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NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
The Story Behind ‘JFK Reloaded’, One of Gaming’s Weirdest Controversies
"You can espouse these crazy conspiracy theories and everyone’s fine, but if someone builds a recreation in software? Nope.
www.vice.com
“As I watch the limo creep down Dealey Plaza, I put my finger on the trigger and peer down my rifle’s telescope,” reads a 2004 story in Slate. “I can see my target in the crosshairs. It’s Nov. 22, 1963. I’m trying to kill the President.”
The writer was not indulging a violent personal fantasy or an imagined time travel exercise. He was playing JFK Reloaded, a video game from Scottish developer Traffic Games, which promised something that was both a gory first-person shooter and a serious historical simulation.
Released on the 41st anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the “docu-game” allowed players to recreate Lee Harvey Oswald’s three gunshots from the window of the Book Depository in Dallas and would ultimately rate them on how closely their actions and movements cohered with the official story as laid out in the Warren Commission’s report and famously captured in the Zapruder film.
To maximise their score, the player’s first shot had to miss its target entirely, the second had to pass through Kennedy’s neck and strike Texas Governor John Connally in the chest, and the third had to fatally wound the President’s head. Any deviation from the official record of events — like by shooting First Lady Jackie Kennedy, or one of the other cars in the motorcade — would incur a points penalty.
It’s not entirely as self-serious as it sounds. It’s a video game, after all.
JFK Reloaded offered the ability to tweak the in-game physics to a cartoonish degree, presenting the tantalising opportunity to turn the sombre events of November 22 into bloody slapstick comedy, complete with a “Chaos Meter” tracking how comically ahistorical the simulation was getting.
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