40th Day rejoins the impossibly named Elliot Salem and Tyson Rios, professional mercenaries with a hockey mask fetish.

Back in early 2007, when EA's Army of Two was an unknown quantity more than a year away from release, I interviewed the game's senior producer Reid Schneider for an Electronic Gaming Monthly feature story. The story was an examination of the way games depict war, and at the time, Army of Two looked like one of the ballsiest uses of real-life material yet attempted. It was set in post-invasion Iraq, for one thing, a bold move at a time when civil war seemed to be breaking out across the country. And here was this guy, Schneider, talking about private military contractors instead of space Nazis or Cold War plots resurrected from the dead. It was kind of astounding.


"We're not afraid to go into that subject matter in any way," said Schneider, at the time. "We want to expose people to the idea that there are these companies out there. Take Halliburton. Dick Cheney is a former chairman of Halliburton, and you know there's a reason the U.S. government is putting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts into Halliburton. If Army of Two causes people to do some digging about the world of private military corporations and about how large a role mercenaries are playing in the global conflicts of today, then I think that's pretty cool."

An unexplained disaster unfolds during the game as the city literally falls down around you.

Fast-forward to Army of Two's release in March 2008, when the game its creators hoped would spark intelligent discussion about a touchy, real-life situation was panned by many critics as a tone-deaf expression of macho U.S. military power written like an '80s action movie. How did it fall so spectacularly short of the mark, and what did the game's creators think of the press reaction? I caught up with Schneider at a media event promoting the game's forthcoming sequel: Army of Two: The 40th Day.

"It's funny, some people found it very pro-military, and some people found it very derogatory toward the U.S. military," says Schneider, executive producer on the sequel, which is underway at EA Montreal.
"I remember one day waking up and looking at Metacritic and thinking, 'Oh, great; we got a 92 from a site.' I didn't know the site at the time. It was called MEGamers.com. I got to work and looked it up, and it was Middle East Gamers. They were our highest score, our highest rating. It was weird for us because it was like, 'We're getting criticized for all this, but in the Middle East, they don't give a shit!' It was an out-of-body experience."

In part, Schneider blames the reaction on poor timing: "We released the game right when Blackwater had been charged with the killing of innocent civilians, so it was a perfect time for people to say, "Oh, you're making a game that's just like Blackwater."

Schneider and his team walked a fine line with Army of Two. They tried to be relevant to the real world by staging their game in a real-life war zone, but mostly kept their own views on the conflict out of it. What they discovered, however, is that it's nearly impossible to make a game about touchy political realities without saying something -- maybe even something you don't believe is true. "What we learned from it is that anytime you make a game that's realistic and set in a real-world location within a real-world conflict, it's going to be perceived as commentary," says Schneider. "There's no way around that."

Shanghai's not the first place you think of when you think of possible global conflict, but that's the point.

And so Schneider and his team are packing up their missile launchers and heading for less-controversial ground, abandoning the Iraq war in favor of a mysterious, completely fictional conflict in Shanghai, China. "I think one of the things we really want to do with Army of Two: The 40thDay is to say, OK, they're real characters in a real place, but the conflict is fictitious," says Schneider. "That's so that we can put the focus back on the game and why the game is fun to play."

It seems like a loss, for anyone interested in games that have something to do with the world we live in, to see such a high-profile experiment retreat from meaning. That's not how Schneider would phrase it: "It's not really retreating from meaning. With this one, what we want to do is present choices to the player, and then let them decide. How do you want to play? What choices do you want to make in the game?"

He loads up a scene from 40th Day. The game's hockey-masked protagonists lurk inside a building, staring out into a cramped and dirty Shanghai street where enemy troops (motivation and identity not yet known) train their guns on a cowering family kneeling down on the pavement. This is one of the choices the game offers you: Save the family or don't. Schneider and creative director Alex Hutchison choose the latter, gunning down the troops and their hostages. It's a weirdly cold scene in a weirdly cold game, and it makes me wonder how successful Army of Two's move to China will be in stemming the original game's controversy. But maybe that's not really the point.

"The flip side of all that press on Army of Two was that it sold really well," says Hutchison. "So it's like, f*** off, right? It doesn't matter. Having people have strong reactions is what you do it for. There's nothing worse than having people bored."