Ben Palmer, the creator of Heroes of the Pacific, talks about his big breakthrough as a game designer with a disarming humility. �What basically happened,� he says, �is the government over here [in Australia] decided to create a devkit access program, where they would give out PS2 development kits to worthy people, and I sat down and thought, �Okay, what can I do with no budget, no resources, no team, but if I get my hands on those two devkits, what game can I make?�� Palmer grew up in the suburbs of London, and he was unemployed at the time, having moved to Australia to be with his girlfriend and having gone through the roller-coaster ride of an internet start-up and flame-out. �That�s basically where Heroes of the Pacific came from,� he says. �I did a little homework, talked to some publishers, and they liked they idea. World War Two was just hitting its boom time, with The Call to Duty and Medal of Honor stuff, and nobody was doing the flight stuff and it sounded achievable with a small team.�

The �flight stuff� had more to recommend it, of course, than the fact that nobody else was crowding that space. World War Two aviation, as Palmer puts it, �wasn�t all looking at radar and firing a heat seeking missile and then forget about it. You had to get up close and see the enemy, there�s was a lot more spinning and twirling around your enemy, and there was a lot more contact. And with the war effort, there was a lot of creativity going on, a lot of new weapons and new planes. It was a golden era of dog-fighting.� Likewise the decision to set the game in the Pacific theater, which Palmer disarmingly says was made �so we wouldn�t have to do a lot of landscapes.� Needless to say, the war in the Pacific was also the scene of the greatest plane-to-plane and plane-to-ship battles in the history of warfare, from Pearl Harbor to Midway to the Marianas Turkey Shoot and beyond. Which means that Palmer, although he�s temperamentally disinclined to make a big deal out of himself, had stumbled across one of the great unplucked plums of historical war-game design.

After raising enough seed funding—a nice chunk came from the Australian Film Commission, in the form of a generous grant—Palmer took only four months to produce a demo—this was in 2003—and when he had trouble raising additional capital—nobody wanted to invest in a guy they�d never heard of, a guy with no track record—he brokered a partnership with. Which is when the fun really began.

Justin Halliday, part of Palmer�s original team and now a senior producer at IR Gurus, says, �What we really wanted to do was to capture the actual skill of the pilots and the technology of World War Two, where the pilots were still more important than the technology. It was still about the guy flying the plane instead of the plane flying itself.� To that end, the team poured over books like Robert Jackson�s Warplanes of World War II � Fighters, Bombers, Ground Attack Aircraft, and Henry Sakaida�s Aces of the Rising Sun, which included stories about Japanese aces flying loop-to-loops over American airbases, just to demonstrate their skill, and even breaking away from their squadrons to escort a U.S. civilian plane all the way home, because it was in danger of being attacked. Palmer and Halliday even read German and British research papers, from the 1940s, on how many bullets were required to shoot various airplanes out of the sky. (�I think they were saying that cannon fire could shoot down a bomber in three seconds,� Halliday recalls.)

As for choosing which real-life battles to recreate, Palmer and Halliday felt they had something special up their sleeve: the prowess of the PS2 in rendering many versions of the same thing very quickly. �This meant we could put lots of planes in the sky,� Hallidays says, �and that was really what we wanted to capture, the feel of these actual battles, because in some of them there were literally hundreds of planes.� Starting with a timeline of events, they went big from the start, with the most ambitious attempt ever made to render Pearl Harbor in a video game. Next came Wake Island, which the Japanese attacked shortly after Pearl Harbor, and then onward to a series of a massive engagements like The Battle of Midway and the Marianas Turkey Shoot, the largest plane-to-plane engagement of the Pacific.

When it came time for finishing touches, the team even recorded engine noise from a P-51 Mustang motor bolted to the back of a vintage engineering truck. �It�s amazing to watch,� Palmer says, �because one of these things is sixty years old, it�s an antique, a straight-twelve Merlin engine, and it�s developing about three times the horsepower of a modern formula one racecar. They have to chain the truck down or would just top over. It�s a serious amount of power. You also know why all the pilots are deaf.�

Realism does have its limits, of course, and the game would�ve been vastly different if it had been geared towards hard-core flight-sim fans, instead of first-person-shooter types looking for an arcade-style dogfight. "You can fire up a lot of World War Two flying sims,� Halliday says, �and just the number of controls is overwhelming. We couldn�t get the plane off the carrier because we didn�t have the fuel mixture right, or we didn�t release the brakes on the wheels so we just nosed over. You need to sit with a manual just to figure out how to get the thing in the air, and then you�re going to crash anyway.�

For that reason, bringing Heroes of the Pacific to market also meant a constant and careful series of negotiations between the way things were and the way things need to be, to produce good game play—maintaining the feel of the era while making the plane reasonably easy to fly and rendering enemy targets reasonably possible to kill. All of which, according to Halliday, is just par for the course: �The great thing about working in computer games is in each new game you get to learn something new,� he says. �It�s a great excuse to go out and throw ourselves into all the reference books we can find. It�s a great kind of boy�s own adventure.� And whatever the unpretentious origins of Heroes of the Pacific—World Two was in a popularity boom; oceans are cheaper to draw than landscapes—the final product is a great adventure too.