Asi Lang looks completely out of place. For starters, he's 25 years old and dressed in khaki cargo shorts, sandals, and aviator sunglasses. The men around him are at least a decade older, some of them bearded or balding, many of them overweight. Most glaringly, Lang isn't carrying a gun. Here at the annual blast-fest hosted by the Green Mountain Boys Shooting Club deep in the woods of Vermont, nearly everyone is toting an automatic. The roar of machine guns drowns out everything except the occasional boom of a mounted rifle or grenade launcher. From 200 yards away, a line of shooters slowly turns a half-dozen junk cars into scrap metal.
Lang may not be lugging an AK, but he's no novice. For the past four years he has worked to develop a videogame called Alliance: The Silent War. The quick pitch: Gran Turismo with guns instead of cars. The game takes players across famous battlefields from the past 90 years, but the main attraction is the WarStudio, which contains 200 authentic weapons, including the Vietnam-era M14 rifle, the Nazi MG42 machine gun, and the rare 1929 Czech semiautomatic ZH-29. The game also offers suggested handicaps for matching up fighters from different eras; for instance, a patrol of Batista's Cuban regulars can square off against a squad of six to eight of Nasser's Egyptian guards.
The guns aren't the only thing that makes Alliance distinctive. Unlike most videogames, in which bullets fly straight at targets, this one obeys the laws of physics, so projectiles follow a realistic trajectory. The size of each round affects how an enemy is injured. And in advanced mode, players must rely on intuition, not an onscreen display, to tell when it's time to reload. Lang has been interested in weapons since he was a kid. He has already tried most of the guns at today's shoot; now he wants his colleagues to feel the recoil, hear the blast – there are some things you just can't learn on the Internet. One of his buddies is firing a sharpshooter special, which makes the ground tremble around him.
Alliance has received good reviews but so far has no distributor, so Lang is also trying to publicize the game. He walks up to one of the more gregarious shooters and offers him a business card, saying, "Check out our Web site." The man shrugs and steps away to fetch what looks like an AK-47 from the trunk of his car. He doesn't have an Internet connection, he says. In fact, he doesn't even have a telephone.
– S. E. Kramer
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Live-Fire Exercise
