The Power Of The Internet: World's Most Tasteless Game Made Hilarious

IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED BY POORLY-ANIMATED HISTORICAL FIGURES DYING IN HILARIOUS WAYS THEN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON’T BOTHER TO READ ANY FURTHER!

November 22nd, 1963. Dallas, Texas. Truly, an unforgettable time and place in modern history.

After all, it was the day before Doctor Who premiered on British television.

Oh yes, and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

But if I may be serious for the first and probably only time in this rambling little post, the assassination of JFK was a pretty big deal. An idealistic young president, a beacon of hope for the entire nation, gunned down in the prime of his life. The world mourned his passing. Many have postulated that America has never truly recovered from that fateful day. Luckily, his assassin, one Lee Harvey Oswald, was quickly captured and everybody was at least satisfied that they got the right guy and no more questions were asked about it, ever.

Oh, if only that were true. Unfortunately, the murky and occasionally conflicting details surrounding JFK’s death turned the event into the mother of all conspiracy theories. It didn’t help matters that Oswald himself was rather mysteriously murdered before he could confess to much of anything. I’m going to stop right there because it’s hardly new subject matter and if you’re really curious you can look it up yourself. You’re on the internet right now, for fuck’s sake.

Suffice to say, JFK’s death spawned countless other theories regarding every tragic or world-changing event that followed. Commies. Lizard People. Jews. (Mostly Jews) Somebody was responsible for stealing your mail. Oh sure, the post office said it was misrouted but of course they’re going to say that, they’re all in on it. It’s gotten to the point that you can tell which one of your friends is a raving idiot by the horrible and insensitive shit they post on their Facebook page the day after the latest school shooting.

 Even so, nothing will top the assassination of JFK on the conspiracy theory food pyramid. Was it even possible that Lee Harvey Oswald pulled off such a crime on his own? Wasn’t it infinitely more believable that LBJ and Marilyn Monroe infested JFK’s brain with an army of experiential nanobots developed by ex-Nazi scientists? In 2004, one plucky independent game developer decided to answer the question once and for all.

 Ladies and gentlemen, I give you JFK: Reloaded.

 
Yes, this was an honest to god, first person shooter video game where you play Lee Harvey Oswald. There are no powerups or rocket launchers. No save points or medikits. It didn’t even have online multiplayer capabilities! It’s just you looking out the window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, trying to shoot JFK in the head. Does that sound appallingly morbid? It totally fucking is. The game got the kind of public backlash you’d expect, but the game developer had a fairly logical defense prepared.

The object of JFK: Reloaded is not to just shoot as many people as possible because there would be no real challenge in that (more on that later). The point of the game is to recreate EXACTLY what Lee Harvey Oswald pulled off. You are scored points accordingly. It has long been held by conspiracy theorists that there was no way Lee Harvey Oswald could have made his famous headshot from that height and distance. The game developer reasoned that getting a bunch of Call Of Duty players (who live for sniping people online and shouting racial slurs into headsets) to try and recreate the exact event was the best way to prove or disprove the possibility. As an interesting side note, nobody HAS gotten a perfect score on the game so maybe it was the Jews all along.

 So there you have it, a totally tasteless game with a rational reason for existing. Was this a misguided attempted at finding the truth or a crass ploy to make some quick cash? We’ll never know, the developer is probably still in hiding. Now that you’ve got your perfect assassin simulation game, it’s time to test it out. Surely, this will result in nothing but scholarly discourse! There was just one thing the developer didn’t count on: gamers are total shitheads.

 
See, although you are rooted to the spot where Oswald made his assassination, you are not limited in your choice of targets. You can shoot at ANYTHING you see. And you’re not limited to the number of shots historically fired by Oswald. You can squeeze off as many rounds as you like before the timer runs out. Are you starting to see how this might break the game? No? Not yet?

 
JFK: Reloaded gives you an impressively detailed (for 2004 technology) layout of the area around Dealey Plaza at the exact moment of the assassination. All the major players are represented by blocky little polygon people riding in the Presidential limo and there is a Secret Service car along with a dozen or so other cars which may or may not be historically accurate, I don’t have the energy to find out but they are there and they all have little people in them that you can shoot if you’re an evil bastard.

 
It’s pretty easy to snipe just about anybody you feel like but that isn’t where the fun is. It’s in causing one car accident that triggers a chain reaction of stupid. All the little people animate the way they should when certain events happen. Beyond that though, the game’s AI is rock stupid. It can only react to the historical events. Anything else results in characters standing around stupidly or random panicked driving. Combine random panicked driving with an early example of ragdoll physics and what you end up with is chaos so ridiculous and over the top that it loops straight around tastelessness and winds up in the far reaches of totally fucking hilarious. To paraphrase one YouTube commenter, it looks like that day could have been A LOT worse.

 

JFK: Reloaded was abandoned by the developer in 2005 (mostly out of shame, I’m guessing) and it’s now freely available on the internet. Just don’t tell them I sent you.