"I got that one printed on a T-shirt," says Ewing. A Reverend in the mid-west called me a 'purveyor of electronic wickedness'." Later, when the Kennedy family heard about the game's existence, JFK's brother, Ted, denounced the work as 'despicable'. The Daily Mail door-stepped my parents to see what they thought about what I'd done - as if they knew what was going on. "There were numerous death threats in the mail. "I had an unbelievable amount of violence directed towards me," he says. "For an entire week intelligent people unpicked my personality in front of an audience of millions." This trial by media was just the start of the onslaught. "I was ferried by car around New York City, moving from TV station to radio station and back again," Ewing recalls. The result was controversy on a scale Ewing never anticipated. But JFK: Reloaded, a game which allowed players to assume the role of Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old sniper who murdered the president on November 22, 1963, hit a different kind of national nerve. In 2002 he worked as game director on State of Emergency, a game published by Rockstar Games that was denounced by Washington state politicians for replicating the 1999 World Trade Organization riots. Kirk Ewing, who now works at augmented reality outfit Zappar as well as Veemee. Before joining the video game industry he worked in television, producing an episode of the current affairs programme Dispatches for Channel 4 and making several appearances on the long-running show GamesMaster. "I've had to deal with the consequences of my actions a great deal over my life, so it was no huge surprise," he says in his mischievous Scottish brogue. After a moment's pause, he asked: "Why did you kill John F. Ewing sat down and the presenter looked him the eye. He made his apology and promptly announced the launch of his new rap CD." As the athlete left the stage and the applause died away, Ewing was ushered onto the TV programme's set. He'd recently punched someone in the crowd during a game and had been invited onto the programme to apologise. "A basketball player appeared on the show before me. "I was in Times Square sitting in the green room at Good Morning America," he recalls. You can, if you wish, kill Jackie instead.41 years after the assassination of the 35th president of the United States, Kirk Ewing was about to stand trial for his murder. Or sometimes the driver dies with his foot on the accelerator, driving the car off the road and into a lamppost. Shoot the driver first, and the motorcade comes to a halt, allowing you to pick off anyone you want. While the game’s ostensible purpose is simply to re-kill Kennedy as accurately as possible, you can perform any number of alternative scenarios. These are real people who still have immediate living relatives-or, in the case of Nellie Connally, are still alive. John Connally and his wife Nellie) are completely recognizable. When you peer through the rifle scope, the faces of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy (and Texas Gov. Even war games where you’re theoretically fighting a real enemy-like German or American or Japanese armies-don’t really feel personal. When I play blood-soaked shoot-’em-up games, the vamped-up violence doesn’t really bother me-the more cartoonish the action, the fewer consequences the game seems to have. As a physics simulation, it’s remarkable. Then you get a 3-D model of the limo that you can rotate however you want, with the bullet trajectories traced in freeze-frame. After each round, the game lets you view the scene in a dozen different ways, including the classic Zapruder film angle or even from the perspective of a camera mounted on the limo. Sometimes I’d hit the back of the limo and the bullet would careen forward, smashing the glass other times it would embed itself in the metal. Every bullet bounces around with a super-realistic trajectory, behaving in the incredibly complicated way that bullets do. That’s part of the pleasure of everything from the Sims to Super Mario 64.Īfter playing JFK Reloaded for a couple of hours, I have to give Traffic credit for the game’s unbelievably precise physics. If people still don’t believe that Oswald acted alone, why not create a realistic 3-D simulation of the event to show it could have worked that way? This is what video games are uniquely suited to do-set up a system and let people mess around in it so they can discover what’s possible and what’s impossible. On its face, this is an interesting concept.
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