Could indie dev Yager paint a big-ass spaceship on … the Berlin Wall?

Look around at most video game companies founded in the 1990s, and you’d find similar stories: People growing up playing 8-bit games on their computers and home gaming systems. But it’s not the story you’d find from the people who founded Yager Development, one of the studios behind Dreadnought, a multiplayer combat game about big-ass spaceships.

No, for these five cofounders spent their childhoods behind the Iron Curtain, the dividing line behind East and West, freedom and tyranny, in the Cold War. Any games they got were cracked copies for the Commodore 64 or Amiga. The embodiment of this separation was the Berlin Wall, and one section remains standing between what was Communist-controlled East Berlin and the democratic western portion of Germany’s biggest city. The Wall remains as a memorial to those who died trying to cross from the oppressive East German regime to the West — and all who suffered under Communist rule. Over the years, people have painted murals and written graffiti on the portion that remains.