14 DAY TRIAL // Atomic Games, as the developer, and Konami, as the publisher, are saying that they are planning to create and release Six Days in Fallujah, a videogame that will tackle one of the most known episodes of the current war in Iraq. The title is set to arrive on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 consoles.
The game should be played from a third person perspective and will be set mainly during the Second Battle of Fallujah, which took place from November to December 2004. The fighting was quite tough during that period and a large number of American forces were involved in a street by street fight with Islamic militants and Iraqi resistance fighters, which lead to the destruction of much of the city. The game should incorporate the experiences of Marines who fought in that episode of the war, most of them hailing from the Third Battalion of the First Marine Regiment.
Atomic Games is based in Raleigh, North Carolina and has a history of creating war games in the '90s. Now, the company is involved in providing simulation technology for the military and is said to also be tied to the intelligence gathering community of the United States. This probably gives it access to accounts of the battle and to military information not available to other developers.
Atomic Games is saying that it wants to create a game that will really show the players what modern warfare means, for those fighting and for the territories where the conflicts are being fought. The environments in Six Days in Fallujah will be destructible and the enemy will use the city itself as a weapon, implementing complex tactics and the element of surprise.
Peter Tamte has outlined the challenges that such a game creates, telling the Los Angeles Times that “How do you present the horrors of war in a game that is also entertaining, but also gives people insight into a historical situation in a way that only a video game can provide? Our goal is to give people that insight, of what it's like to be a Marine during that event, what it's like to be a civilian in the city and what it's like to be an insurgent.”