Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
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| Super Columbine Massacre RPG! | |
|---|---|
 Harris and Klebold in the school cafeteria of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. |
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| Developer(s) | Daniele Ledonne |
| Designer(s) | Daniele Ledonne |
| Engine | RPG Maker |
| Release date(s) | 2005 |
| Genre(s) | RPG |
| Mode(s) | single player |
| Platform(s) | Windows |
| Media | download |
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is a controversial computer game centered on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado in the town of Littleton. It was developed by 24 year old Daniele Ledonne,[1] using a game-making program called RPG Maker.
Contents |
[edit] Game Features
[edit] Gameplay
The opening screen displays the following statement: "Welcome to Super Columbine Massacre RPG! You play as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on that fateful day in the Denver suburb of Littleton. How many people they kill is ultimately up to you." Upon selecting "Start", the first thing the player encounters is a quotation set to a black background:
The purest surreal act would be to go into a crowd and fire at random.
André Breton, (1896-1966)
A player may opt for the "auto play" mode, in which the game chooses the weapon, or "manual play" mode, in which the player decides whether to use a hand-to-hand weapon, gun, explosive, or defensive move. Once a battle starts, it is impossible to avoid or escape: the player must kill the "enemy" or die.
Much of the plotline is constructed around the events precisely as they are believed to have occurred, down to the very minute at which the bombs were set to explode. The boys' dialogue is often lifted verbatim from their writings, or from their own home videos of each other.
[edit] Story
The game follows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold through Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, the date of the Columbine shootings. In the first part of the game, the events unfold as they are believed to have occurred the morning prior to the attack.
Harris is awakened by his mother, and phones Klebold. They meet in Harris' basement to plot the school bombings that would precede the shootings. Photographs are shown from the video that Harris and Klebold made before leaving that morning, discussing their motives for the massacre. The two reminisce about the bullying they experienced at Columbine High, expressing both rage at those they perceived to be their tormentors, and remorse for what they were about to do. They apologized to their parents, told them that they loved them, and asked them not to blame themselves. They collect their guns and bombs, pack up a duffel bag with the weapons, and leave home.
In the next scene they are standing outside their high school. The player must guide them to the cafeteria to plant their timed propane bombs without being detected by security cameras or hall monitors. The timing of the bombs parallels the facts of the actual events, as per the boys' written documentation of their plans. After the explosives are set, the two stop for a moment outside the school on a hill overlooking the city of Denver, discussing once again their philosophies, alienation and hostility.
After the bombs fail to explode as planned, Harris and Klebold decide to go into the school and murder as many people as they can. The player is armed with a Tec-9, two shotguns, a carbine rifle, and many other bombs and weapons: the same weapons the shooters had at the school in the actual event. Their "enemies" are only named as stereotypes or occupations, such as "Preppy girl", "Janitor", "Math teacher", and "Jock", among others.
The player decides whether or not to kill, while making his way from the school cafeteria to the library. Eventually, after the police arrive, Harris and Klebold commit suicide. The actual grisly security photographs of the shooters' bodies are shown, followed by a montage of crime scene and newspaper photographs; finally, family photographs of Klebold and Harris from early childhood to high school are shown.
The game begins its second part at this point, with the player taking control of Klebold alone, as he finds himself in Hell. Unlike the first half of the game, this segment departs from historical accounts, as the player makes his way through Hell while combating demons and monsters from the computer game Doom. After reuniting with Harris, the two joyfully proclaim their excitement at the prospect of living out their favorite video game.
After more fighting, the pair find themselves at the "Isle of Lost Souls", where they meet several fictional characters and dead celebrities, including Bart Simpson, Mega Man, Mario, Ronald Reagan and John Lennon, who regales them with "Imagine". Next, they deliver a copy of Ecce Homo to the soul of Friedrich Nietzsche, who praises Trent Reznor, quoting his contemporaneous song "Heresy" (which itself quotes Nietzsche, in declaring "God is dead"). Continuing on, they encounter and do battle with a caricature of Satan (exactly as depicted in South Park). Upon their victory, Satan congratulates them, rewarding them with a flying dragon for use in travelling about Hell. After locating the two halves of the Satanic Bible and returning them to Satan, the player has completed the game.
The game returns to outside Columbine High School, where a press conference addresses the tragedy. Much of the dialogue is rendered precisely as it was spoken after the actual event, though some of it does caricature the political forces at work in the aftermath of the tragedy; the exchange references gun control advocacy, religious fundamentalism (in the form of church-state separation), and media scapegoating attempting to implicate Marilyn Manson and video games.
[edit] Presentation
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was developed using the RPG Maker software, which is designed to create console role-playing games reminiscent of Super Nintendo titles from the mid-1990s, particularly from the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. Hence, the game generally looks and plays like a video game from that era, with a 2D overhead view, sprite-based graphics, and low quality MIDI music. Many of the songs in the game are MIDI versions of '90s grunge and alternative music by bands such as Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, in keeping with the popular music of the times.
The game does occasionally break from these formats, inserting crude digitized photographs from the incident, and including full voice samples as a contrast to the artificial 16-bit video game world. For each of the battle scenes, real photographs from Columbine High School are used as backgrounds. Video surveillance pictures from the cafeteria and bloody pictures of the dead bodies of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on the floor of the library are also displayed.
This style is deliberate and apparently satirical, as the seriousness of the events contrasts with the crudeness of the medium itself; because video games were themselves proposed as a motivating factor behind the shooting in the wake of the actual events, the crude graphics of the era now depict the atrocity. When the title screen starts up, a Marilyn Manson song plays, because Manson was blamed in the media for corrupting Klebold and Harris.
Many examples of the game's satire are rooted in video game conventions: for instance, in Final Fantasy games, characters regularly equip sets of armor or weapons to boost their statistical power, including such accessories as magic gauntlets or rings; in SCMRPG, the player can discover stat-boosting "accessories" such as a CD-ROM of Doom or a Marilyn Manson CD. Also, the presentation of the flashback scenes which depict the shooters in a sympathetic light are reminiscent of similar scenes from Final Fantasy VI, down to the muted color palette and melodramatic background music used to evoke a sense of nostalgia for the characters.
Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas noted that it is "not especially bloody."[2]
[edit] Development
The game was created by Daniele Ledonne, a 24-year-old aspiring filmmaker who grew up in Alamosa, Colorado. He has stated that he created the game because he himself had once been "a loner," "a misfit" and "a bullied kid" in high school. He described the game as an "indictment of our society at large."
Ledonne said he spent more than six months designing the game. Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is the only video game he has ever created, and he has no future plans to create another. In 2002 Ledonne made a short film based on Ted Kaczynski's short story Ship of Fools.
[edit] Release and later history
The game was made available for download on April 20, 2005, the sixth anniversary of the Columbine massacre. However, the release was not covered in the mainstream or gaming press until the time surrounding the anniverary in the following year, 2006. The game is distributed as freeware, though for a brief time when the site was becoming popular a $1 donation was requested for site hosting expenses.
[edit] Popularity
Ledonne reports 40,000 downloads of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! between April 2005 and mid-May 2006. A record 8,000 downloads on May 17, 2006 temporarily crashed the host server.
[edit] Controversy
Ledonne, anticipating a negative reaction to the game, sought to remain anonymous after its debut, using the alias "Columbin" on the few occasions he was contacted by a reporter. His identity was revealed by Roger Kovacs, a 22-year-old web developer who said his search to identify "Columbin" was a response to his anger over the game. Kovacs was a friend of one of the Columbine victims, Rachel Scott.
"The game does not glorify school shootings," Ledonne told The Washington Post. "If you make it far enough into the game, you see very graphic photos of Eric and Dylan lying dead. I can't think of a more effective way to confront their actions and the consequences those actions had."
[edit] Montreal's Dawson College Shooting
- For more details on this topic, see Dawson College shooting.
Kimveer Gill, injured 19 Dawson College students and killed Anastasia De Sousa on September 13, 2006 during a shooting rampage at Dawson College. Kimveer expressed his love of the game on his internet blog[3]. Ledonne expressed his reaction to the shooting in an interview a week later[1].
[edit] References
- ^ Columbine Creator Unmasked
- ^ Vargas, Jose Antonio. "Shock, Anger Over Columbine Video Game", The Washington Post, 2006-05-20, pp. C1. Retrieved on 2006-09-16. (in English)
- ^ "4 shooting victims still in intensive care" (HTML), CBC News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2006-09-14. Retrieved on 2006-09-16. (in English)
- Crecente, Brian D. (2006, May 6). Columbine Survivor Talks About Columbine RPG. Kotaku.
- Vaughan, Kevin & Crecente, Brian D. (2006, May 16). Video game reopens Columbine wounds. Rocky Mountain News.
- Crecente, Brian D. (2006, May 16). Q&A: Creator of Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Rocky Mountain News Free Play Blog.
- Artist's Statement: A Meditation on Super Columbine Massacre RPG! by Daniele Ledonne on the SCMRPG! website.
- Vargas, Jose Antonio. (2006, May 20). Shock, Anger Over Columbine Video Game. The Washington Post, p. C1
- Crecente, Brian D. (2006, May 24). Gamer was on deadly road The Rocky Mountain News.
[edit] External links
- Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Web Site
- Super Columbine Massacre RPG! at MobyGames
- TV interview with Daniele Ledonne on CANOE news
- Daniele Ledonne talks about the Dawson shooting and Super Columbine Massacre RPG! on Kotaku
- Columbine Survivor Richard Castaldo Talks About Columbine RPG! On Kotaku.
- PCWorld's top 5 worst games ever
