When video game producer Petr Kolar and his future colleagues made a research trip to the Legiovlak, a replica World War I-era train that chugs around the Czech Republic, he noted the pristine Czechoslovak Legion uniforms worn by the museum guides.
"The Legion were like gentlemen fighting,” says Kolar, who co-founded Ashborne Games after that visit. "They always made sure that they were well cleaned, well equipped. That’s one of the reasons 70,000 men could control the whole Trans-Siberian Railway.”
Foregrounding historical accuracy was a priority for Ashborne’s first original game, Last Train Home, which retells the Legion’s rolling evacuation eastward across Russia in the embers of the war. Its journey for homebound ships at the port of Vladivostok was tangled in Russia’s internal conflict between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik armies.