Sniper Alley and the night run: how the siege of Sarajevo shaped This War of Mine

This War of Mine did not begin with a war movie or a military campaign. It began with an article that Grzegorz Miechowski, founder of the Polish studio 11 bit studios, brought into the office: an interview with a man who had survived a year inside a besieged city in Bosnia in the early 1990s. It was called "One Year in Hell." More than a decade after the game's release on November 14, 2014, the siege that inspired it returned to the news for one of the darkest reasons imaginable.

From late 2025, prosecutors in Milan began investigating claims that foreigners, most of them Italian, paid to shoot at civilians in Sarajevo during the war. In February 2026, investigators identified a first suspect, an 80-year-old former truck driver from the Pordenone area. Whatever the case concludes, it is a grim prompt to look again at where This War of Mine came from, and at why the siege is remembered above all for what it did to ordinary people.

From a survivor's story to a studio's pivot

Miechowski's brother Pawel, who works on narrative at 11 bit, later explained that the article was not the only spark. Grzegorz had been reading testimonies from survivors of many conflicts and noticed a pattern: they rarely described physical hardship as the worst part. What stayed with them was the emotional weight they carried, during the war and long after it.

Miechowski has admitted he could never confirm the article's authenticity or find its author, and that this did not matter to him. The studio went on to read dozens of accounts published by Amnesty International, and Miechowski became convinced these stories belonged in a game: books and films leave the audience as spectators, while a game could put them in the position of someone forced to choose.

The project did not start out that way. According to 11 bit's own conference presentations, early work was based on a more conventional game before the team decided to tell the story through civilians, a change that defined everything that followed.

Sarajevo was the clearest reference, not the only one. The developers also cited the siege of Leningrad, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and later conflicts in Kosovo and Syria as sources for in-game events. Art director Przemek Marszal has said the look drew on 1980s and 1990s music videos that layered pencil drawing over live footage, and on Banksy, whose grimy, restrained palette helped shape the game's charcoal monochrome.

The longest siege of a capital in modern warfare

Bosnian Serb forces surrounded Sarajevo on April 5, 1992, the day after peace demonstrators were shot on one of the city's bridges. The first two victims, Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić, give that bridge its name. The siege grew out of the breakup of Yugoslavia and became the defining episode of the Bosnian War, fought between Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.

It ended on February 29, 1996, after 1,425 days, longer than the siege of Leningrad and the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. Estimates of the dead range from roughly 11,500 to 14,000, most of them civilians, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) counted 1,601 children among them. On average, 329 shells hit the city every day; on July 22, 1993, a record 3,777 fell. In February 1994, a mortar attack on the Markale marketplace killed 68 shoppers and hastened the international response.

Surviving without water, power or firewood

What set Sarajevo apart was the kind of war it was. The target was the civilian population. Water, electricity and gas were cut early, and around 350,000 people were trapped in a valley ringed by hills full of artillery.

Daily life had to be rebuilt from almost nothing. Families cut down the city's trees and burned furniture, clothes and books to get through the winters. Residents improvised ways to collect water and stretch United Nations rations. In a city that had always been mixed, Serb, Croat and Bosniak neighbors often became one survival network, trading a handful of flour for salt, a few cigarettes for a candle.

Civilian life refused to stop. Cafés reopened between bombardments, films were screened in basements, newspapers kept printing and a beauty pageant went ahead. Bruce Dickinson, who had left Iron Maiden the year before, played a concert in the besieged city. Many survivors called that stubborn normality their best resistance.

Sniper Alley and the "safari" allegations

No image of the siege is better known than Sniper Alley, the main boulevard overlooked by Bosnian Serb snipers. More than 200 people were killed and over a thousand wounded on that stretch alone. People sprinted between burned-out cars or crossed in the shelter of UN armored vehicles.

Rumors have circulated since the 1990s that wealthy foreigners paid for "sniper safaris": weekend trips to Bosnian Serb positions in the hills to shoot unarmed civilians for sport. Reports say groups gathered in Trieste before being flown to the Sarajevo area, and the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported fees of around 100,000 euros. The story gained international attention through Sarajevo Safari, a 2022 documentary by Slovenian director Miran Zupanič, co-produced with Al Jazeera Balkans, which led Italian journalist Ezio Gavazzeni to file the formal complaint examined in Milan.

The evidence is contested. Former British soldiers who served in Sarajevo called the story an urban myth, and a joint investigation by ARTE and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, published in July 2026, found no conclusive proof that the trips took place. There is testimony and a formal investigation, but the allegations remain unproven.

Why Sarajevo is remembered for its civilians

Stalingrad entered the history books mainly as a military chapter: two armies, a strategic turning point, enormous losses on both sides. Sarajevo is remembered differently, and the reason is legal as much as cultural.

In December 2003, the ICTY convicted Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galić, commander of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps from 1992 to 1994, and sentenced him to 20 years, increased to life imprisonment on appeal. The charge was spreading terror among the civilian population, the first judgment at the tribunal to deal with that charge alone. The court found that civilians fetching water or buying food had been deliberately targeted. His successor in command and Bosnian Serb political and military leaders were later convicted of crimes tied to the same campaign of terror.

From testimony to game systems

11 bit has never said that any single mechanic copies a specific event, but the parallels are hard to miss:

• Scavenging only at night mirrors survivors' accounts: crossing open ground by day invited sniper fire.
• Barricading the shelter echoes the way residents reinforced their homes against shrapnel and gunfire.
• Growing vegetables and collecting rainwater reflect the improvised solutions of a city cut off from every utility.
• Morale and depression, which can kill a character as surely as hunger, come straight from Miechowski's founding insight that emotional strain weighs as much as physical hardship.
• Moral dilemmas, such as robbing a defenseless elderly couple to feed your group, turn the city's barter economy and hard choices into play.
• The Little Ones expansion, which adds children, speaks to the 1,601 children the ICTY counted among the dead, and to a generation that kept playing and studying among the ruins.

A game that became a memorial

This War of Mine recovered its development costs in two days of sales and went on to sell more than 9 million copies. It has been exhibited at the Imperial War Museum in London and at MoMA in New York, received a special recognition from Amnesty International in 2024, and was adopted by Poland's Ministry of Education as supplementary school material. A long partnership with the charity War Child has raised more than half a million dollars, and in 2022, shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 11 bit donated a full week of the game's sales, $850,000, to the Ukrainian Red Cross.

None of that changes what the game asks of the player. It still works the way that office copy of "One Year in Hell" suggested it could: not as entertainment in the usual sense, but as a way to make someone on the safe side of the screen feel, for a few hours, the weight of choices no one should ever have to make.

Platforms: PCPlayStationXboxSwitchMobile