The vision of a game that would reenact the first days of Fallujah began to take shape.Ītomic's sprawling office feels almost like a shrine to Phantom Fury, with photos of the fighting pinned to walls and scattered on desks. Notes he kept about every meeting and mission helped bring the experience to life for Tamte and Atomic creative director Juan Benito. Garcia had been stationed just outside Fallujah for months before the battle. "I mentioned that since we'd already made one game together, why not make another?" After he recovered, Garcia began regular brainstorming sessions with Tamte and his designers, showing them unclassified maps and photos from his deployment. He says even before he left the hospital, he was e-mailing Tamte about Fallujah. One of those Marines was Eddie Garcia, a sergeant from the Bronx who had suffered shrapnel wounds on the first day of the fighting. 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. A year later, those same Marines ended up at the center of the Fallujah battle, code-named Operation Phantom Fury. Starting in 2003, he worked closely with members of the Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, to make training simulators based on games he'd helped develop. Tamte says he got the idea to make a videogame of the Fallujah battle from Marines who fought there. "For someone interested in the events there, that can be very powerful." "You can almost occupy the actual space of Fallujah and explore the environment in a videogame," Sicart says. If videogames can overcome stigmas, he says, their interactive technology gives them an advantage. Miguel Sicart, an expert on videogames at the IT University of Copenhagen, says it took decades for people in television and film to figure out how to convey the experience of war (and for audiences to get accustomed to the new media). The effect of television footage beamed from Vietnam directly to the living rooms of Americans was hotly debated throughout the war. The first published photographs of dead American servicemen-including a 1943 shot showing three bodies sprawled out on Buna Beach in New Guinea-prompted a public outcry. For Tracy Miller and other skeptics, the idea that animated shooters can communicate the heroism and sacrifice of Fallujah is deeply misguided.īut efforts to document war in new ways have always garnered skepticism and controversy. "If for some reason it doesn't work, we'll have to think about making some very significant changes to the studio," he says.Ĭan something as weighty and complex as war be conveyed by the same medium that produced Mario Brothers and Grand Theft Auto? Mostly, videogames are associated with mindless entertainment or gratuitous violence or both. And he's staked the fate of his company on the success of the $20 million project. At his studio in Raleigh, N.C., 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. But the 41-year-old executive says he's now attempting something more serious: a documentary-style reconstruction that will be so true to the original battle, gamers will almost feel what it was like to fight in Fallujah in November 2004. A second company he runs, Destineer, makes games with titles like Indy 500 and Fantasy Aquarium. "By making it something people play for fun, they are trivializing the battle," she told NEWSWEEK. Miller listened politely, but remained skeptical. 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 honors the Marines. But now relatives of dead Marines were angry, and the game's distributor and partial underwriter had pulled out of Tamte's project. 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. The 75 employees of one of his companies, Atomic Games, had worked on the endeavor for nearly four years. 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.
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