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- Israeli Indie #14 - Rising Eagle
Israeli Indie #14 - Rising Eagle
Rising Eagle was Israel’s boldest FPS of its era, created before free-to-play and long before today’s modern FPS landscape existed. Launched 18 years ago with ambitions to rival Counter-Strike, the game now feels less like a relic and more like a glimpse into a future that arrived sooner than expected.
Set in the year 2040, Rising Eagle: Futuristic Infantry Warfare’s lore imagines a future global war involving the United States, the European Union, China, Israel, and Iran. Players can take the role of the U.S. Marine Corps, European Union forces, China’s People’s Liberation Army, the Israel Defense Forces, or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Matches take place across three main locations: a major Chinese city where U.S. Marines fight Chinese forces, Paris where U.S. Marines face European Union troops, and Gaza where IDF forces confront Iranian Revolutionary Guard units. In hindsight, parts of this fictional premise feel unusually relevant today, as real-world geopolitical tensions echo scenarios the game envisioned years ago.
Israel vs. Iran loading screen in Rising Eagle. Feels unusually relevant today
Rising Eagle was one of the most ambitious video games ever created in Israel. Developed in the mid-2000s by Invasion Interactive, which was founded in 2004 by Yaron Dotan, Shay Ozer, and Guy Dotan, the game was a large-scale multiplayer shooter built years before modern engines and today’s indie-friendly tools.
Rising Eagle aimed to compete with international FPS titles, featured global factions and expansive online battles, won the 2009 GameIS Game Of The Year Award and even entered Israeli pop culture when it appeared in the television series Deus. Nearly two decades after its release, the game remains alive thanks to a dedicated community of players who continue to play it today and maintain an active Discord server.
We met with Guy Dotan, one of the game’s creators, to talk about Rising Eagle’s legacy to this day.
Rising Eagle
Now vs Then
How did Rising Eagle came to be? What was it like developing a multiplayer FPS game in 2004?
“The company was formed by Yaron, my brother, and Shay, who was our neighbor when we were kids,” Guy says. “I joined a couple of months later. At first, I did the sounds, and my part gradually evolved into what today is considered a Product Manager’s job. I was in charge of the product and served as a bridge between the programmers, the art, and the design people, and I helped push this project forward as far as we could. It was a very different time back then than today for those who wanted to develop a game.”
“Today, you can take Unreal Engine 5 and build whatever is on your mind. When we worked on Rising Eagle, in order to get to work with Epic Games, the makers of Unreal Engine, you had to pay around one million dollars upfront. You couldn’t work with advanced engines and technologies unless you had a lot of money,” Guy says. “Today, you can take Unity, Unreal, whatever and go wild. You take what you want as long as you give them a certain percent. By the way, they took that percentage back then as well,” he laughs. “You didn’t really have another option other than building it yourself, and to be honest, it was nothing less than a nightmare.”
Did you grow up as gamers? Did you player shooters and Counter-Strike?