This War of Mine (2014) is inspired mainly in the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996) on the Bosnian War (1992-1995): the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
Context
For decades, Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s communist leader, had held a multi-ethnic federation of six republics together under the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity”.
When he died in 1980, the country entered a massive economic and political crisis. Deep-seated nationalist political movements filled the power vacuum, driven by Slobodan Milošević, a Serbian leader, who wanted a centralized state dominated by Serbia.
In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. While Slovenia broke away with minimal fighting, Croatia immediately plunged into a brutal war against its local Serb minority and the Yugoslav national army.
Bosnia was the most ethnically diverse republic in Yugoslavia, a mixed mosaic of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats. If Bosnia stayed inside Yugoslavia, it would be entirely dominated by Milošević’s Serbia. If it left, the local Serbs threatened to launch a war.
The Bosnian government held a nationwide referendum on independence on February 29 th and March 1 th, 1992.
The vote passed overwhelmingly, with 99.7% voting “Yes” to independence.
The Bosnian Serb population almost completely boycotted the referendum. They declared that they refused to be part of an independent Bosnian nation where they would be a minority, and immediately began organizing the Republika Srpska: their own armed breakaway state.
Following minor clashes and a shooting at a wedding party in Sarajevo, armed Serb paramilitaries set up checkpoints and masked barricades all around the capital.
Meanwhile, the heavily armed Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) began moving tanks, artillery, and anti-aircraft weapons onto the high hills and mountains surrounding Sarajevo. They claimed they were there to “keep the peace,” but in reality, they were secretly preparing to lock down the city.
On April 5, 1992, a massive crowd of over 40,000 peaceful anti-war protesters—consisting of ordinary Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats marching together with flags—walked through the streets of Sarajevo to demand unity and prevent a conflict.
As the protesters crossed the Vrbanja Bridge near the parliament building, nationalist Serb snipers stationed in the nearby Holiday Inn hotel opened fire into the crowd. Two young women, Suada Dilberović (a medical student) and Olga Sučić, were shot and killed. They are globally recognized as the first civilian victims of the war.
The very next day, April 6, 1992, the European Union and the United States officially recognized Bosnia as an independent country. In response, the heavy artillery on the hills opened fire, imposing a total military blockade on Sarajevo.
The Serb military had the advantage in heavy weapons and artillery, but moving tanks into a dense, urban environment is a military nightmare. The defenders—the newly formed Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, alongside local police and volunteers—fought room-by-room and street-by-street. They used anti-tank weapons and guerrilla tactics to destroy Serb armored columns whenever they tried to enter the city streets.
General Ratko Mladić and the Serb leadership realized that completely invading a city of 400,000 hostile people would result in massive Serb casualties. Instead, their strategic goal was siege and psychological attrition. They wanted to break the Bosniaks’ will to fight by starving them and shelling them into submission, using the city as a massive hostage to force the Bosnian government to surrender territory elsewhere in the country.
Sarajevo was filled with international journalists, UN peacekeepers, and foreign embassies. A full-scale, bloody infantry massacre in the streets of a major European capital would have triggered an immediate, devastating NATO military intervention much earlier than 1995.
The longest siege in modern warfare officially began.
The life on the siege
The city was hit by an average of 329 artillery shells every single day. The record was set on July 22, 1993, when 3,777 shells struck the city in 24 hours. No place was safe—hospitals, markets, and apartment buildings were systematically targeted.
High-rise buildings along the main boulevard were occupied by snipers who shot at anything that moved. Citizens had to sprint across intersections. Parents often had to choose between letting their children risk a sniper bullet to fetch water or watching them die of dehydration.
Winters in Sarajevo are freezing. With no heating, citizens cut down every single tree in the city’s parks, avenues, and courtyards for firewood. When the trees ran out, they burned furniture, shoes, and library books.
People fought to keep their humanity. They organized underground schools in basements, held art exhibitions, ran a secret theater company, and even hosted a “Miss Besieged Sarajevo” beauty pageant in 1993 to show the world they refused to be broken.
The city is located in a narrow valley surrounded by steep mountains. The Serb army held all the high ground, blocking every single road, highway, and railway out of the city with tanks, minefields, and barbed wire.
The only flat opening out of the city was the Sarajevo Airport runway. However, the United Nations controlled the airport strictly for humanitarian aid flights and completely forbade civilians from crossing it. Anyone who tried to run across the open runway at night was illuminated by UN searchlights and shot by Serb snipers or French UN peacekeepers enforcing the neutrality zone.
The only way out was the Sarajevo Tunnel, dug by hand under the airport runway in 1993. It was a claustrophobic, muddy passageway just 1.5 meters high. While it wasn’t a casual exit for regular citizens, it allowed the army to bring in weapons and let political figures, wounded children, and black-market smugglers slip in and out.
Aftermath
Radovan Karadžić, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and Ratko Mladić, the military commander, were prosecuted by the the United Nations’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, receiving life sentences.
The historical trauma remains highly active in regional politics. Following his death in prison, Mladić’s flag-draped body was returned to Belgrade for a military-style funeral service led by the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The event sparked intense European Union scrutiny and strict condemnation from survivor groups like the Mothers of Srebrenica, who called the political glorification of the convicted war criminal an international outrage.
The developers spent years meticulously researching wartime diaries, letters, and survivor testimonies to capture the grim reality of a population trapped without electricity, running water, or medical supplies, all while living in constant terror of hidden snipers.
During daylight hours, snipers prevent you from stepping outside. Your mission is entirely operational within your shelter (a bombed-out tenement house). You must cook whatever food you have, patch up holes in the walls to keep out the bitter winter cold, filter dirty water, distill alcohol for trade, and tend to characters who are sick, wounded, or emotionally broken.
When darkness falls, you select one civilian to venture out into the ruins of the city (abandoned supermarkets, destroyed hospitals, or residential homes) to scavenge for food, medicine, and building materials. Meanwhile, the civilians left behind sleep, guard the house, or risk being violently raided by other desperate survivors.
It discards traditional “good vs. evil” morality bars, forcing to play into the heavy, grey zones of human survival.
During a war, protecting your humanity is just as difficult as finding food.
In 2020 the Polish Prime Minister announced its official addition to the school reading list for high school students in Poland.
The government recognized its immense pedagogical value for students of sociology, history, philosophy, and ethics. They concluded that the game’s ability to foster empathy and convey the human cost of conflict was far superior to traditional, detached history textbooks.