Atomic Games is still shopping around for a publisher for its controversial Six Days In Fallujah, says company president Peter Tamte.
Atomic sparked a firestorm back in April when it announced Six Days in Fallujah, a game set in the highly controversial Second Battle of Fallujah of the War in Iraq. Families of soldiers decried the game as a crass attempt to capitalize on the war and to make the deaths of their loved ones into entertainment. Konami, the game’s would-be publisher, had apparently not foreseen such trouble, and dropped the game a mere three weeks after announcing it existed.
However, at the Triangle Game Conference at the end of April, Atomic president Peter Tamte emphasized his company’s commitment to Fallujah and to the soldiers who had come to them asking the company to tell their story “through the medium that played the deepest role in their lives, videogames.”
Atomic still wants to finish the game, Tamte told Newsweek, though they needed a publisher to help fund the rest of development – not only to complete the development, but to market and distribute. “We have a lot of people who are interested in the project,” he says. “But I’ll feel better when we sign something and the checks start coming.”
He does admit that Konami and Atomic could have marketed the title more smartly, but that the real hangup for Fallujah‘s critics is their knee-jerk reaction to the word “game” – a word that Tamte feels doesn’t quite do justice to what he and his team are trying to do. “We’re trying to do something that hasn’t been done before, and naturally people use the points of reference they understand,” says Tamte. “It’s hard for anyone to envision it until it’s actually created.”
(Via VG247)
