Hanoi-based Emobi Games has announced it's working on what it calls “the first major video game developed by a Vietnamese company and made available in North America.” 7554, set between 1946 and 1954, recounts the first-person story of Vietnamese resistance in the French Indochina War (or Anti-French Resistance War, as it's known in Vietnam today). Get ready to join the Vietnam People's Army...
Charting the VPA's growth from guerrilla operations to fully-fledged military organization, the game begins in 1946, when French forces killed between 2000 and 6000 Vietnamese civilians on one November afternoon. The ensuing war would gain international attention, with French citizens protesting the conflict and US involvement sowing the seeds of the impending Vietnam War. However, “though 7554is based on historical events, it is not an attempt to recreate the past,” says Emobi director Nguyen Tuan Huy, but “a vehicle meant for entertainment.”
“There has never been a video game of this size and scope from Vietnam,” boasts Nguyen, saying the studio challenged itself to create a unique FPS experience, building features like the game's gun controls and aiming mechanics from scratch. Fittingly for a story of scrappy Colonial resistance to a high-tech Western foe, the studio also outfitted itself with internationally-recognized tools to produce the game, whose action runs on the Nvidia PhysX Engine and Havok Vision Engine 8.
And that title? 7 May 1954 – 7/5/54 – is remembered in Vietnam as the date of French surrender at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Get it?
