June 17 (Portaltic/EP) –
The videogame Commandos: Behind The Enemy Lines celebrates his 25th anniversary accumulating successes such as becoming the Best selling Spanish game with tens of millions of copies and obtain international recognition with numerous awards such as the Best European Strategy Game.
This is the first installment of the Commandos saga and was developed by the Spanish company Pyro Studios, founded in 1996 by Ignacio Pérez Dolset. Thus, it presents a game set in World War II and requires the user to manage the strategy in real time in order to overcome the different missions.
Commandos launched in June 1998 and, since then, it has achieved a remarkable level of success in the Spanish video game scene. So much so that it has become the best-selling Spanish game getting players to buy tens of thousands of copies.
Commandos: Behind The Enemy Lines has also obtained multiple international awards, and became the number one in more than 30 countriesincluding Italy, France, Germany, almost all of Latin America, the United States, South Africa, Korea or Japan, among others.
This recognition materialized with awards such as the Best European Strategy Game, which he was awarded in his year of release. In addition, it is included among the top ten strategy games ever.
Now, on his 25th birthday, the creator of the saga, Ignacio Pérez Dolset, states that, among the reasons for its success, it stands out that Commandos was designed with an approach of game “very original, addictive and deep” and that, even so, he maintained a “easy access” dynamic.
It was also Visual change is important. As he has stated, Commandos “marked a new milestone” in PC video games by quality of its graphics. All this, together with the theme of the Second World War, which “fell in love with the regular players” and “attracted many people who at that time did not play video games,” says the creator in statements collected by the U-Tad, center university of which he is also a founder.
The production of the first installment of the saga counted on a budget which is currently equivalent to €900,000. However, at the time, it became the highest budget in the Spanish video game industry. Also, the development team was made up of about twenty peopleincluding graphic artists, programmers and designers.
Following this line, the development of Commandos took about twenty months of workor until its launch on June 19, 1998, marking the beginning of a change in the Spanish ‘software’ market.
However, Dolset also acknowledges that not everything was easy and that they had a lot of difficulties in the process until launching Commandos. Among other things because, as he points out, it was difficult to find professionals in Spain knowledgeable in video games.
It was also difficult find an international distributor who would bet on a game created by a new studiowith additions such as that “it was made up of professionals without a track record and, in addition, in Spain,” according to Dolset.
“Almost no one believed in Commandos until it went to number one,” Dolset sentence, while highlighting the importance that the title had in “an entire generation”.
THE STORY OF COMMANDS
The idea for this video game arose thanks to Pérez Dolset’s love of strategy games and the history of World War II and war movies. After Commandos: Behind The Enemy Lines were developed four more deliveries.
These successor titles are Commands: Beyond the Call of Duty, which arrived in July 1999 for PC; Commandos 2: Men of Courage, which was made available to gamers in September 2001, for consoles and PC; Commandos 3: Destination Berlin, which was released in October 2003, only for PC; and Commandos: Strike Forcewhich was released in March 2006 for PC, PlayStation 2, and Xbox.
In the case of Commandos: Behind The Enemy Lines, the story includes different missions after the German occupation which are held in different countries, from Norway to North Africa. In this sense, it is a videogame in which the documentation has an important role, collecting four years of history. All this, embodying its protagonist, who drives a small squad of elite soldiers and, with their missions, they must end the war.
