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.