The references to indigenous fascism are all pretty on-the-nose in the era of #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, but Matthies insists that the game’s fiction pre-dates Donald Trump’s rise to power. Machine Games has been wanting to take the Nazis to America since it first laid hands on the license. “We’ve been enthusiastic about that since 2011, when we were talking to id Software and we had this opportunity to work on Wolfenstein,” he says. “We came up with this idea, what if the Nazis won the war and it’s now the Sixties and they have this technology, and then it dawned on us – the Sixties, that’s when everything happened in Western culture basically! Everything from civil rights movements to the Beatles, Woodstock, the Summer of Love.
“So you have all these moments that are of cultural significance to the world, and how would that look if the Nazis had taken over and started subverting all of that? And so that was super-interesting and we were already then starting to think about all of the Americana of the era, and we quickly realised – we can’t do this in the first game, just in a level where BJ goes to the US, because it’s too big and it’s too significant for him, to have his mortal enemy take over his homeland. This needs its own game. So we were always building towards it – if we had the opportunity to do a sequel, that’s where we’re going to go.”