Building history.
Games that let you step into the less-told corners of the past, rebuilt place by place from the historical record.
A note from Marty
I want to make games that put you inside historical events and experiences that rarely get told. Not the famous battles, but the places in between, rebuilt as closely as the evidence allows.
That takes painstaking research and verification: deeds, maps, letters, official reports and old newspapers, read and checked against each other line by line. My dream is to use AI to do that work at the scale a game needs, and then to build scenarios where you can step into what we found.
I don’t want to shy away from our use of AI. I want to reframe it. We built AI pipelines to do the heavy lifting: searching archives, transcribing, cross-checking, writing and testing code, running the tools that build the world. The passion and the direction still come from a human. I decide what we make, what it says about the past, and what ships.
Where the record runs out, we say so. That’s what I mean by building history.
Marty, Irregular Formations
What we’re making
Northern Virginia, 1863–1865
Mosby’s Rangers
Plan raids across a hex map of Northern Virginia, then ride them yourself, in real time and first person. Every place is rebuilt from the historical record, starting with Herndon Station on 17 March 1863.
In development. The first level, Herndon Station, will be free on Steam.
From the journal
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Building history
Why I make games from the historical record, why I use AI to do it, and where we start: a railroad depot in Virginia on 17 March 1863.
Follow along
A newsletter is coming: one letter a month on the history we’re digging into and the game we’re building from it. Until then, the journal has an Atom feed you can add to any feed reader.
Placeholder: links to follow the studio will go here once the accounts are set up.