Video Game Recreates Horror Of Fallujah

Apr 11, 2009 18 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

Times Online:

A video game that revisits one of the key conflicts of the Iraq war has ignited controversy on both sides of the Atlantic, one year before its scheduled release.

The game, Six Days in Fallujah, is currently under development by Atomic Games at its base in North Carolina. Announcing the game to the press earlier this week, Peter Tamte, the company’s president, said: “It’s time for video games to do what movies, music and television have done: give people insight into this war that is shaping our world.”

The game will take as its focus the second battle of Fallujah, of November 2004, when 10,000 US troops stormed the city of Fallujah, which had been held by al-Qaeda in Iraq and its Sunni insurgent allies for more than six months. The military action is believed to have caused the deaths of nearly 6,000 Iraqi civilians, and remains controversial. On April 2 this year, a US Marine, Sergeant Ryan Weemer, was charged with the murder of an unarmed Iraqi during the re-taking of the city.

Historical wars and battles have long been fertile ground for games developers. Games such as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty recreate the historical circumstances of key Second World War battles, while the British developers of the Total War series have delved further into the past to recreate the era of the Crusades or 18th-century trade wars.

Kieran Brigden of The Creative Assembly, the makers of Total War, told The Times: “If you choose to represent history you cannot simply airbrush things out that you’d rather didn’t happen. What you can do is treat those issues with sensitivity and tact, which is a line we intend to tread properly.”

This is doubly true in the case of Fallujah. If the game’s makers skew their version of events in favour of the American military, they will face accusations of bias. An option to play the game as an insurgent fighting the Americans, which is currently under discussion, would surely prove even more controversial on home turf.

What makes Six Days in Fallujah different from other similar war titles is that this will be the first game to deal with a conflict that has not yet been resolved. It is also, its makers claim, the first war game to be developed at the request of those who took part, many of whom are keen video game players themselves.

“Fallujah was the largest urban assault since Vietnam,” Tamte said, “and just under half of the Marines in that battalion were killed or wounded. When they came back from Fallujah, they asked us to create a video game about their experiences there.”

Atomic Games has since been working with eye-witnesses, using photographs and satellite imagery to ensure that its recreation of the battle is as accurate as possible.

Such attention to detail is unlikely to silence the game’s critics, however. “I find it astonishing,” David Wilson of the Stop the War Coalition told The Times. “I’m sure that US Marines would want the battle turned into a game, just as I’m sure Serbian paramilitaries would like to see a PlayStation game based on the massacre at Srebenica. Fallujah was a particularly awful episode. I’d like to know what the Iraqis involved would make of this.”

Despite the protestations of balance from the game’s makers, it seems unlikely that Six Days in Fallujah will stray far from the American version of events, partly due to its source material, partly because the parent company of Atomic Games, Destineer, runs a business offering virtual training to soldiers using technology developed for video games.

According to a statement on the company’s website: “It’s the way we use our technology to create results-oriented training solutions that has caused many of the world’s leading military, intelligence, and law-enforcement organizations to choose us to develop their training systems.”