Leave it to a video-game franchise created by acclaimed Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to become the only video game to receive an Academy Award. Between 1999 and 2012, Spielberg's DreamWorks, Electronic Arts and a handful of other game companies released 16 "Medal of Honor" games.
Then, as franchises like "Call of Duty" and the "Battlefield" series began to saturate the market, "Medal of Honor" had a hard time keeping up. It wasn't until 2020 that the series returned, and it returned in a big way -- eventually earning an Oscar for its efforts.
"Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond" was released on Dec. 11, 2020. Like most (but not all) of the "Medal of Honor" games before it, the gameplay takes place during World War II. The player is a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's nascent intelligence and special operations agency.
The idea of this entire series was to make players feel like they were actually in the shoes of the men who fought in World War II, so it was fitting to the developers of "Above and Beyond," Respawn Entertainment, that the game would be released for Oculus, a PC-powered virtual reality headset.
Moreover, to complete the authenticity and immersive experience, the game's designers extensively interviewed actual World War II combat veterans, flown by the Honor Flight Network, to the actual locations about which they're being interviewed. As players navigate the game's various stages, they earn access to a gallery that features these interviews.
Among the vignettes in the game's gallery is a short documentary called "Colette." This 24-minute film was produced by Oculus and Respawn Entertainment specifically for the game. It's about Colette Marin-Catherine, a real-life French Resistance fighter who was just 16 when she began working against the Nazi occupation of France.
Colette worked reconnaissance for the resistance, aided wounded fighters and civilians, and began working as a nurse for Allied troops after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. In the film, Colette, 90 years old at the time of production, travels to the remains of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Germany, where her brother, also a resistance fighter, was worked to death by the Nazis.
The film became an official selection at Montana's Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Short. That win made it eligible for an Academy Award nomination. It was the first film produced for a video game to receive such a nomination and the first (and only) winner when it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021.
While "Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond" may have been met with mixed reviews by gamers for its large installation size (likely due to the included gallery), it met the dedication of its founding principles, to honor and remember those who fought to free Europe from the yoke of Nazi occupation.
-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on LinkedIn.
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