Biographies are everywhere in books and in movies, where the real life stories of notable individuals are retold, charting their rise to fame and maybe even their downfall. These stories are less common in games, however, as these stories are foregone conclusions and don’t allow for a lot of player choice in what happens.
There are some exceptions out there though. Whether they tell a short snippet of someone’s life, fictionalize it to make it work better for a game or throw real life into a pot of anime tropes, these games put a real person’s life into a player’s hands.
7 Velvet Assassin
Violette Szabo was an agent working for the British special forces during the Second World War, recruited seemingly due to her French nationality that allowed her to slip undetected into occupied France and spy on Nazi activity. She was arrested by the Germans during her second mission, brutally tortured and executed at Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1945.
Her life story was an interesting one, so much so that it got turned into a video game. Velvet Assassin is loosely based on her life, taking place as a series of flashbacks as Violette Summer lies comatose in hospital after being shot by a sniper. It takes numerous liberties with Violette’s story for the sake of cool spy action, but it generally uses her life as the basis for it all.
6 The Saboteur
Similar to Velvet Assassin, The Saboteur takes a real life story of an operative in the Second World War and heavily fictionalizes it for gameplay purposes. The protagonist is Sean Devlin, an Irish race car driver who joins a French resistance group during Nazi occupation. The game itself saw Sean moving through an open world sabotaging Nazi operations and retaking territory for the resistance.
Sean’s story is a dramatized version of the real story of William Grover-Williams, a French-born and British-raised driver best known for winning the first Monaco Grand Prix. During the Second World War he would be recruited by British special forces to infiltrate and sabotage Nazi operations in occupied France. However, while the game plays his story as a heroic one where he saves the day, William in real life was caught and executed at a concentration camp in 1943.
5 The Beatles Rock Band
The Beatles are one of the most influential bands of all time, and their story is one of a phenomenal rise that led to a major break up barely a decade after they took off. While The Beatles Rock Band doesn’t have a story in the strictest sense of the word, it does follow this story in chronological order.
The player starts out playing in The Cavern Club where the band got their start playing their early 60s pop hits, before moving through their iconic Ed Sullivan performance, major venues, Abbey Road studio sessions and finally the rooftop performance that coincided with Let It Be. While the game doesn’t go in depth into the stories behind the songs, the progression through this excellent rhythm game does a great job of following the story of The Beatles through their music.
4 1979 Revolution: Black Friday
1979 Revolution: Black Friday is a fictional biography of a photojournalist named Reza Shirazi who becomes directly involved in the events surrounding the Iranian Revolution. The game is a narrative adventure built around making tough moral choices and photographing the events as they happen.
However, while the protagonist may be fictional, the events he is documenting are not. The story is based the testimonies of 40 Iranians who lived through the Revolution, features photos and footage taken by eyewitnesses and the game’s producer added a few elements of his own experience into the story. While Reza isn’t a real person, the level of authenticity in the game means he could have been.
3 Cibele
Nina Freeman is a game designer on a mission to produce highly personal small games about sex and relationships. Her first game in this style was How Do You Do It, a game about using toy dolls to figure out how sex works, based on her experiences doing that after watching Titanic as a child. However, it was Cibele that gained her critical acclaim.
The game takes place on the desktop of a teenage girl playing a fictional MMO and developing an online relationship with another player. The whole game is based on Freeman’s real experience of doing exactly that, with the real world MMO being Final Fantasy XI, and how it led to her first sexual encounter. Cibele is a niche game that won’t appeal to everyone, but it’s a fun personal tale that may be relatable to others.
2 That Dragon, Cancer
Ryan and Amy Green, a game designer and writer respectively, had their third child in 2009, but after only a year, their son had been diagnosed with cancer and given four months to live, although he lived for another four years. It was a tough time for the couple caring for their terminally ill child, and they jointly decided they needed a way to process their experience following the child’s death.
The result was That Dragon, Cancer, a narrative adventure game that recounted their time with their son. Starting with his diagnosis and working through various events of his life, the game features abstract representations of reality and mini-games such as a racing game segment through a hospital. It’s a short yet harrowing tale that isn’t for everyone, yet it proved a relatable story for players who'd been through similar experiences.
1 Eternal Sonata
Frédéric Chopin is generally considered one of the greatest pianists and composers of all time, with works such as Nocturne No. 2 being iconic pieces to this day. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 39, and if the game Eternal Sonata is to be believed, he spent his time on his deathbed dreaming of being the main character in an intensely anime-style RPG.
While the main story of Eternal Sonata is an original one, much of it does call back to events, places and people from Chopin’s life, giving it a semi-biographical feel. For example, the character of Polka is believed to be a stand-in for Chopin’s sister Emilia, who died at age 14. Naturally, it also features many of his compositions throughout the soundtrack to celebrate his life.