General Location Info:
• Even though Blazing Angels 2 takes a more fantastic approach to World War II,
complete with giant zeppelins and electricity-charged flying dreadnoughts, a
great many of the game’s elements are inspired directly by the very rich (and
often fantastic in itself) history of the war.
• The secret missions that the player undertakes do not often take him to the
frontlines of the war, but they do take him in some less known places that
nevertheless witnessed extraordinary, rarely talked about events.
• You can find out more about the stories that fired up the imagination of
Blazing Angel 2’s designers from our Q&A session.
Himalaya
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: The main inspiration for this mission was The Camel’s Hump, an air bridge
of impressive proportions organized by the Allies in help of the Chinese
government, at the time fighting a difficult war against the Japanese. Because
all the land roads had been captured by the Japanese, bringing supplies over the
air was vital. However, it was far from easy. The pilots had to fly as far as
possible from the area covered by the Japanese Zeros, which brought them over
the eastern part of the Himalayas, an area they called the Camel’s Hump because
of its shape. It was far from an easy mission; in fact over 550 American and
Chinese crews were lost in this difficult endeavor. Apart from the ever-present
Japanese pilots, the area was almost constantly affected by bad whether and
violent air turbulences. Another inspiration for the mission was the fact that
Tibet was often the target of research for German scientists of the era trying
to prove Nazi theories of superiority.
Rome
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: The Italian government surrendered on September 8, 1943, only five days
after the Allied invasion, but this didn’t make the road to Rome any easier for
the Allies; the Germans kept the territory under occupation and defended every
inch of it. Rome itself didn’t suffer from bombing, as this could have damaged
the city’s invaluable ancient treasures, not to mention could have affected the
Vatican, which is what inspired us to create a mission of infiltration, where
the player sneaks into the city under the cover of dark, in order to undertake a
surgical strike.
Baltic Sea Coast
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: This mission location was inspired by the real-life V2 base on the coast of
the Baltic Sea, at Peenemünde. The location has inspired many writers over the
course of time, because of the shroud of secrecy that covered it for so long and
because of the incredibly high tech developments that were taking place there at
the time. Apart from housing the well-known V2s, the base also was the place
where tests were being done for a possible missile that could be used against
the United States. The allies finally identified the location of the base in
1943 and severely hampered the German efforts with bombing raids. However, the
base was destroyed entirely only after the war, when an agreement about its
destruction was made among the Allied nations and carried out by the Soviet
Union.
Cairo
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: Our intention with Blazing Angels was to have an exotic, somewhat
lighthearted adventure without the usual grittiness of war games, and no city
says “exotic” like Cairo does, with its pyramids and with the Nile River flowing
through the desert. Cairo was the main allied base in Africa for the duration of
the war and it was safe for the entire time, even though Erwin Rommel’s Afrika
Korps got as close as 150 miles at one point. However, it did suffers from
bombardments, and the premise of our mission that, sometimes, bombing raids
aren’t what they seem to be.
Moscow
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: The Eastern Front was a part of the war that wasn’t featured at all in the
first game, and we felt that this time we couldn’t pass on its potential. One of
the Eastern locations found in Blazing Angels 2 is Moscow. Even though the
Germans never got as close to Moscow as they did to Stalingrad or Leningrad, the
battle for Moscow certainly was a hard-fought one with very high stakes. If the
Germans had been successful, the results would have been far-reaching. Our
mission starts with a real event, a parade organized by Stalin in order to
bolster the morale of his suffering people. The soldiers paraded through the Red
Square and then went directly on the front. It was a very dramatic moment and
one we felt we would do well to capture.
Pacific
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: Obviously, the Pacific has been the site of many of World War 2’s most
important battles, but the element that attracted our attention was a less known
one. The mission centers around a “Hell Ship”, a transporter that was used to
carry Allied prisoners from the place of their capture to the location where
they were going to be used for forced labor. The conditions in which these
prisoners were transported were very harsh and many of the prisoners died or
were severely debilitated as a result. This and the fact that the ships were not
marked in any way as POW transport (which meant Allied planes and submarines
often targeted them by mistake), is why these transports earned the “Hell Ship”
nickname.
San Francisco
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: The mission idea was inspired by a real plan of the Japanese navy, to
attack the Panama Canal and several large American cities that were close to the
coast, using the huge submarines in the I-400 class. These submarines, of which
only 3 were ever built, carried attack planes inside them and, so, could be used
to perform surprise attacks on the continental United States. The Japanese never
had the time or the capacity to complete this plan, but we couldn’t help but
wonder what could have happened. The concept of “what if” scenarios was one of
the ideas driving us when developing our missions, and certainly one of the most
interesting “what if” questions was what if the Axis would have managed to
attack the continental United States. We chose San Francisco because it is a
geographically very interesting city, with lots of hills and tall buildings that
make for an interesting environment to fly in, but also because it is less
featured in games than other cities like New York, which was another possible
location of a hypothetical attack on the United States.
Three Gorges
• Q: Was the choice inspired by any real event?
o A: The inspiration to place some events in China came to us while studying the
famous Flying Tigers, a group of pilots that shared some similarities with our
own heroes. They were a group of volunteer Americans that were sent to assist
the Chinese government even before the Unites States entered the war officially.
In order for them to be able to fight without involving the United States, they
had to be discharged from the army and to be hired by a private contractor
working with the Chinese government. The location that we chose, however, is not
in itself connected to the history of the Flying Tigers. The Three Gorges region
was chosen for its extraordinary configuration, that makes flying through it
quite a challenge. Placed on the Yangtze River, this very beautiful region is a
long and twisted canyon that forces the player to switch his focus from fighting
to flying.
