The Battle Over the Battle of Fallujah

Mr. Tamte, who are you fooling? $20 million was not about honoring them but about making money. Excuse me but if you wanted to honor them and make people understand what it was like, then you'd be closer to it doing it the way Ken Burns does it, not by turning it into a video game. I have no doubt you care about them but it seems you spent a lot of time and money for your own sake and not their's or the family members of the fallen. What do you think $20 million could have done for any of the organizations trying to care for them because they didn't play a game, they lived thru it? What do you think that kind of money could have done for the families of the fallen or for the wounded? I'm sure you and your employees could have found a lot better way of honoring them than to do this.

The Battle Over the Battle of Fallujah
A videogame so real it hurts.

By Dan Ephron NEWSWEEK
Published Jun 6, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009


Peter Tamte was months away from completing his dream project—turning the largest urban battle of the Iraq War into a videogame—when it all seemed to fall apart. The 75 employees of one of his companies, Atomic Games, had worked on the endeavor for nearly four years. They'd toiled to make Six Days in Fallujah as realistic as possible, weaving in real war footage and interviews with Marines who had fought there. But now relatives of dead Marines were angry, and the game's distributor and partial underwriter had pulled out of Tamte's project. On May 26, he got on the phone to Tracy Miller, whose son was killed by a sniper in Fallujah, and tried to win her over by arguing that the game honors the Marines. Miller listened politely, but remained skeptical. "By making it something people play for fun, they are trivializing the battle," she told NEWSWEEK.

Tamte is not above triviality. A second company he runs, Destineer, makes games with titles like Indy 500 and Fantasy Aquarium. But the 41-year-old executive says he's now attempting something more serious: a documentary-style reconstruction that will be so true to the original battle, gamers will almost feel what it was like to fight in Fallujah in November 2004. At his studio in Raleigh, N.C., Tamte has been helped by dozens of Fallujah vets who have advised him on the smallest details, from the look of the town to the operation of the weapons. And he's staked the fate of his company on the success of the $20 million project. "If for some reason it doesn't work, we'll have to think about making some very significant changes to the studio," he says.
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