The Caribou Trail is about war, but it’s not a war game.
It’s not a first-person shooter, or a game of military strategy. And there’s nothing glamourous or desensitizing about its depiction of life on the battlefield.
Instead, it’s about people. Specifically, three young Newfoundlanders who enlist in the First World War looking for adventure, only to end up far from home, fighting a hellish campaign on Turkey’s rugged Gallipoli Peninsula.
“We put the players in the shoes of what it feels like to be a soldier that is sent to this disastrous front,” Francis Rufiange, the game’s creative director, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.
The Caribou Trail is a collaboration between Montreal studios Unreliable Narrators and ManaVoid Entertainment, available on PC and PlayStation 5.
It tells a fictionalized account of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment’s role in the Gallipoli campaign, a failed effort by Allied forces to take control of Istanbul and the Black Sea.
The game’s concept was loosely inspired by the family history of Chris Chancey, ManaVoid’s CEO, and his brother Kevin Chancey, the director of marketing, who are originally from Newfoundland.
“When we visited our families and talked to our grandmothers … we found out we have relatives that were in both world wars,” Kevin Chancey told The St. John’s Morning Show.
Their great-great-uncle, Patrick Noftell, served in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War, and died in Belgium in 1917 at the age of 19.
“My brother Christopher had his concept in his head of just, you know, how crazy is it to have just some of the nicest, most genuine, most generous, charming people in such a horrible situation?” Chancey said.
The Royal Newfoundland Regiment is now an infantry regiment of the Canadian Army. But during the First World War, Newfoundland was still a dominion of the British Empire.
The Regiment was the only North American battalion to fight at Gallipoli, a brutal campaign marked by heavy artillery, muddy trench warfare and rampant disease.
“It’s our baptism of fire,” said Frank Gogos, a Newfoundland military historian who wasn’t involved in the game.
When the First World War broke out, Gogos says thousands of Newfoundlanders, many who had never seen battle, enlisted.
“Most soldiers who signed up had no idea what this was going to entail,” Gogos said. “As for why they signed up? Patriotism, you know, a sense of adventure, a sense of duty.”
In The Caribou Trail, the player inhabits Fisher, a rural fisherman who enlists alongside his buddies, Gordon and Lonnie, who all get shipped off to Gallipoli.
“It’s very much a group of naive young people that don’t really know what they’re in for,” Rufiange said. “They’re almost expecting this to be like a summer camp and they’ll be back in a few months.”
But Gallipoli was no summer camp.
“Gallipoli just would have been a horrible existence for the entire time that they were there,” Gogos said.
“The heat when they first got there was horrible. A lot of flies, and these flies fed off decaying bodies from battles previous. They carried disease. A lot of the guys, from that, came down with dysentery, jaundice.”
Newfoundlanders made up only a small fraction of the soldiers at Gallipoli, but they played a key role in November 1915, when they secured a knoll that had been used by the Turks as a sniping post.
“Because of that action, they actually secured a big chunk of territory at No Man’s Land — more than anybody had accomplished in the last month or two, and even to the end of their occupation,” he said.
The Regiment named the knoll Caribou Hill, a nod to the caribou insignia they wore on their uniforms.
Today, a caribou statue stands in Gallipoli. It’s one of six that mark locations of where the Regiment faced significant tragedies and exploits during the First World War. Together, they form the Trail of the Caribou.
The Royal Newfoundland Regiment — from Gallipoli to the Somme and beyond
More than 46,000 mostly British, Australian and New Zealander soldiers died at Gallipoli, as well 55,000 Turkish troops of the then-Ottoman Empire.
Of the 1,076 Newfoundlanders who fought at Gallipoli, 30 died, 10 from disease. Another 80 were injured.
But that was just a precursor to what the Regiment would endure during the war.
Just six months later, on July 1, 1916, nearly 800 Newfoundlanders were killed on the front lines of the battle of Beaumont-Hamel, a casualty rate of more than 90 per cent.
Rufiange says the story of Newfoundlanders in the First World War is “a great tragedy,” and he hopes the game will inspire people to learn more about the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.
“It felt important to have a game that wasn’t about just shooting and accomplishing objectives. Gallipoli is pretty much the opposite of that,” he said.
“It’s much more about connecting to the humans that are behind those wars and the cost of those wars.”
