DEVELOPER DIGITAL ILLUSIONS CE PUBLISHER ELECTRONIC ARTS
The turn of the millennium saw PC gaming ask itself two big questions. The first was “What if you could play multiplayer shooters in teams?” while the second was “What would it be like to fight in the Second World War?”.
Battlefield 1942 answered both these questions simultaneously. In doing so, it spawned one of gaming’s biggest franchises. Battlefield took the renewed interest in WWII spawned by Saving Private Ryan (and in the PC gaming sphere, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault) combined it with the PC’s rapidly advancing multiplayer capabilities that facilitated games like Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress, and then massively blew out the scale.