[Onkel Neal]

So, looks like a great start. Here's an article from the NYT about the origins from 1997 of two Czech developers and an Aussie heavy metal singer. This turned into Bohemia Interactive (Operation Flashpoint, Arma, DayZ).


A War Training Platform From an Unlikely Source


Ondrej, left, and Marek Spanel created the game VBS 2, which is used by the American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand armies.Credit...Kurt Vinion for The New York Times.

The video game that the Army and the Marines selected to help train soldiers for combat owes its existence to an Australian heavy metal song.

Called VBS 2, the game allows soldiers to rehearse for missions, and trainers to constantly plug in new information — from a recent mission in Afghanistan, for instance.

VBS, which stands for Virtual Battlespace, was created by two brothers, Ondrej and Marek Spanel, who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia when computers and video games had to be bought on the black market.

“We were avid Atari fans,” Marek Spanel, 38, said. “The only way to play games was to make our own.”

Now, as franchises like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Battlefield compete for the hearts, minds and eyeballs of millions of gamers — and billions of consumer dollars — the VBS platform is winning the battle to develop game-based military simulators.

How did an independent Czech developer accomplish this?

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.

“Small computer game companies are struggling,” said Pete Morrison, a former captain in the Australian Army Signal Corps who is now chief executive of Bohemia Interactive Simulations, but “thinking about real-world applications can help.”

At some point, Lagettie formed Titan IM/Vanguard and bought the Microprose brand. Now with Task Force Admiral and Sea Power under development, the series has some real traction.

As probably many people know, Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BIS), makers of VBS, is a major player in the "serious games" field. What is probably less known is that the company was originally founded as Bohemia Interactive Australia by David Lagettie, an Australian who saw the potential in Operation Flashpoint game, and went to use it for military simulation and training software, which soon saw a widespread adoption.

Later, around the time BIA was relocated to Prague, he left and founded Virtual Simulation Systems (VSS), a company developing all kinds of simulation hardware used in weapon and vehicle/aircraft simulators. Several of these were actually used at the ITSEC demo, shown on the screens below.

https://outerra.blogspot.com/2014/12...-military.html