The story of German developer Yager is not one you see repeated often in the games industry. Most people know this name from its 2012 seminal work: Spec Ops: The Line, a game with its own history of struggle to balance politics in its art with the demands of a publisher hoping for a piece of the Call of Duty pie.
But we don’t remember all that when we think of Spec Ops: The Line. Instead, it’s the game’s view of war through the lens of video games, its understanding of player agency, and its commitment to saying something at a time when games were just starting to experiment with embedding messages in their narratives that most really think of when the game comes up.
Few people have kept up with the goings-on at Yager since, in part because the developer abandoned the limelight of AAA development and took matters into its own hands, opting to focus on interesting prototypes and see them to fruition. These weren’t always successful ventures, but they established a theme for Yager, one which the studio would follow in the years to come. To me, that’s the ability to shelf something that isn’t popular, and shift to a new project in a completely different genre.
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