While spending time in Wargaming’s Minsk head office, I had some time to speak with Alexander Bobko. He’s the head of the publisher’s Global Special Projects division and gets to do some incredible things.
“We are focusing as a department within Wargaming, which is called Special Projects, on different cool stuff that’s ahead of the curve. Finding new opportunities like how to bring history to life,” Bobko said of the department. In a nutshell, Alexander thinks of cool ideas and then implements them.
A perfect example of this is in the photo above. You can see Alexander standing proudly by one of the many tanks Wargaming has helped to restore. This is the most recent one: the KV-1. If you look close you can even see the holes where German shells penetrated the hull. While on a tour at the Stalin Line Historical and Cultural Complex — yes, I got to ride on a tank but that’s another story — I was shown multiple projects in various stages that were all helped along with a partnership with Wargaming.
Have a look at the video below for a more in-depth break down of the restoration of the KV-1.
Restoring tanks sounds like an incredibly rewarding job, so I asked Alex what other projects he had a hand in facilitating.
“So it’s been a while since we partnered with the Bovington Tank Museum, for 5 years already,” he said. “We’ve done quite a lot with them. In the past year we have brought the mark 1 or the mark 4, technically, from Steven Spielberg’s movie War Horse. So we took that tank from World War I straight to Trafalgar Square in London to commemorate [one] hundred years of tanks.”
It’s truly an amazing feeling to see these pieces of history in person. Something that was once buried underground or scattered across a field becomes whole once again, but with a new story to tell. Alexander’s job at Wargaming may sound like a lot of fun — and he assures me it is — but it’s also a very important one. Every Wargaming employee I speak with happily talks about the pride they have in knowing that they are involved in giving back to the rich history their games are based in. We have even seen the benefits of Wargaming’s generosity here in Australia — the publisher found one of the rarest tanks in the world, sitting in a private collection in Texas, and dutifully sent it back to Oz.
Stay tuned for more from Alexander Bobko alongside interviews from team members from the Wargaming Belarus office.
Stevivor was flown to Minsk as a guest of Wargaming.
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