’re ever going to have,’ and that turned out to be the smallest map of the whole mission pack!” remembers Javier. “Everything was like, ‘Let’s do as much as we can.’ The difficulty was also a result of that: everyone, all the designers and playtesters, were already so familiar with all the things that you can
do that a hard level would feel to them like easy.” Indeed, Beyond The Call Of Duty was notorious for its difficulty, but also for its wonderful level design, like a mission set in a bombed-out zoo with roving lions, and a raid to destroy experimental German jet planes.
Still, a ‘proper’ sequel was inevitable, and the stakes were high. “Because Commandos had been so successful, Commandos 2 was in the spotlight for Eidos for the whole development, and so there was a lot more pressure,” says Jon. “Eidos was a publicly traded company so they had to post quarterly results. They were in some trouble because Lara Croft becoming… I mean, their games were not being so successful, and they needed to sell a lot. So suddenly Commandos 2 became the game they hoped would save their results. So the amount of pressure was enormous. I think they were going to duplicate 1 million copies on day one.”
The devs didn’t make it easy for themselves, though. “We threw all the code [for Commandos] and restarted it from scratch,” says Jon. Javier adds, “On Commandos 2 it was like, there’s a bigger budget and the publisher is super happy, so let’s do something really big and ambitious. There was some boost to the engine, to the graphics, to everything, it was completely different.”
And whereas around 18 people worked on the first Commandos game, the sequel saw the team peak at about 40, around half of whom were in the art department. The extra hands meant that the look of each level, whether it was the Eiffel Tower or Colditz Castle, could be completely unique, rather than relying on assets being reused across maps, as was done in the first game. “The goal was to apply all the experience from Commandos and […] make the game more detailed and more alive,” says Javier.
The biggest change was that the backgrounds were now being modelled in 3D and then rendered to produce a ‘2D’ map. And because the player’s viewpoint could now be altered to different directions, each map had to be rendered multiple times to show each angle. “It was a very, very painful process,” says Javier, “and after doing that render, there was a lot of post-production. In a couple of places we had to, like, fake what you would see from one direction versus the other in order to make sure that there weren’t any blind spots.” Not only that, the characters were now also being animated in 3D rather than 2D.
The team was pushing boundaries in terms of the technology of the time, yet, strangely, development was partially focused on a somewhat long-in-thetooth platform. “At the beginning of Commandos 2 there was the intention of doing a Playstation version of it before we really knew how humongous the game was going to end up being,”, says Javier. “Of course, there’s no way that Commandos 2 would have fit into the Playstation, but in the beginning we were trying to develop it.” Work on the Playstation project was abandoned after a few months, but Javier notes that it resulted in the creation of techniques for streaming data straight from disc, which would be used in other versions.
The idea of a Playstation version seems all the more laughable when you consider what a headache the team had when trying to port Commandos 2 to the more-powerful PS2. “PS2 was quite a nightmare,” says Jon. “The maps didn’t fit in the PS2’S memory, so we had to read it from the DVD drive even when you’re playing the mission. And the DVD drive was quite fast when reading, but if you skip to another part of the drive, that would take ages – scrolling could grind to a halt.” Getting the game to work with a joypad rather than a mouse was also quite a challenge, and involved moving the characters directly rather than clicking on where you wanted them to go. Jon was rather pleased with the result. “It felt very different to play Commandos like that, you felt a lot more involved with a character when you were controlling it so directly.”
Commandos 2: Men Of Courage was released on PC in September 2001, and followed on PS2 and Xbox a year later. But getting the game out of the door was a struggle. “We worked weekends, we worked really long hours, it was not healthy at all,” says Jon. “At some points I was like, ‘This is never gonna work.’ It did, but we did have to pull many, many all-nighters. It was worth it because it was a life-changing kind of project, but it was hell – like, you don’t want to live like that.
“And the other thing is, the game was buggy, and we were super delayed,” Jon continues. “We were delaying it – they wanted to release it as it was, and it was like, ‘No, this cannot be released yet, it needs more work.’ The pressure was so high.”
By this point, Jon had had enough: “We left the company – about 13 people left and we started our own company. It was a big hit for Pyro Studios, but it was like, that was not the place for us […]. So we left and some people remained at the company, and those took over and worked on the sequel Commandos 3 and then Strike Force […]. I think Commandos 3, it was continuing in the spirit somehow. Strike Force was very, very surprising, why they would… I never, never, never got it. That wasn’t a great idea.”
Javier wasn’t involved in later Commandos games, either. After Commandos 2, he moved across to head the development team for the RTS Praetorians, and recalls it was a difficult time at Pyro. “The studio was growing, every year more people, more products, more ambition,” he recalls. “And that was also painful in many ways: the growing pains of a studio that is trying to deliver more than it really can do. After you have a huge success like Commandos, everyone was under pressure to replicate that.”
Commandos 3: Destination Berlin was released to mixed reviews in late 2003. Edge gave it 6/10, criticising its relatively short length and lack of inspiration. The review noted the much smaller maps, the lack of new characters and the recycling of much of the equipment from the previous game. Although not a bad game by any means, Commandos 3 was nothing like the huge step forward between Commandos and Commandos 2.
Pyro reacted by turning the series into a firstperson shooter for Commandos: Strike Force in 2006. Only three commandos – the Spy, Green Beret and Sniper – made an appearance, but the player could swap between them to approach missions in a more strategic way than in a traditional FPS. Still, it was a far cry from the previous games. Manuel Mendiluce worked as a junior QA tester on Strike Force, and recalls that the decision to redesign Commandos as an FPS was questioned “on many occasions, both by the team and by critics and public”, adding that he thinks Pyro should have continued to specialise in strategy games. The game received a Metacritic rating of 62 on PC and sold poorly, and Pyro would later move exclusively into producing mobile and casual games, seemingly marking the death of the Commandos series.
But in 2018, the soldiers received an unexpected breath of life courtesy of Kalypso Media, which bought the rights to the Commandos series and is currently working on a new game (see ‘Back To The Battlefield on page 86’). Like in the WW2 films that inspired it, Commandos has pulled through the narrowest of scrapes to fight another day.