The inception for what would become BPRE happened in a hotel bar in Philadelphia, PA in 2002. It was there that I met a man who would become a good friend until his death in May 2010. It was at this meeting that I first heard about DynCorp, a company that, among other things, provided special operations contractors to the US Government to assist in operations throughout Afghanistan.
We discussed what the environment was like that he worked in and some of the challenges they faced. This conversation would eventually inspire everything that BPRE would become over the next 8 years.
For me, whenever I am creating any fiction, I always start with a world. If people are a product of their environment, it stands to reason you need to design an environment before you can understand the people that would live there. The first titles that had a huge impact on the world the player would be walked through were:
Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
Blade Runner stands as “the” dystopian future city upon which all others are judged (though I like Otomo’s rendering of Neo-Tokyo in Akira a bit more). Looking at the thoughtfulness and care layered by Ridley Scott and his production team and applying that to trends in current urban sprawl gave birth to our concept of the city of New Basra. Part Basra, part Dubai - New Basra is a city being torn apart by oppositional and sometimes overlapping interests, where people are swept along by events of rather than driving them.
A place rife with conflicts is perfect for the kind of game we wanted to meet, now to figure out who was who and what were their motivations.
Being as the setting of the world was the Middle East, with an overwhelmingly Moslem population, I needed to expand my narrow understanding of Islam and it's history. A book I found very lucid and helpful was:
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future
The book gave me a great overview and taught me a whole lot I never really understood about Islam and it’s branches. From here, I started a deep dive into the entities I had identified as the main players in the story, specifically the Saudis, the various branches within the Shia Iraqi populace and the Iranians.
The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency
Iran's Military Forces and Warfighting Capabilities: The Threat in the Northern Gulf (Praeger Security International)
The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection
Inside The Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia
The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower
Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition
After reading all of these books and conducting dozens of interviews, it became clear to me, I did not have a deep enough understanding of how the Middle East and Central Asia, as we know them, even came to be. I found, what seems to be considered, the two authoratative works on the subject and read them.
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Kodansha Globe)
These books are exhaustive. I normally read fiction/non-fiction at about 800 pages a week. These books took me almost a month to read each, and I was taking notes the entire time! If you want an understanding of how we got to where we are today, these books are a must, but YMMV :)
Throughout the process I had also been reading any books I could get my hands on about special mission units fighting insurgents, terrorists, nacro-cartels, revolutionaries, etc. The stand outs that I found to be the most helpful when designing our specific game were:
Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team
Warfare by Other Means: South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s
Task Force Black
WAR DOG: Fighting Other People's Wars -The Modern Mercenary in Combat
There were tons of others detailing brutal and painful struggles, such as Sean Naylor’s “Not a Good Day to Die” but the material in that, and other great books, did not ultimately have much of an impact on this specific project.
OK, that’s a long list of stuff to check out if you are interested. Hope you find this informative.
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