Thursday, September 14, 2006

"Super Columbine Massacre"

The Post has an AP story on the Montreal college rampage with a nasty Colorado angle:

A man with a black trench coat whose shooting rampage in a Montreal college killed one person and wounded 19 others before he was slain by police said on a blog in his name that he liked to play a role-playing Internet game about the Columbine
shootings . . . .

In postings on a Web site called VampireFreaks.com, blogs in [shooter Kimveer] Gill's name show more than 50 photos depicting the young man in various poses holding a rifle and donning a long black trench coat and combat boots.

One photo has a tombstone with his name printed on it - below it the phrase: "Lived fast died young. Left a mangled corpse." . . .

He said on the site that he liked to play "Super Columbine Massacre," an Internet-based computer game that simulated the April 20, 1999, shootings at the Colorado high school by two of its students that left 13 people dead.

According to the Rocky,
The game's creator, who refused to identify himself to the Rocky Mountain News, did agree to an online interview. He said he wanted to create something profoundly unique and confrontational that would "promote a real dialogue on the subject of school shootings."

Several Columbine families, after being told about the game, had plenty to say.

"It's wrong," said Joe Kechter, whose son, Matt, was murdered in the Columbine library.

"We live in a culture of death," said Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Dan, was gunned down on a sidewalk outside the school, "so it doesn't surprise me that this stuff has become so commonplace. It disgusts me. You trivialize the actions of two murderers and the lives of the innocent."

And Judy Brown, who has been immersed in the Columbine controversy along with her husband, Randy, called it a "sad and sick thing to make a video game out of a tragedy where 13 innocent people were murdered."
Here's the Q and A with the anonymous creator of Super Columbine Massacre, conducted by the paper's video gaming writer Brian D. Crecente.

Update: The Rocky story quoted above seems to have been disappeared and replaced by this one from AP. Strange.

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