We shall fight them on the Xbox: a short history of Nazi-shooting video games

From Medal of Honor to Sniper Elite 4, we just can't seem to resist the lure of the second world war

For a while it seemed like all we ever did in video games was shoot Nazis. In 1997, Steven Spielberg, post-Schindler's List, pre-Saving Private Ryan and apparently in the midst of a second world war fixation, met with a team at DreamWorks to outline an idea for a first-person shooter set in 1944. In the resulting game, Medal of Honor, you played as protagonist Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson, who parachutes into Nazi territory in a bid to single-handedly turn the tide of war. In this way, Spielberg's game was reminiscent of Hollywood's most jingoistic postwar output. Like 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima or 1965's Battle of the Bulge, Medal of Honor used the theatre and mud-flecked aesthetic of the war to present a revisionist, nationalistic yet deeply cathartic take on the war of our grandparents.

Nazis offer us uncomplicated, centrally organised bad guys, a simplistic antidote to dispersed, incognito pariahs

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