THE HISTORY OF COMMANDOS

“At the time, there wasn’t anything like Pyro Studios,” says Javier Arévalo. “Pyro was created with the goal of making games that would be sold everywhere around the world.” Plenty of developers in Nineties Spain were producing games for the domestic market, and some of these games eventually went on to international success. But Pyro, the Madrid-based studio behind the Commandos games, was founded in 1996 with an international outlook from the start. “It was the first time that the exclusive goal [was] making games not just to sell first in Spain and then elsewhere,” says Javier, who was technology lead on the first three entries in the Commandos series.

When it came to deciding on the studio’s crucial first game, there were a number of contenders, recalls Jon Beltrán De Heredia, lead programmer on Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, Commandos: Beyond The Call Of Duty and Commandos 2: Men Of Courage. “They were actually working on three separate projects,” he says. “There was a World War 2 game, which would become Commandos, and there was also a pirates game – I don’t think it had a name, ‘Corsairs’ maybe. And there was a third game, which was not as well defined – it was a Conan The Barbarian kind of universe.

“So the Commandos prototype had a lot more work put in than the others, then they went to pitch the games to several publishers in the UK, and Eidos, on some whim, decided to buy the rights to Commandos, which was the one they really liked.