Army Launches $50 Million Videogame Push

By Noah Shachtman November 24, 2008 | 9:22:51 AMCategories: Training and Sims

The Army's Training and Doctrine Command is getting ready to pour $50 million into videogames that'll help troops get ready for combat.

Development won't start until 2010, Stars & Stripes reports. The games themselves wont be ready until 2015. By then, the U.S. military will be in its eighth decade, using games to prep troops for war -- starting with primitive, 1940s flight simulators bought from a Coney Island amusement park.

This isn't the Army's first stab at developing games, either. In 1999, the Army teamed up with gaming and Hollywood pros to found the Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles; it's become one of the world's most advanced schools for simulation-building. 2002 saw the debut of the wildly-successful shoot-em-up, America's Army, developed by the military as a recruiting tool. In 2004, the Army set up a videogame studio in North Carolina. Last year, Training and Doctrine Command opened a new office for gaming.

While soldiers wait to see the results from the Army's latest, $50 million gaming venture, troops around the world will get new gaming consoles.

Leslie Duvow, project director for gaming at PEO-STRI (Program Executive Office - Simulation and Training), tells Stars & Stripes that the Army will have 70 gaming systems in 53 locations in the United States, Germany, Italy and South Korea by September 2009.

"Each system will consist of 52 computers with ancillary equipment including steering wheels, headsets and mice," she said.

Soldiers will be able to drive virtual vehicles, fire virtual weapons, pilot virtual unmanned aerial vehicles and do "most anything a soldier does" in a virtual battle space as large as 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers, she said.

[Score! /.]

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