‘Fortnite on steroids’: the virtual gaming worlds transformed to train British soldiers

Inside Skyral, part of a consortium that won a £2bn MoD contract to help forces game out complex decisions On a sunny July day in Riga, Latvia, a Nato convoy drives down a street lined with kebab shops and a pharmacy. At a downtown intersection, there is the sound of an explosion and the lead tank bursts into flame. These are real streets in Riga – Lāčplēša iela and the downtown corridor of Tērbatas iela. The kebab shops and the pharmacy are on them. The pedestrians who flee after the tank explodes and huddle at a distance are modelled after the population of Riga: some old, some young, some friendly to Nato, others less so. But the entire thing is a simulation. It has been built by Skyral, a UK company that is part of a consortium that recently won a £2bn contract from the Ministry of Defence to train the British army. Modern armies have been training in virtual environments for decades. In 2002, the US army launched a video game called America’s Army, initially run on Windows, a multiplayer shooting scenario that aimed to model combat situations but was criticised as being propaganda for the US military. A new generation of companies are trying to offer something diffe