The more I researched aerial reconnaissance, the more interested I became in what happened to the photographs after the aircraft landed.
Spitfires, Blenheims, Mosquitos and Hudsons flew over occupied Europe and captured tens of thousands of images. That was the visible and dangerous part of the job. But someone still had to examine those photographs, compare them with earlier images and spot what had changed. Buildings, aircraft, camouflage, bomb damage — sometimes tiny details that could reveal something important.
What I found was a profession I barely knew existed: the photographic interpreter.
During the Second World War, photographic interpreters worked with stereoscopes, maps, reconnaissance photographs and chinagraph pencils, turning what they could see into intelligence. Much of this work eventually centred on the Central Interpretation Unit at RAF Medmenham — from which our studio borrows its name.
This changed my idea of the game.
The aircraft and cameras were fascinating, but the detective work happened afterwards: around a table, examining photographs through a stereoscope and looking for something that perhaps nobody else had noticed.
And there was something immediately familiar about that: looking carefully at an image and trying to find the important details hidden within it. It was, essentially, the core loop of a hidden-object game.
That sounded like a game.
I had started with the idea of making something involving aerial reconnaissance photographs.
Now I knew what the player would actually do.