> > I wonder what would happen if someone marketed a game about assassinating the president?
>
> They have. In 2004 a company released a game called "JFK Reloaded" in which the player got to recreate the Kennedy assassination.
>

That game is nutty. I tried it out a few months ago. The point of the game is to try to take three shots from your sixth floor sniper nest, and time them exactly right to perfectly recreate the assasination. So, the order of the shots has to go something like this:

Shot 1: Has to come at the right time (I can't remember the actual timing) and, more importantly, has to *miss*. Since you're trying to replicate the Oswald shots perfectly, and since the prevailing theory is that Oswald missed on his first shot, you too have to miss. This leads to the paradox that it is actually better to just fire into the ground deliberately on your first shot than it is to aim at anything.

Shot 2: The so-called "magic bullet". Your second shot has to be so many seconds after your first shot. It has to enter Kennedy's upper back/neck area, exit his throat, wound Governor Connoley in precicely the right way, and end up lodged in in the Governor's wrist. This is the one that is just absurdly hard. You have to time it just exactly perfectly--both absolutely (in relation to the start of the simulation) and reletively (in relation to the firing of your first shot) to pull it off. It's basically just luck. Of course, Oswald wasn't TRYING to do this--he was of course trying to hit Kennedy in the head and kill him, and this near-miss resulted instead.

Shot 3: Has to be so many seconds after shot 2, and has to be the headshot that kills Kennedy. In isolation, this is actually the easiest shot to pull off (well, not counting the deliberate miss of shot 1 I guess). If the object of the game was just to get this result, it'd be easy. But since you're trying to exactly duplicate what actually happened, you'll be extremely, insanely lucky just to get to this point and still be in position to "win".

It's a really creepy game. Of course, once I got past the creepiness of the whole thing (and gave up on trying to faithfully recreate the Oswald shots) I invented my own game in which I tried to cause as much havoc as possible. See, the simulation ends a few seconds after any vehichle leaves Dealy Plaza. However, it's possible to bottle up the vehicles forever by shooting the driver of the lead car and causing a pileup (among many other methods I came up with) and then just spend your time shooting people randomly (unlike Oswald, you magically have unlimited ammo for some reason). I'm not sure how the simulation figures an end point once no vehicle is able to exit the plaza, but I think it's programmed to be no more than about five minutes long, as I was never able to continue longer than that.

The game was supposedly designed as a way to debunk conspiracy theorists who claim Oswald couldn't have pulled off the shots alone. How you can "prove" anything like that with a computer simulation in which you're not dealing with the kick of a rifle or anything like that is beyond me, but one thing that DID strike me is how much easier it was to get the kill shot if you didn't bother to wait for the motorcade to go around the corner and start driving away. If you just shoot Kennedy in the face as he's coming right at you down the street, it's stupid-simple. The only plausible reason I can think of for why Oswald didn't do this himself is that everyone would have been facing in his general direction when he was shooting, rather than away from him. He might have feared being seen if he took the easier shot, and waited for the comparatively harder shot to try to avoid detection.

-- Dave