G|A|M|E The Italian Journal of Game Studies (Dec 2017)
“Heute gehört uns die Galaxie”: Music and historical credibility in Wolfenstein: The New Order’s Nazi dystopia
Abstract
This article addresses the use of “Nazi rock ‘n’ roll” in Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) as a strategy to reinforce a historically selective sense of verisimilitude of the game’s dystopian setting. In W:TNO’s production, cover replicas of US popular music classics from the second half of the 20th century were composed in ‘Nazi mode’, with German themes and language, with the intent of creating a sense of stereotyped and mythicized knowledge of World War II that also imagined an outcome of the war in which the Nazis had won. The diegetic embedding of songs in this style could have supported the game’s atmosphere in a way that is comparable to the use of licensed works in games such as Grand Theft Auto and Fallout. However, the soundtrack composition was constrained by controversies around the representation of the Third Reich in computer games, a factor that also limited the role of the songs within the game world. The narrative potential of the original score thus remained untapped, as the songs were used mostly for marketing purposes. This paper highlights how music partly contributed to the creation of a myth-historical alternate timeline of post-WW2, and how the use of these songs could have turned the game’s story into a more complex and multifaceted discourse than what production allowed, contributing to a nuanced representation of Nazism, a theme that has remained controversial in the medium of the videogame.
