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Imagine waking one morning to discover that two of your staff had been detained in a foreign country over allegations of espionage. What would you do? You're not the head of MI6. You don't employ spies. You employ developers who make video games. You discover the news in your online forum but soon it's spread like wildfire, to local radio and TV, and people are knocking at your door for comment. What do you say? What do you tell the families of the arrested men?It was the hardest period of Marek Španel's working life. In all the 13 years he'd run Bohemia Interactive Software he'd never expected this. "Nothing comes close to it," he tells me now, perched animatedly on the edge of a well-worn sofa in a comfy cabin-retreat of an office in rural Czech Republic, not far from the capital, Prague (it can be glimpsed in our DayZ video's short intro). "It was a big shock" and "it was everywhere", he remembers - "we were literally chased by state television".
The men in question, Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar, had been apprehended in possession of several photos of a military air base that the Greek authorities considered problematic - a threat to national security. The pair had taken hundreds if not thousands of pictures on Lemnos, an island they protested they were holidaying on. This was all "a completely absurd misunderstanding", they said at the time. But they were holidaying without their families, and Lemnos happened to be the setting of Bohemia's realistic new war game Arma 3 - something Marek Španel had suggested, having holidayed there a few times himself. The case would go to trial. But Buchta and Pezlar wouldn't go home; they would be imprisoned while they awaited their fate, facing a possible 20 years if found guilty.
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