The dark is almost upon us... There will be light soon

I have good news and bad news. Well, two bits of good news. The Velvet Assassin material we showed off at E3 was really well received, people are getting very excited about the game. So that’s great.

And the items that belonged to Violette Summer, that were stolen from the studio back in May? We’ve got some of them back! Unfortunately under the terms of the agreement we have with the collector who supplied them to us we can’t tell you which ones they were, or which ones are still missing, or even what we have. But it’s been a real morale boost for the team, and has reconnected us with the spirit of Violette Summer. And I can confirm they will appear in the game, as high-quality renders based on 3D scans of the items.

The bad news is that with this, and a few other things I can’t go into I wont be able to post on this blog for a while.

I’m really sorry about this, but we are entering a rather chaotic phase of the development cycle, and my time is really required elsewhere...

Dan the Man, and the search for those Stolen Items

We are hoping that the mystery of the break-in will be solved very soon and the saga will be brought to a close. Dan Corrigan has returned to London with a copy of the missing security-video recording. Because he is working for the insurance company (I think—is that right Dan?) and not the police or Replay Studios I haven’t seen the tape.

Dan Corrigan is a man after my own heart. He’s a real WWII fanatic, and knows lots of trivia and details that I’d never heard before. We spent many long evenings talking about the operations of the different espionage units during the war, and particularly (of course) SOE and Nova-5. He admitted that the main reason he took the job with Surer Risk in the first place was because of its roots in the post-war espionage community. He said he’d always hoped he could get into the archives and rummage around to see what he could find about the early days of the company, but he never did because it’s a firing offence. And then he got fired for something else completely. Ironic, isn’t it?

(Have you seen this film Female Agents? I don’t think it’s opened in the US yet but it’s very good—not very realistic but a good story. Of course it’s supposedly based on real characters but there’s not a sniff of Violette Summer or Nova-5 in it. I still don’t understand how SOE became the ‘sexy’ part of WWII spycraft and the rest of it has been banished to a backwater. Maybe I should write a book...)

Dan has also spotted that there was a pattern to the Violette Summer items that were being used in the game, something that connects them all together. He has a theory about the reason behind it that doesn’t explain why they were stolen, but which says a lot about why they’re here in the first place. I hope I can give you more details about that in the next few days, once I’ve had a chance to do some more research.

I do have an inventory of all the items, but I’ve been asked not to post it here until they’ve been safely recovered—a time which we all hope is near. But I think collectors will be interested to see what we’ve been able to play with. And there’s still a chance we might be able to get the objects to appear in the game, if they can be recovered in time.

And of course E3 is on, and I’m told that Velvet Assassin is getting good reactions from the press—I wish I was out there, but we’re nearing crunch-time on the game and it’s all getting a bit frantic here. Heads down, and back to work.

It's been almost two weeks? I've had my head down, things have been busy around here. I've had a visitor from the UK, a Mr Dan Corrigan, who has been looking into the theft of the Velvet Assassin items, and I have been helping him with his researches into German beers. And after I made that post about the scans, I wanted to bring you some good news next. I have been talking to people in the studio about getting the scans released onto the web but there's a lot of "Leave it alone, VJ, we've got a game to release."

Yes! I remember, there's a game! And it's looking really good! In fact it's looking like this:

and like this:

and sometimes like this as well:

(Click on any image to make it bigger.)

Those images should be exciting enough to make anyone forget about a missing collection of WWII relics, correct? And even if not then I'll post some more news here very soon.

Doh!

Ignore that last post. I took the stuff to KZ who was in charge of the physical assets and he shot me down immediately—the scans I found are preliminary scans taken for calibration, and the resolution’s not good enough to use them in the game. Serves me right for shooting my mouth off before I knew what I was talking about.

Still, in my defence NOBODY mentioned that these early scans existed at all. And maybe there’s some way we can release them, to use them as a record of the missing items. I’ll talk to people.

Cache Bandicoot

Well, here’s a turn-up. We’ve not recovered the WWII items that were stolen, but I have found the next best thing. I was checking some server back-ups and came across a directory of 3D scans of the missing items. Looks like someone goofed and forgot to log things properly. So we do have virtual versions of all Violette's equipment that was taken, and we can put them in the game after all.

I can’t wait to tell everyone and see their faces.

Break-in Point

Still no news from the police regarding the break-in, and no sign of the CCTV footage either. Things are getting a bit tense here: some of the guys on the creative side are muttering that it was an inside job and others headed up by KZ the research manager saying that’s crazy talk, crunch-time must be beginning to get to them, and so on. And it does seem pretty far-fetched. I know that the insurance company has agreed to cover the cost of the items, but really how do you put a value on items like that? Violette Summer items come up for auction once in a blue moon.

Morse and re-Morse

While we're waiting for the police to let us know if there's any news of the missing items, I thought I'd tell you about codes.

The codes that British Intelligence used during the Second World War were pretty close to the codes they used in the First World War, and nowhere near as sophisticated as the output of the Enigma machines that the Axis was using. The Enigma codes needed the first programmable computer to crack them; the British ones could be brute-forced if you had a clue as to their content, enough people working at them, and a lucky break. Leo Marks at SOE had a team of four hundred female operatives from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, known as FANYs (I am not making this up), whose job was to brute-force messages from their own agents that had got scrambled in transmission. They were remarkably successful.

The reason that these codes could be broken was because of the way they were encoded, a system known as poem-codes. Each agent was issued with a piece of poetry or text that they'd use to encode messages sent from the field: for each message they'd pick a few words from the poem at random, use numbers at the start of the message to indicate the words (the transposition key), and encode the message in the usual way, omitting word-breaks and punctuation, and breaking the resulting letter-wall into five-character bricks, which were then transmitted by Morse Code. Some agents, mostly the SOE ones, had radio operators sent in with them; others like the Nova-5 ones went in alone and had to do their own transmitting.

This means two important things. Firstly, poem-codes are transposition cyphers—double-transposition in the case of the SOE ones--not a subsitution one. The encoded message is nothing more than a giant anagram of the original message. So short messages can be broken quite easily, particularly if the agent's code-techniques are slack and they re-use keys. SOE agents were told to make their messages at least 200 characters long. Many didn't bother.

(200 characters. Think of it: you’re intelligence-gathering in occupied territory, knowing that discovery is a death-sentence, and you’re supposed to send back your findings and requests in something only slightly longer than a text message.)

Secondly, once you've cracked one message you're on your way to knowing what the agent's code-poem is. In the early days SOE advised its agents to choose a poem that'd be easy to remember, even under stress, so messages were being encoded with Jerusalem, Land of Hope and Glory, or the National Anthem. None of which are exactly hard to guess.

Here's what happens when an espionage network is using inadequate cryptography and lax protocols: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Englandspiel.

And thirdly, because it's all being done by hand, there are many steps where errors can creep in. You’ve got three elements: the message, the poem, and the transposition-key. Spell a word in the poem wrong, or add an extra letter where there shouldn’t be one and the whole thing becomes a jumble of letters.

So all in all, it's not a very satisfactory way of doing things. And then in June 1943 Leo Marks persuaded his bosses at SOE that this whole system was completely insecure and they should use worked-out codes and one-time keys instead, and all the fun came to an end.

But Violette had been parachuted into Europe in the early summer of 1943, before Leo Marks' system was in play. And yet nobody has ever been able to decode it.

Violette Summer's code-technique was, as far as we know, exemplary. I've mentioned before that most of the Nova-5 records were destroyed when a flying bomb hit their headquarters in Portman Square in 1945, and most of the rest has never been published, but the code-training was done at RAF Tempsford where separate records were kept. So we know Violette was not the sort to make careless errors. And the nature of double-transposition means that even badly encoded messages can eventually be cracked. So what happened to Violette's last message to render it undecipherable?

That, my friends, is the $64,000 question.

The rest of you, ignore this

This is a message  to 'The Fan'. I know you're reading this blog. Please contact me. We have shared interests and I need your expertise on a piece of history connected to Violette Summer. We should talk, and soon.

Velvet Overground

In amongst all the hubbub, someone nudged me yesterday to remind me the PR guys had released some more screenshots from the Velvet Assassin game-in-development. Here they are, looking lovely. Clicky for bigger. I can't say much more about them at this stage, but details will follow. Just keep reading the blog.

All images copyright 2008 Replay Studios but you know that.

More details...

The break-in seems to have been professional work, and it looks like the only thing they stole, apart from the CCTV tape, was the Violette Summer items. A few PCs got smashed up but nothing else was actually taken. We’re in the process of putting together an inventory of the missing items. If you’re a collector, or you have any interest in Violette Summer and you hear or see anything about any of these items coming onto the market, please let us know immediately.

This is a really sad day. We had borrowed the items from a private collector, and they’d only been in the studio for a few days. In other words we hadn’t have time to do the 3D scans we needed to put them in the game. Okay, I’m a Violette history buff and I was really excited to be able to actually touch these items. And I have to wonder if the thief or their client knew the items were here because I’d mentioned them on this blog.

We’re picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off. Nobody got hurt. Just history.

Update...

We haven’t got a full list of what was taken during the break-in, but it looks like the thieves have taken all the historical items relating to Violette Summer.

Office break in!

We’ve been burglarised. Someone broke into the Replay offices last night

We’re not the easiest office to break into. We’re on the top floor of an office block in Hamburg. We're still trying to work out how they got in.

Stuff’s definitely been taken. We’re trying to work out if they were after anything specific, like the source-code for the latest build of Velvet Assassin, or if it was a crime of opportunity. The police are here and they say it looks like it was a pretty professional job.

More news as it happens.

Could it be true?

Still working to get permission to post photos of Violette’s possessions.

Meanwhile, there’s the theory of Violette’s last cache. This gets lots of people very excited. The idea is that before she disappeared she buried something in France, probably around Normandy where we believe she was operating. Nobody knows what was in it, but people say gold, or important papers, or blueprints. And there’s also speculation that the uncrackable last message points the way to it.

A lot of people have spent a lot of time looking for Violette’s last cache. It’s like Rennes-le-Château or Oak Island: there’s probably nothing there, it’s fun to think about it, and a few people who think about it too much become obsessed, spend years and fortunes trying to crack the secret, and fail.

I’m mentioning it because another group has sprung up to talk about it, headed by a mysterious individual called ‘The Fan’ who runs a blog and discussion board called Violette’s Dream. You can find it here. I’m not sure what their angle is, but they’re getting quite excited about it all.

Will Violette’s cache feature in Velvet Assassin? That would be telling...

Busy times

Sorry for the delay in updating the blog. I’m trying to getting permission to post images of some of the Violette Summers items we have in the office. But we need to contact the owner first and it’s taking a little while. More news soon.

Are you out there?

If you emailed me directly at around 16.02 CET on Monday, using the name 'the Fan', then please email me again. Your reply-to address was munged, and I would like to answer your comments.

How much do you know, and where are you getting your information?

The two Violettes

The confusion between Violette Summer and Violette Szabo is understandable. They were alike in many ways. Both women lived in England, both had husbands who were killed in action in the early years of the war, and both were sent on undercover operations in France. But Szabo was French by birth, married a French soldier and had a daughter. Summer was born in Devon, her husband was an RAF pilot, and she had no children. Summer was also four years older (born 1917), her hair was not black but dark brown, and she was several inches taller than the diminuitive Szabo.

Violette Szabo was sent on two missions into occupied France and was captured in 1944 defending her comrades in the Resistance, was tortured horribly, was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and was finally executed with a bullet in the back of her skull on February 5th 1945. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance.

Violette Summer's last mission was in 1943. We don't know what happened to her. Nobody knows. She sent her final message to London, and disappeared.

Some people say she was captured and killed by the Germans, and her body hidden so that she wouldn't become another martyr-figure. Some say she was executed by the Resistance, or by a traitor in the Resistance. Some say she was sick of all the killing and hid herself away until the end of the war. Some say she changed identity as part of a mission and never went back to being 'Violette Summer' again. Some say she went over to the side of the Nazis, or that she'd been a German double-agent all along, but the evidence for that is flimsy. Some say she's still alive. Some people are optimists.

I said that nobody knows for sure. More truthfully, if anyone knows then they're not telling... and they have held their secret for 65 years.

I'll talk about Violette's final message soon.

Gold and codes

I was going to use this entry to talk about Violette Summer's brief and tragic life. But after the first post went live I've had so many emails about the magic words 'unsolved codes' and 'Nazi gold' that the plan's changed. Whether you're a newbie who's never heard the story of Violette Summer, or an existing fan who was asking about my take on the subject, here you go. And yeah, this is a subject I'll be returning to in later posts.

The coded message. Violette's last three transmissions from occupied France have never been decoded. We're not even sure how they were encoded: it looks like it was a poem-code, but Leo Marks of SOE had developed a system of disguising messages encoded with Worked-Out Keys to look like poem-codes ('Operation Gift Horse'), to waste the time of the German code-crackers. (His book Between Silk and Cyanide is terrific, even if he was with SOE). And the messages are only about 100 characters each, which is the right length for WOK: poem-codes were usually twice as long,

Secondly, nobody really knows what Violette Summer's last mission was. The Nova 5 records room was destroyed by a bomb in 1945, and nobody who knew her has ever given away her secrets. But there are stories that it had something – no, a lot – to do with finding out what the Nazis were doing with the gold that they'd looted. Many tonnes of that gold are still missing, unaccounted for.

Then add that agents were trained to set up caches, buried treasure-troves of emergency equipment, identity documents, money and, yes, gold. They'd return to these and dig them up if they had to drop their cover-identity and flee. One of Violette's unused caches from an earlier mission was found in the 1960s. So people think there may be more, and they may either contain gold or may point the way to the missing Nazi loot.

And thirdly, there's the question of what happened to Violette Summer. Nobody knows. She sent her three last messages and — just disappeared. The Germans were meticulous about recording every agent they captured but there's no arrest records, no last sightings by comrades in the resistance. Nothing. Nobody knows what happened to Violette Summer.

Like I said, I'll come back to this in future posts, and I'll also be telling you about the game and how it's going. But right now I need to work. Later!

Replay Studios - live and kicking

Here at Replay we’re about half-way between the moment we announced we were doing Velvet Assassin, a video-game about secret agent Violette Summer, and the moment the game will actually go on sale. It’s a weird time. It’s exciting because the project is really coming together, and yet there’s still months of dev and testing before we go gold.

So this is a good moment to start filling in some backstory.

The announcement that we were doing a Violette Summer game was a little controversial. For a start, pretty much all the journalists immediately got her confused with Violette Szabo. Which is understandable, because people have been doing that since 1944. There’s no question that Szabo has the (deserved) reputation. She was an incredible, brave, heroic woman. But so was Violette Summer, even if the world doesn’t remember her as much, and that’s why we wanted to do the game.

So here’s the first difference. Szabo worked for SOE, the Special Operations Executive (not to be confused with that other SOE, Sony Online Entertainment). Summer worked for MI6, or SIS—the Secret Intelligence Service. SOE was technically part of MI6 (it was known as Section D) but early in WWII it was spun off into its own department. SOE and MI6 hated each other. Hated, hated, hated. They wasted an ludicrous amount of energy trying to screw each other over.

SOE’s mission was ‘espionage and sabotage’ in occupied countries. They were specifically about disrupting Nazi activity. It was an SOE team that blew up the heavy-water plant in Norway (and I’m still trying to persuade someone that there’s a fantastic game to be done about the race to develop the atom bomb.) Violette Szabo rebuilt resistance rings and organised sabotage raids in France. This kind of work put the German troops on higher alert. That made it much harder for MI6/SIS operatives to do their work, which was mostly covert intelligence-gathering.

That doesn’t mean that Violette Summer didn’t kill people when necessary. She did. She was extraordinarily good at it too.

In future updates I’ll talk more about Violette Summer, who she was and what she did, and how we’ve been working to make Velvet Assassin as faithful to her deeds and memory as possible, while still being a thrilling and original game. We’ve been talking to historians, experts and collectors. We’ve even borrowed a selection of Violette’s actual possessions and equipment, which will be 3D-scanned to become usable objects in the game. We think that’s pretty cool.

As for me I’m Victor Jones. I’m webmaster at Replay Studios, a bit of a WWII buff, and a longtime fan of Violette Summer and her legacy. I’ll be your guide. Hang around, this is going to be a very interesting journey.