I, Columbine Killer

Clive Thompson

I barrel into the Columbine High School cafeteria, pull down the fire alarm, and the kids erupt into chaos. Then I pull out my Savage-Springfield 12-gauge pump-action, which I've sawed off to 26 inches for maximum lethality. A jock stumbles across my path: With one blast, he lies dead on the floor.

"This is what we've always wanted to do!" hollers my fellow killer, Dylan Klebold. "This is awesome!"

The I in these previous paragraphs is, of course, Eric Harris -- one of the two infamous teenage shooters in the Columbine High School shootings of 1999. I'm playing one of the most controversial games in existence right now: Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a homebrew role-playing game that puts you in Harris' shoes.

As you'd imagine, the game has been sandblasted with criticism since it was released early in 2005. Families of Columbine victims denounced it; a Miami Herald editorialist called it a "monstrosity." The game -- and its creator, the 24-year-old Danny Ledonne -- came under even more fire last year when a school shooter at Dawson College in Quebec was discovered to have played Super Columbine.

Still, it didn't capture the attention of the gaming community -- until last week, when Slamdance booted the game out of its annual Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition. The competition organizers had originally lobbied Ledonne to enter the game, and the jury selected it as a finalist.

But as Slamdance approached, cofounder Peter Baxter decided that Super Columbine was simply too hot a potato. There were legal concerns, he told me (though he was vague about them); and "there was a question of our moral obligations to the families of the victims."

Fair enough. If Baxter has moral concerns, he's certainly allowed to act on them. But given how politically radioactive the game has become, you might well wonder: What's it actually like? Does it exploit the tragedy for cheap thrills? Or does it actually have artistic merit -- offering a new way to think about Columbine?

Right off the bat, Ledonne tries to put his critics off guard by delivering precisely the opposite of what you'd expect. Nobody will be able to use Super Columbine to live out explicit fantasies of gore or train themselves to shoot up a high school.

That's because it's anything but a graphically sophisticated, blood-soaked shoot-em-up. On the contrary, Super Columbine was designed to look like a clunky Nintendo game from the mid '90s, with low-rez, pixilated characters the size of sugar cubes, and cheesy MIDI music. When you kill someone, the avatar looks like a mashed red blot.

What strikes you, instead, is Ledonne's attention to narrative detail. He painstakingly researched the killers' life stories using publicly released police investigations of the pair, and the game thus includes all manner of detail I never knew. When I started off in Harris' house, I found a box of Luvox, an antidepressant he was on that prevented him getting into the Marines. When I met up with Klebold in a basement, we sat down in front of the VCR to watch the "I've seen the horror" speech from Apocalypse Now, a movie they apparently loved.

Ledonne actually reconstructed copious dialogue for the pair, pulled from real-life transcripts of what they said on the day of the shooting -- including survivor reports and their own videotapes of themselves. (He estimates 80 percent of the dialogue in the game is lifted from real life.) It's oddly mesmerizing: They wonder about what the reaction will be to the massacre ("pass more gun laws, probably"), reminisce about old times, gird themselves for battle and explicitly compare the attack to video games. "It's gonna be like Doom, man!" Dylan exults.

You're constantly reminded of how creepily unbalanced Harris and Klebold were. One minute they're tossing off nihilistic riffs: "When I'm in my human form, knowing I'm going to die, everything has a touch of triviality to it," Klebold muses. The next minute they're quoting Shakespeare: "Good wombs hath borne bad sons."

Harris is sad that his parents will be blamed for his evil acts ("My parents are the best fucking parents I have ever known. My dad is great. I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse").

And they perennially break into bitter recriminations about the popular kids they feel have tormented them. "If you could see all the anger I've stored over the past four fucking years. I'm going to kill you all," Klebold seethes.

The upshot is that Ledonne has done a surprisingly good job of painting the emotional landscape of the pair -- whipsawing from self-pity to pompous grandiosity and blinding rage, then back again.