TITLE
The video game assassination of JFK
AUTHOR
Simon Parkin
PUBLICATION
Eurogamer
YEAR
2014
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
41 years after the assassination of the 35th president of the United States, Kirk Ewing was about to stand trial for his murder.“I was in Times Square sitting in the green room at Good Morning America,” he recalls. “A basketball player appeared on the show before me. He’d recently punched someone in the crowd during a game and had been invited onto the programme to apologise. 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. Ewing sat down and the presenter looked him the eye. After a moment’s pause, he asked: “Why did you kill John F. Kennedy?”
[…]
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. 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. The result was controversy on a scale Ewing never anticipated.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Stainless Games
Traffic Games
GAMES MENTIONED
Carmageddon
JFK Reloaded
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Kirk Ewing
TOPICS MENTIONED
Historical Studies
Violence
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive