The US Marine sergeant inched down the alley, eyes trained on his gun’s sights, aware that one wrong move could be his last. Turning a blind corner, a shout of Allahu akbar went up and machinegun fire thudded into the walls around him.
The sergeant screamed for “suppressing fire”, and the screen faded to black.
The battle scene comes from a trailer for Six Days in Fallujah, a video game in which the player engages in firefights based on “true stories” from the 2004 battle against al-Qaeda, when more than 100 Americans, 3,000 jihadists and 800 civilians were killed.
To Iraqis in the city, many of whom were trapped as the battle raged for six weeks through their streets, the game has turned harrowing memories into western entertainment and reduced their suffering to a prop in a story focused on American heroism.
Abu Omer, a professor who was 22 when he had to flee the fighting, said that the game could only bring resentment from the Iraqi people. “How can I communicate to my students that there is a game where there are Americans having fun killing us?” he said. “The Americans could not distinguish [between civilians and armed fighters], they killed anyone they saw on the street.”
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The game takes its inspiration from the second battle for Fallujah in November and December 2004. Some 850 British troops from the Black Watch maintained a cordon around the city while 8,000 American troops carried out the main assault.
It is not the first time that Six Days in Fallujah has courted controversy. In 2009 the Japanese video games company Konami announced that it was dropping the title after complaints from those who had been affected by the war.
Highwire Games, the new developers, said the aim was not to sully or simplify the memory of Fallujah.
Jaime Griesemer, its creative director, said: “Games are not toys any more: they’ve proven they are capable of dealing with serious topics and we’re trying to see if they’re capable of documenting history. Video games can be powerful tools for creating empathy.”
