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 endeavour 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 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 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.

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.

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