How ‘Saving Private Ryan’ launched a $30 billion empire: “It was that first rickety bridge”
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan became the highest-grossing World War II movie in history when it was released, a record it would hold for almost 20 years until Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk dethroned it, but the movie’s legacy became more lucrative than anyone could have possibly imagined.
Obsessed with the conflict since childhood, Spielberg was struck by the fact that almost every Hollywood-produced film set during the war shied away from the true horrors of combat. Aiming for authenticity above all else, the filmmaker delivered that and more, with audiences having to pick their jaws up from the floor by the end of the seminal D-Day landing sequence.
Once Saving Private Ryan had completed its theatrical run, cut a swathe through awards season, and been subjected to arguably the biggest daylight robbery in Oscars history, the director wanted something else. He was in no mood to shoot another feature, though, so he instead enlisted his company to develop a video game that could serve as a spiritual successor.
DreamWorks Interactive began developing Medal of Honor in November 1997 when Saving Private Ryan was in post-production, with video game aficionado Spielberg using his son Max’s love of gaming as the springboard to pitch a way to use the medium to get younger generations as interested in World War II as he’d been as a kid.
An early roadblock appeared in the form of Paul Bucha, who was president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and didn’t want to see the nation’s highest decoration used as the basis for a shoot ’em up. “When it comes to the Medal of Honor, it’s a serious and sacred thing; you don’t turn it into a video game,” he said in an early meeting. “It’s an awful thing to do.”
Taking his words to heart, the developers toned down the violence and dialled up the realism, creating a best-selling game in the process. The original was released in 1999, and within three years, it had been followed by sequels, Underground, Allied Assault, and Frontline. In 2002, Saving Private Ryan‘s influence on gaming took an unexpected turn when it gave rise to a commercial and cultural behemoth.
The Medal of Honor series was published by EA, and when several members of Allied Assault‘s development team were left dissatisfied with their current contract, they splintered off and formed a new independent studio called Infinity Ward, whose first game was 2003’s Call of Duty.
It wasn’t a million miles away from its progenitor as a World War II-set shooter, but fast forward two decades, and Call of Duty is estimated to have earned upwards of $30 billion from physical sales, online play, and various ancillary revenue streams, none of which would have happened were it not for Spielberg’s insistence in the late ’90s that DreamWorks Interactive make a game set during the time period.
If it weren’t for Saving Private Ryan, there would be no Medal of Honor. If it weren’t for Medal of Honor, there would be no Call of Duty. As Max Spielberg told Games Radar: “It was that first rickety bridge built between the silver screen and the home console,” and it’s snowballed into an empire.
