Trivia / Spec Ops: The Line

• Absurdly Short Production Time: Every single voiceline was recorded during the same day, and in chronological order. By the end, the voice actors were just as tired and weary as the characters they were portraying — which was wholly intentional.
• Acclaimed Flop: The game was near-universally praised for its writing, but it failed to sell well due to its release being sandwiched between massive genre mainstays Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, as well as having a nigh-unmarketable premise: being a stealth Genre Deconstruction whose experience requires one to come in expecting a generic modern military shooter, it had to be marketed as one in order to not spoil the surprise, leading most people to pass on the game as a generic genre title. Writer Walt Williams reasonably predicted that the game wasn't going to sell well, admitting that he was expecting the game to, at most, find longevity as a critically-respected Cult Classic.
• B-Team Sequel: Technically speaking, since none of the key people who made past Spec Ops games had anything to do with this one, though it really has nothing to do with their past work anyways.
• Banned in China: Banned across the entire GCC ^note  The Gulf Cooperation Council, consisting of the UAE itself, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain due to the whole "Dubai left to rot" premise. The finished game makes it even more understandable since the intel items reveal the Emirati government knew that the storms were coming and had the wealthy evacuated in secret while ordering the media to cover it up.
• Creator Backlash: According to the writing team, multiplayer was mandated by the publisher and farmed to an outside studio for development. Lead writer Cory Davis describes it as a different game entirely, "rammed onto the disc like a cancerous growth." This is made quite obvious by the fact there is no achievement for multiplayer, and that many of the achievements of the game that would seem to be easier to get by playing multiplayer can only be unlocked in the campaign. The dev team is basically telling us it's not meant to be played.
• Creator Breakdown: Lead writer Walt Williams points out that, to write the game, he had to undergo the same sort of psychological barrage the player would face, except for much, much longer.
  Williams: This would be hard enough to experience just once. But, writing a project like this takes time. About 3 years, to be exact. That is a very long time to be immersed in a game like Spec Ops. There were definitely times when I wanted to walk away from the project, because it was taking a serious toll on my life. But in the end, I couldn't walk away from a story and project that was so personal to me and the team at Yager.
• Creator's Favorite: Nolan North, Capt. Walker's voice actor, is especially fond of the game and has been recommending it constantly anywhere he can.
• Deliberate Flaw Retcon: Many reviewers have praised the developers for intentionally making the gameplay awful as a reflection of the oversaturated shooter genre, with generic Take Cover! mechanics and terrible controls. However, in an interview, the developers have explicitly stated that they weren't trying to make the controls horrible on purpose, but they were more than happy to let their audience assume that if they wanted to.
• Enforced Method Acting: According to Word of God, the voice recordings were done with the entire cast together in chronological order, so that by the time the end came about, the cast members were tired and angry and ready to go home, just like Walker's team.
• Executive Meddling:
  • As a result of the poor multiplayer mode, several reviews marked the game's score down significantly. According to the lead designer, the multiplayer mode was done by another team entirely on a publisher mandate.
  • In a positive example, 2K Games stipulated that the game was to be a military-themed shooter set in Dubai long before the actual game went into development. Writer Walt Williams has stated that he appreciated being given this "box" to work in, as it forced him and the rest of Yager to be creative in how they designed the setting and narrative.
  • According to this article, which Williams contributed to, the reason the entire framing device with having the helicopter sequence, in the beginning, is so odd and barely acknowledged is that it was a last-minute change by the executives while they were recording dialogue.
• Genre-Killer: The game's acclaim for it being a brutal deconstruction of the pulp-cinematic modern military shooter that was commonplace in the mid-late 2000s ended up being the final coup-de-grace for subgenre.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Nolan North actually read for Cpt. Walker before Uncharted shipped.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: In the end of January 2024, Spec Ops: The Line was delisted from all digital sales platforms due to unspecified "partnership licenses" expiring; most likely referring to the licensing for the music.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Nolan North usually voices lovable rogues or funny smartasses. Captain Walker is VERY far from his usual roles, being a no-nonsense infantryman. Not to mention a shell-shocked, insane war criminal.
  • Bruce Boxleitner also counts. His best known roles are stubborn, cheerful, heroic Dork Knights. Konrad is about as far from that as you can get.
  • Ditto for Christopher Reid. While his first voice acting role, he was known for playing relatable, down-to-earth "everyman" types. Here, he's an extremely jaded and frustrated soldier, with years of baggage weighing on him.
• Playing with Character Type: Nolan North's role as Cpt. Walker is a savage Deconstructed Character Archetype of the Action Hero guys that North usual portrays. Curiously, the writer of the game has claimed that they had no deconstructive intent in mind when casting him — it was just a happy coincidence.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: It's sometimes speculated that the game's test builds gave the player more freedom like the section regarding the white phosphorus, but certain interviews by the writers confirm that the player had little to no control over the railroading even in the game's early versions.
• Sequel Gap: Released 10 years after the last Spec Ops game, Airborne Commando, although it really has no connections with previous Spec Ops games anyway other than the name.
• Throw It In!: A rare script example - writer Walt Williams originally didn't want the helicopter sequence In Medias Res and saw it as a cheap tactic, and in the spur of the moment, he wrote "We've done this before!" in pen on the back of the script out of spite.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: One of the main reasons almost everyone dies and Walker either is also dead or psychologically broken at the end was so that sequels couldn't be made. Ideas for story DLC featuring Adams were bounced around, since his death technically didn't happen onscreen, allowing him to survive it, but even then, the script ended with him dying in a much more certain manner.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The story was originally going to be an even greater homage to Apocalypse Now then it ended up being. According to Word of God Konrad was going to be like Colonel Kurtz conducting illegal search and destroy missions in nations that the US was not supposed to be at war with. In the same way, Kurtz was in Cambodia and Laos, Konrad would be infiltrating Iran using Dubai as a base of operations. The U.S Government would then send Walker to assassinate Colonel Konrad and terminate his command just like Willard did to Colonel Kurtz. This was changed mid-development so that Walker would simply be sent to conduct recon on Dubai, with Konrad actually trying to help Dubai.
  • As noted elsewhere on this wiki, Yager Development had no desire to include a multiplayer component in the game, and have openly criticized its publisher-mandated inclusion.
  • Several members of the team (including writer Walt Williams here) have stated that they would have preferred had achievements not been present in the game, as they thought they detracted from the emotional force of some sequences. In the end, all the achievement pictures used in the game are pictures of the developers mocking the player.
  • At one point in development, Josh Homme was attached to compose the game's score.
  • According to Significant Zero, there was going to be a DLC for the game that would have had Adams surviving his final stand with the Damned 33rd at the end of the game, albeit horrifically scarred and trying to help out a 33rd member escape Dubai.
  • Originally, when confronted at the end, Konrad was alive, but killed himself by jumping off the Burj Khalifah, leaving Walker the victor only by default. When the game's long production cycle forced a story rewrite, one of the writers came up with the twist that Konrad was Dead All Along in less than an hour, changing everything without changing anything.
  • According to an interview with writer Walt Williams, the player originally could exit the building and properly fight the 33rd without the white phosphorus albeit in a Hopeless Boss Fight, but the hardware limitations regarding the maps forced the the production to scrap the idea.^note Williams doesn't fully remember why they removed the alternate battle with the 33rd, but hardware limitations or not, he noted it was a mistake not to give the player said choice to experience the dead-end route.
  • Concept art shows a flamethrower was once planned as a usable weapon, and the game's E3 2010 trailer shows both a short glimpse at the flamethrower as well as a shot of Walker shooting down the enemy Blackhawk in Chapter 7 with an RPG, implying it was originally meant to be fought by the player rather than shot down by a rebel as a background event.
• Word of God: Walt William wrote and released a book that went into a lot of detail about the development cycle of Spec Ops called “Significant Zero”. It also delved into Walt’s mental health crisis while he was working on the game; see Creator Breakdown above.

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