ENTERTAINMENT

Former Marine makes games so real

Decorated military adviser Dale Dye brings his expertise (and rigorous training methods) to video games.

By Paul Bond

When Hollywood needs to portray the gritty realism of battle, it turns to Capt. Dale Dye. He's someone who pays attention to the details, the person you ask about the proper vernacular or whether a strategy is appropriate to a given period. A military historian, Dye spent 21 years in the U.S. Marine Corps before founding Warriors Inc., the film industry's secret weapon for advice on all things related to war. His résumé glitters with epics like "Platoon" and "Saving Private Ryan." More recently, Dye, who has worked on nearly 40 movies, has been lending his formidable experience in combat operations to a less traditional and more unexpected medium -- video games.

Dye, 60, is an official military adviser on "Medal of Honor Pacific Assault," a first-person shooter game created by Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts. In this newest entry in the best-selling World War II video game franchise, players step into the boots of a Marine recruit fighting the Imperial Japanese Army. "It satisfied my agenda of celebrating the men and women in uniform," Dye says.

He has worked on all eight titles, dating back to 1999. He begins each project with a refresher course on WWII before splitting his time between the level designers and game-play engineers. Dye then dedicates a tremendous amount of time to the animators responsible for how the soldiers fight and maneuver. At this point, some team members undergo weapons training with Dye.

For "Pacific Assault," Dye conducted a course on handling, equipping and firing each weapon in the game. To simulate battle sounds, he had game-makers discharge weapons into watermelons; engineers captured the sound on tiny microphones and used the recordings in the game.

"His focus on getting it right is omnipresent," "Pacific Assault" director Brady Bell says of Dye. "For example, there's always some poor soul who refers to one of the weapons as a 'gun.' That individual quickly finds himself being berated by Dale and forced to perform push-ups" -- always good for a laugh.

Brought up in Cape Girardeau, Mo. (also Rush Limbaugh's home town), Dye entered military school at age 10. A decade later he was in Vietnam, where he earned three Purple Hearts. (Dye shows me a small hole in the back of his neck that occasionally oozes shrapnel. He keeps the small bits of metal in a jar, freely admitting it's a disgusting thing to do. Does it hurt? "It is what it is," Dye says. "I'm not whining.")

One of his pet peeves is the "cartoonish" way game-makers tend to portray the enemy. "We focused on making the enemy tougher," he says. In fact, the "Pacific Assault Director's Edition" is a $60 video game on DVD that thinks it's a history lesson, complete with interviews with World War II veterans like Roy Rausch, 80, who saw combat in four of the biggest battles in the Pacific. "I don't know how they could make this game any more real," Rausch says. "I usually get knocked off pretty quick. I was better in actual combat than I am in the game."

Another feature on the DVD has factoids popping up. Example: The phrase "the whole nine yards" refers to WWII fighter pilots who shot all the rounds contained on their .50-caliber machine-gun ammo belt, which measured exactly 27 feet long.

"There's a tendency to think these gamers are a gaggle of wankers who can't spank their [butt] with both hands," Dye says. "But it's a bad business decision to underestimate the people who play this game."

In the new game, you're a Marine recruit fighting the Japanese in World War II. The director's edition comes with a timeline presentation that takes you behind the action, including the attack on Pearl Harbor.

More video games that take war seriously

KUMA\WAR, an online subscription service, puts players in real-world military events, like John Kerry's swift-boat mission in Vietnam. There's also a new retail game, THE WAR ON TERROR, in which U.S. forces clash with well-armed insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
FULL SPECTRUM WARRIOR was created at the Institute for Creative Technologies, a U.S. Army-funded operation that uses Hollywood talent to produce military training tools. It's designed to instruct young squad leaders in making smart combat decisions, so it's long on tactics and short on explosions.
CLOSE COMBAT: FIRST TO FIGHT, written by a 30-year Marine veteran, has players lead a team of Marines in urban combat through a modern Middle Eastern city.