There’s been some controversy over 2D dogfighting game Luftrausers recently, with some people concerned at the game’s use of mock fascist imagery. Yesterday developers Vlambeer took to their website to respond to the concerns.
”We do have to accept that our game could make some people uncomfortable. We’re extremely sad about that,” wrote Vlambeer developer Adil Rami, “and we sincerely apologise for that discomfort.”
”From our perspective, we do not cast our player as a Nazi pilot. LUFTRAUSERS is a dogfighting game very much inspired by a very specific century in the history of mankind. Somewhere between the 1900’s and the 1980’s, there was a period in which military intelligence was capable of determining whether an opposing military force was working on secret weapons, but not quite what those weapons were.”
The developers do admit that they borrowed certain visual cues from both world wars, hoping to make these quasi-historical elements more cohesive. ”We wanted to be genuine about the timeframe that inspired the universe in the game, and that means that yes, there were some stylistic cues we took from World War II to construct this enemy force, as well as from characters, aesthetics and technology from World War I, the Cold War and the smaller conflicts during this timeframe. For the technology, we were inspired by things that would exist in a world in which the documents we were inspired by were true. For the characters, we took the idea of puppets from Thunderbirds and dressed them in exaggerated outfits.”
Rami also acknowledged that all interpretations of their game were valid. ”The fact is that no interpretation of a game is ‘wrong’. When you create something, you leave certain implications of what you’re making. We can leave our idea of what it is in there, and for us, the game is about superweapons. We think everybody who plays Luftrausers can feel that.”
Luftrausers is out on Steam, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita now.
