Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is a 2005 role-playing video game created by Danny Ledonne. The game recreates the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado. Players assume the roles of gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and act out the massacre, with flashbacks relating parts of Harris' and Klebold's past experiences. The game begins on the day of the shooting and follows Harris and Klebold after their suicide to fictional adventures in perdition.
Ledonne had spent many years conceptualizing games, but never created one due to his lack of game design and programming knowledge. He was inspired to create a video game about Columbine by his own experience, being bullied and the effect the shooting had on his life. The game represents a critique of how traditional media sensationalized the shooting, as well as parodying video games themselves. Super Columbine Massacre was created with ASCII's game development program RPG Maker 2000 and took approximately six months to complete. Ledonne initially published the game anonymously, releasing an artist's statement about the work after his identity was revealed. Super Columbine Massacre was released for free online and attracted little attention until 2006, when widespread media coverage fueled hundreds of thousands of downloads.
Upon release in April 2005, reaction to Super Columbine Massacre was negative. The title was criticized for trivializing the victims of the shooting and the actions of Harris and Klebold. The game's cartoon presentation and the side-plot into hell were considered by critics as obscuring the game's message, but it received minor note as a game that transcended the stereotypical associations of the medium as entertainment for children. Super Columbine Massacres themes and content led to it being included in discussions as to whether video games cause violence; the title was later listed as a possible motivating factor of the 2006 Dawson College shooting. The game has been described as an art game, and Ledonne has become a spokesperson for video games as an art form, producing a documentary in 2008 called Playing Columbine about his game and its impact.
Gameplay
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is a role-playing video game. Players control the actions of teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; the pair entered Colorado's Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, and killed 13 people before turning their guns on themselves in a library. Much of the game takes place in a third-person view, with players controlling Harris and Klebold from an overhead perspective. The graphics and characters are deliberately reminiscent of a 16-bit-era video game; while the content is violent, the violence is not graphically rendered.
When players engage in battle, the screen changes to a first-person view of the enemy; enemies are named by stereotypes or occupations, such as "Preppy girl", "Janitor", "Math teacher" and "Jock Type". Combat has two options: "auto play", where the game chooses the weapon to use, or "manual play", in which the player decides to use a hand-to-hand weapon, explosive, gun, or defensive maneuver against foes. Once a battle starts, it is impossible to avoid or escape; the player must kill the enemy or die themselves. Text narrates battle events and actions such as finding a bag or gaining a weapon.
As the game proceeds, flashbacks occur showing events in Harris and Klebold's lives which may have caused them to commit murder; real life events are compressed into the game's timeframe for narrative purposes. Much of the plot is constructed around the events as they are believed to have occurred; lines of the gunmen's dialogue are often lifted verbatim from their writings or from their own home videos of each other. In contrast to the 16-bit graphics are digitized photographs from the shooting or full voice samples from news reports; photos of the school are used as backdrops during battle scenes.
Plot The game begins as Eric Harris' mother wakes him on April 20, 1999. Harris phones Dylan Klebold, and the pair meet in Harris' basement to plot a series of bombings that will precede their planned shooting. The two reminisce about the bullying they experienced at Columbine High and express rage at those they perceive to be their tormentors. Harris and Klebold make a video, apologizing to their parents, collect their weapons, and leave home.
At school, the pair plant timed propane bombs without being detected by security cameras or hall monitors. After the explosives are set, the two stop for a moment on a hill outside the school, discussing their alienation and hostility. After the bombs fail to explode as planned, Harris and Klebold decide to enter the school and murder as many people as they can; the final number killed is up to the player. After roaming around the school shooting innocents, Harris and Klebold commit suicide. A montage of clips showing Harris and Klebold's corpses, students comforting each other, and childhood photos of the gunmen plays.
The game's second half finds Klebold alone in Hell. After combating demons and monsters from the video game Doom, Klebold reunites with Harris, and they profess their enthusiasm for the opportunity to live out their favorite video game. The pair find themselves at the "Isle of Lost Souls", where they meet fictional characters such as Pikachu, Bart Simpson, Mega Man, Mario and personalities including J. Robert Oppenheimer, JonBenét Ramsey, Malcolm X, Ronald Reagan, and John Lennon. Next, they deliver a copy of Ecce Homo to Friedrich Nietzsche before fighting the South Park design of Satan. Upon their victory, Satan congratulates them for their deeds.
The game returns to Columbine High School, where a press conference addresses the murders. Some of the dialogue appears precisely as it was spoken after the actual event, while other lines caricature the political forces at work in the aftermath of the murders. The conference references gun control advocacy, religious fundamentalism, and the media's implication of Marilyn Manson and the video games they played as culpable in the shooting.
Development
Super Columbine Massacre was created by Danny Ledonne of Alamosa, Colorado, then a student and independent filmmaker. As a high school student, the Columbine High School massacre resonated with Ledonne, who said that he himself had once been "a loner", "a misfit" and "a bullied kid" in high school like the shooters. "I was an easy target to be picked on, and that started in kindergarten", he said. "It was the kind of bullying that most kids who were bullied experienced [...] When you get pushed every day, and when you are ostracized not once, not twice, but years in and out, your perception of reality is distorted [...] These things really do warp your understanding and your perception of humanity in some almost irrevocable way", he said.
In 1999, director Stanley Kubrick's death and the Columbine High School shootings occurred within months of each other; Ledonne credited the two events with changing his life. After seeing A Clockwork Orange, Ledonne discovered that film could comment on culture; after the Columbine shootings, he realized he was headed down the same path as the shooters. "It was a bit scary, once I learned more about these boys, because it was like I was looking in the mirror and I didn't want the same fate for myself", Ledonne said. He began taking martial arts, studying film, and saw a therapist. By the time he graduated from Alamosa High School, Ledonne had a 4.0 grade point average and was voted "most likely to succeed" by his peers. He studied film at Emerson College and moved back to Colorado to form his own production company, Emberwild Productions, which mostly edits wedding videos.
In November 2004, Ledonne discovered a program called RPG Maker, which allows a developer to add images, text, story and objectives to design a game; RPG Maker creates the necessary programming automatically. Ledonne had always conceptualized video games throughout his childhood but never produced one due to his lack of technical knowledge; with RPG Maker he was able to fulfill his ambition. Ledonne decided to make a game that would explore why the Columbine shootings occurred, as well as refuting pervasive myths about the shooters and the alleged role video games played in the massacre.
The researching, planning, design and programming of the game took about six months and between 200 and 300 hours of work. All the footage and pictures in the game were taken from the internet. Final Fantasy VI influenced the sprite-based design. Many of the songs in the game are MIDI versions of 1990s grunge and alternative bands such as Radiohead, Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins. Ledonne paid meticulous attention to detail, including giving players access to the exact inventory the gunmen used on their rampage. He watched videos, read newspaper articles and pored over 11,000 pages of documents released by the county government regarding the massacre and the killers.
Ledonne added elements to the game to criticize subjects varying from public reaction to the disaster, to stereotypical role-playing game conventions. Every victory in battle displays the message "another victory for the Trenchcoat Mafia", in reference to the gang that Harris and Klebold were mistakenly affiliated with by the media. Ledonne added the hell segment and populated it with characters from the video game Doom, explaining that "[having the shooters] battle these monsters in an eternal recreation of their favorite videogame was a statement in and of itself." Super Columbine Massacre is the only video game Ledonne has created, and he has no future plans to create another.
Release
The game was made available for download on April 20, 2005, the sixth anniversary of the Columbine massacre. Ledonne sought to remain anonymous at the game's debut to avoid any possible controversy, which he would later regret as it created the impression he had something to hide. Under the alias "Columbin", Ledonne regularly engaged gamers and critics alike on a message board he established to discuss the game's depiction of the shooting and the broader implications of the shooting. Ledonne's identity was revealed by Roger Kovacs, a friend of Rachel Scott, one of the Columbine victims. Kovacs learned of Ledonne's identity by donating to his website via PayPal; after his name and address were posted online, Ledonne stepped forward and was greeted with requests for interviews. "That's when I decided that I had to grow a backbone and stand up for my creation", Ledonne said.
The game is distributed as freeware, with donations in the amount of $1 requested to defray bandwidth costs. Initially, the game attracted little attention, and was downloaded 10,000 times in its first year. In April 2006 Patrick Dugan of web site Gamasutra wrote about the game after meeting its host at Game Developers Conference. Impressed, Dugan sent an email to Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost, who blogged about the game. Brian Crecente of gaming news site Kotaku and the Rocky Mountain News subsequently interviewed Bogost, and the Associated Press and mainstream media picked up the story. The increased visibility resulted in increased coverage, controversy, and downloads; in the first half of May 2006 the game was downloaded more than 30,000 times. Ledonne announced in September 2006 that the game was no longer available for download directly through its website (instead providing download links), as the title's popularity cost too much to sustain; in a single day in September, he reported 8,000 downloads. By March 2007, the game had been downloaded more than 400,000 times.
Reception