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The long, strange saga of Six Days in Fallujah’s arrival on Steam

3K View2023-06-23

It’s been fourteen years since the announcement of Six Days in Fallujah, a gritty tactical shooter set during one of the most violent clashes of the war in Iraq. In that time, the game has faced two separate rounds of controversy—over very different reasons—and been jostled between publishers. So what is Six Days in Fallujah, and why has it proven so contentious, years before it was ready to launch?

Six Days in Fallujah was first imagined as one of the first military shooters to directly deal with actual events in the Iraq War, which landed it in hot water in 2009. Family members of soldiers who died in the second battle of Fallujah, the events portrayed in the game, were concerned that creating a video game based on the conflict was distasteful and crass. The criticism was severe enough to convince Konami to back out of the project as publisher, leaving developer Atomic Games to fend for itself.

While Konami never officially pulled the plug on the project, its withdrawal from Six Days in Fallujah effectively canceled the project—or at least, mothballed it while Atomic Games founder Peter Tamte, who had worked in marketing at Apple and Bungie in the late 1990s, searched for new publishing partners.

Tamte went on to found Victura Games, which is now publishing Six Days in Fallujah. Almost a decade after it was originally put on ice, the game was back in active development—and once again, the announcement generated controversy. In early 2021, Victura released a new trailer for Six Days that featured newsreel video and interview footage. It highlighted the firsthand accounts of the battle by marines and Iraqi civilians who were present, with in-game footage showing fireteams moving through houses to search for “insurgents”—members of Al-Qaeda and other militia groups that were dedicated to keeping US forces out of the city.

I spoke with Tamte for a story about Six Days in Fallujah in 2021, initially about the goals his team had set for this second attempt to finish the game, and then about the new wave of criticism it faced. This time, the major concerns critics voiced were over Six Days’ point of view. Would this be another attempt to justify the US occupation of Iraq, casting it in a heroic light, glossing over the indiscriminate violence committed by American forces, and leaving out the perspective of Iraqis who bore the brunt of the war’s horror?

Tamte assured me this was not the case. He said Six Days in Fallujah developers worked with a journalist to interview more than a dozen Iraqi citizens with firsthand knowledge of the battle. Victura also sent a team to Fallujah in 2020 to survey some of the sites depicted in the game and gather more accounts from residents. The company also interviewed a group of Iraqis who had recently immigrated to the United States.

Based on my discussions with Tamte, I think it’s clear that he views Six Days in Fallujah as a new form of documentary. It’s journalism dressed up like a triple-A game, a new vehicle for telling important stories about the world as it is. I think that’s a genuinely exciting idea.

There are, however, a lot of potential pitfalls, and it remains to be seen how well Victura has managed to avoid them in Six Days in Fallujah. First, even the most dedicated journalists can struggle to accurately relate a story from a perspective they don’t share, and their own perspective can blind them to important realities their subjects face. Deciding what to include in a story necessarily involves deciding what to leave out, and as game developer and educator Rami Ismail put it to me, when the neighborhood doors get kicked down, which side are we seeing?

Further, even if Six Days in Fallujah manages to handle its subject matter responsibly—which I sincerely hope it does—is there a danger of the message being lost in the medium? To put it another way, is a tactical first-person shooter the best way to get this story across, or does that genre come with too many baked-in assumptions and motivations for players to see anything but targets on their screen? Will players be talking more about recoil patterns and damage values than about the impact Fallujah has had on the lives of those who survived?

All of that remains to be seen, but we can start finding out now. Six Days in Fallujah is now available in early access on Steam.

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