When the video game producer Petr Kolar and his future colleagues made a research trip to the Legiovlak, a replica World War I-era train that chugs around the Czech Republic, he noted the pristine Czechoslovak Legion uniforms worn by the museum guides. “The Legion were like gentlemen fighting,” said Kolar, who co-founded Ashborne Games after that visit. That’s one of the reasons 70,000 men could control the whole Trans-Siberian Railway.”Foregrounding historical accuracy was a priority for Ashborne’s first original game, Last Train Home, which retells the Legion’s rolling evacuation eastward across Russia in the embers of the war. Its journey for homebound ships at the port of Vladivostok was tangled in Russia’s internal conflict between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik armies. World War II has been the dominant historical battlefield in video games, from the Medal of Honor franchise and early Call of Duty titles to Hell Let Loose, a multiplayer recreation of the war’s various fronts that pits two teams of 50 against each other.

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Persons: Petr Kolar, ”, Kolar, “ Organizations: Ashborne Games, Siberian Railway, Bolshevik Locations: Czech Republic, Russia, Vladivostok