The American attack on Fallujah during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 still stirs controversy among interested parties, but this didn't stop publisher Konami and developer Atomic Games from creating a new survival horror game based on the "Six Days In Fallujah."
Atomic Games has been developing simulation and training tools for the United States Marine Corps when the a Marines battalion participated in the first battle of Fallujah and asked the company to create a videogame about their experiences there. "It seemed like the right thing to do," Atomic Games president, Peter Tamte said before adding that the goal of Six Days in Fallujah is to create the most realistic military shooter possible, and that "Ultimately, all of us are curious about what it would really be like to be in a war. I've been playing military shooters for ages, and at a certain point when I'm playing the game, I know it's fake. You can tell a bunch of guys sat in a room and designed it. That's always bothered me."
Tamte then described the project as "a meticulously recreated in-game version of Fallujah, complete with real life Marines lending their names and likenesses, as well as recreations of specific events from the battle. It's almost like time travel. You're experiencing the events as they really happened."
The development team interviewed over seventy individuals, composed of the returning Marines, Iraqi civilians, enemy insurgents, war historians, and senior military officials, and learned the psychological complexity of the battle.
Atomic Games classify Six Days In Fallujah as a survival horror game, but not in the usual sense. The fear in Six Days does not come from the undead or supernatural, but from the unpredictable, terrifying, and very real tactics employed by the insurgents that were scattered throughout Fallujah. "Many of the insurgents had no intention of leaving the city alive, so their entire mission might be to lie in wait, with a gun trained at a doorway, for days just waiting for a Marine to pop his head in. They went door-to-door clearing houses, and most of the time the houses would be empty. But every now and then, they would encounter a stunningly lethal situation... which, of course, rattled the Marines psychologically."
Six Days In Fallujah is under development for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Windows PC.