I don’t know how the Bohemia Interactive Simulations PR team got the New York Times to cover the origin of their Virtual Battlespace (serious) game, but they did:
In 1997, the Spanel brothers began working on a commercial first-person-shooter game with an open platform and design tools, asking users to build more weapons, vehicles and terrains.
Ondrej Spanel had an advanced degree in landscape generation and animation, so terrain rendering became a central feature.
After several failed attempts to find a publisher, the brothers signed with an American distributor that soon went out of business and sold its catalog to Ubisoft, which cancelled the brothers’ contract.
“We were kind of hopeless,” Marek Spanel said.
When the game was eventually published by Codemasters in 2001 as “Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis,” the brothers’ fledgling company, Bohemia Interactive Studio, had grown to a staff of eight. “It was a small team. We were very dedicated. We had no family, no life,” said Mr. Spanel, who now has a 7-year-old son and two daughters, 5 and 3.
The brothers chose as the game’s theme song the heavy metal tune “Lifeless” by the Australian Internet band Seventh, whose lead singer, David Lagettie, was obsessed with military simulators. Mr. Lagettie, 42, had been an industrial air-conditioning mechanic near Canberra. The son of a Vietnam War veteran, he grew up enthralled by military flight simulators. He wrote “Lifeless” in memory of a close family friend, Sgt. Tom Birnie, who was killed in Vietnam.
He suggested that the Spanels turn Operation Flashpoint into a military training game.
The open design and mission editor, it turned out, provided just the flexibility the military needed. Mr. Lagettie helped the Spanels customize Operation Flashpoint into a military simulator they called VBS, which the Marine Corps started purchasing in 2001. The American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand armies now also use the software.
“If it wasn’t for that song,” said Mr. Lagettie, “VBS wouldn’t exist today.”
The military simulation business has sustained the company.
Now, the Bohemia Interactive Group, based in Prague, has a staff of 140. For the 2009 fiscal year, game revenue was about $6 million, while simulation sales were about $7 million, Marek Spanel said.