Shafaq News / A Seattle-based development team is reviving a controversial project, where they plan to use a video game to tell the stories from the ground of one of the best-known battles of the Iraq War, GeekWire reported.
Six Days in Fallujah is described as a “first-person tactical military shooter,” based on information collected from U.S. veterans and Iraqi civilians who fought in and witnessed the Second Battle of Fallujah.
That conflict, which took place over the course of six weeks in late 2004 in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, was between U.S. coalition troops and a mixed force of insurgents from multiple organizations in Iraq, including Al-Qaeda. During the battle, Fallujah was considered one of the most dangerous urban combat theaters in U.S. military history.
The idea behind Six Days in Fallujah is to create a realistic first-person shooter as a sort of interactive historical document, employing the immersive nature of the medium and genre as a tool to help the player understand this particular moment in time. Six Days combines personal interviews, video footage, photographs, and gameplay, striving to be “the most authentic military shooter to date,” with the developers working alongside both military and civilian survivors of the conflict.
The game started with a 2005 proposal by Eddie Garcia, a Marine sergeant who was wounded in the Second Battle of Fallujah. “Sometimes the only way to understand what’s true is to experience reality for yourself,” Garcia said in the initial press release. “Video games can help all of us understand real-world events in ways other media can’t.”
Six Days in Fallujah was subsequently announced in 2009 as an upcoming project by the Austin, Texas-based developer Atomic Games. Previously known for its game Breach, Atomic Games had gotten involved with the project after being approached by a group of veterans, due to Atomic’s history of making training software for the U.S. Marine Corps. Six Days was planned for a release on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, with the Japanese company Konami attached as its publisher and funding partner
Shortly after its reveal, Six Days in Fallujah drew immediate criticism from both veterans and anti-war organizations, particularly in the UK. As a result, Konami dropped the game within a couple of weeks of its initial debut.
Six Days in Fallujah is scheduled for release on PC and consoles at an unspecified point later this year.
