Can a Game Based on the Iraq War be Apolitical?
Is a “realistic” game about war that’s somehow entertaining an irreconcilable paradox? That’s the question indirectly posed by Six Days in Fallujah, an upcoming third-person shooter from Atomic Games, the same company (in name, if not members) responsible for the seminal series of Close Combat real-time tactical wargames that ushered in complex psychological soldier morale models in the 1990s. Six Days in Fallujah follows a squad of U.S. Marines over a six day span coinciding with the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. Apparently the game came about after the 3rd Battalion 1st Marines — then working with Atomic to develop training tools for the Marines — was deployed to Iraq and engaged in the First Battle of Fallujah. “When they came back from Fallujah,” explains Atomic president Peter Tamte in an interview with GamePro, “they asked us to create a videogame about their experiences there, and it seemed like the right thing to do.” The last “realistic” military game from Atomic (working
