You're a freaking idiot. You obviously have never lost anyone. You are the first person that should have to go to war so you would wake up to reality. Go join the military a@%hole, and then maybe you won't tell the families of the deceased to shut up.
Max Aguilera-Hellweg for Newsweek
Artists, designers and engineers work in the Atomic Games studio in Raleigh, N.C.
The Battle Over the Battle of Fallujah
A videogame so real it hurts.
Published Jun 6, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009
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Peter Tamte was months away from completing his dream project—turning the largest urban battle of the Iraq War into a videogame—when it all seemed to fall apart. The 75 employees of one of his companies, Atomic Games, had worked on the endeavor for nearly four years. They'd toiled to make Six Days in Fallujah as realistic as possible, weaving in real war footage and interviews with Marines who had fought there. But now relatives of dead Marines were angry, and the game's distributor and partial underwriter had pulled out of Tamte's project. On May 26, he got on the phone to Tracy Miller, whose son was killed by a sniper in Fallujah, and tried to win her over by arguing that the game honors the Marines. Miller listened politely, but remained skeptical. "By making it something people play for fun, they are trivializing the battle," she told NEWSWEEK.
Tamte is not above triviality. A second company he runs, Destineer, makes games with titles like Indy 500 and Fantasy Aquarium. But the 41-year-old executive says he's now attempting something more serious: a documentary-style reconstruction that will be so true to the original battle, gamers will almost feel what it was like to fight in Fallujah in November 2004. At his studio in Raleigh, N.C., Tamte has been helped by dozens of Fallujah vets who have advised him on the smallest details, from the look of the town to the operation of the weapons. And he's staked the fate of his company on the success of the $20 million project. "If for some reason it doesn't work, we'll have to think about making some very significant changes to the studio," he says.
How we got here is a matter for history. But the democratic ideal is still within reach.
Can something as weighty and complex as war be conveyed by the same medium that produced Mario Brothers and Grand Theft Auto? Mostly, videogames are associated with mindless entertainment or gratuitous violence or both. For Tracy Miller and other skeptics, the idea that animated shooters can communicate the heroism and sacrifice of Fallujah is deeply misguided.
But efforts to document war in new ways have always garnered skepticism and controversy. The first published photographs of dead American servicemen—including a 1943 shot showing three bodies sprawled out on Buna Beach in New Guinea—prompted a public outcry. The effect of television footage beamed from Vietnam directly to the living rooms of Americans was hotly debated throughout the war. Miguel Sicart, an expert on videogames at the IT University of Copenhagen, says it took decades for people in television and film to figure out how to convey the experience of war (and for audiences to get accustomed to the new media). If videogames can overcome stigmas, he says, their interactive technology gives them an advantage. "You can almost occupy the actual space of Fallujah and explore the environment in a videogame," Sicart says. "For someone interested in the events there, that can be very powerful."
Tamte says he got the idea to make a videogame of the Fallujah battle from Marines who fought there. Starting in 2003, he worked closely with members of the Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, to make training simulators based on games he'd helped develop. A year later, those same Marines ended up at the center of the Fallujah battle, code-named Operation Phantom Fury. When they came home, Tamte says, several were already contemplating how they could turn their experience into the kind of game they themselves would want to play.
One of those Marines was Eddie Garcia, a sergeant from the Bronx who had suffered shrapnel wounds on the first day of the fighting. He says even before he left the hospital, he was e-mailing Tamte about Fallujah. "I mentioned that since we'd already made one game together, why not make another?" After he recovered, Garcia began regular brainstorming sessions with Tamte and his designers, showing them unclassified maps and photos from his deployment. Garcia had been stationed just outside Fallujah for months before the battle. Notes he kept about every meeting and mission helped bring the experience to life for Tamte and Atomic creative director Juan Benito. The vision of a game that would reenact the first days of Fallujah began to take shape.
Atomic's sprawling office feels almost like a shrine to Phantom Fury, with photos of the fighting pinned to walls and scattered on desks. Graphic designers, still trying to perfect the game, study the posters to help re-create the precise look of Fallujah: the pockmarked cinder blocks and the sagging electric lines. On a recent day, in a studio attached to the entry hall, an Atomic employee was interviewing Jason Arellano, a former Marine sergeant who had been clearing insurgents in a home when a grenade exploded near him and a bullet struck his groin. "As we pushed further and further into the city, we became aware of a more well-trained or disciplined fighter," he said into the camera for a clip that might be inserted in the game. It's not unusual to hear Atomic employees talking about something as technical as the specific properties of an AT-4 shoulder-fired rocket.
Capt. Read Omohundro, who led a Marine company in Fallujah and lost 13 men there, acts as a kind of quality-control manager for Six Days. "I'll say to them, no, that guy has to be facing the other way. This piece of ammunition doesn't blow up so fast, it only detonates this much. You can't be standing next to it when it goes off or you'll become a casualty." In Atomic's conference room, Omohundro recently described to artists and designers what Fallujah looked like when tanks kicked up dust and debris. "It's not sand like at the beach," he said. "It's that talcum-powder crap. It gets into everything. It just hangs around and you're waiting forever for it to go away."
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