Peter Tamte was months away from completing his dream projectturning the largest urban battle of the Iraq War into a videogamewhen it all seemed to fall apart. The 75 employees of one of his companies,Atomic Games,had worked on the endeavour for nearly four years. Theyd 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 games distributor and partial underwriter had pulled out of Tamtes 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 honours the Marines. Miller listened politely,but remained sceptical. By making it something people play for fun,they are trivialising the battle, she told Newsweek. At his studio in Raleigh,North Carolina,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 hes staked the fate of his company on the success of the $20 million project. If for some reason it doesnt work,well have to think about making some very significant changes to the studio, he says. Mostly,videogames are associated with mindless entertainment or gratuitous violence or both. For Tracy Miller and other sceptics,the idea that animated shooters can communicate the heroism and sacrifice of Fallujah is deeply misguided. 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 hed helped develop. A year later,those same Marines ended up at the centre 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. 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. 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. Ill say to them,no,that guy has to be facing the other way. This piece of ammunition doesnt blow up so fast,it only detonates this much. You cant be standing next to it when it goes off or youll become a casualty. Omohundro says many of his troops would play shooter games on their Xboxes or other consoles after patrolling all day in Iraq. It seems pretty natural to me that these guys would want to have their war documented in a videogame. But on April 9,when Atomic showed a 30-second promotional clip at a publicity event put on by the games distributor,Konami,Fallujah relatives responded immediately. The war is not a game,and neither was the Battle of Fallujah, the group Gold Star Families Speak Out said in a statement. For Konami and Atomic Games to minimise the reality of an ongoing war and at the same time profit off the deaths of people close to us by making it entertaining is despicable. In an e-mail to the Fallujah families dated May 22,John Farnsworth,Atomics studio director and an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel,wrote: I have the highest regard for our troops in uniform and their families,for their brave willingness to sacrifice liberty,country,family and friend. Out of respect,we have not included any fallen Marine in the interactive reenactments. Tamte is now negotiating with a few other potential investors. With Dina Maron in Washington
