V-Tech Rampage

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V-Tech Rampage
Developer(s)	Ryan Lambourn
Platform(s)	PC
Genre(s)	Action
Mode(s)	Single player
Rating(s)	OFLC: MA15+
Input methods	Keyboard Mouse

V-Tech Rampage is a controversial amateur action computer game that re-creates the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. The game was created by 21-year old Australian Ryan Lambourn, who stated "because it's funny." ^[1]. The Flash-based game first came to light when it was uploaded to Newgrounds using Lambourn's screen name Master PiGPEN.

The previous prominent virtual school shooting reenactment, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, (SCMRPG!) is an RPG, a genre particularily ill-suited for simulating violence, and has received praise for artistic merit as well as condemnation. V-Tech Rampage was created to be offensive^[2] without redeeming value^[1]^[2].

1 Gameplay
2 Events
3 Impact
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Gameplay

The game is a one-person work released weeks after the event it's based on, a level of effort that shows. Its graphics and control are both extremely clumsy. The player controls Seung-Hui Cho, the killer, through "3 levels of stealth and murder!" in a slanted overhead view. The player must walk across Virginia Tech campus to shoot Emily, Cho's first victim, without killing too many other people or scaring Emily away. In the second, he must walk across the same campus while avoiding the searchlights of police investigators. This is the only segment with appreciable challenge. In the third, he barricades the exit of a school building and must shoot everyone inside in 90 seconds before the police arrive to arrest him. During this level, a favorite song of Cho's plays while audio clips praise or laugh at murder, or scold the player for merely wounding. The game finishes with Cho's suicide. Without failures, all three take no more than a few minutes.

Cho monologues to himself about mission goals and can also speak to other characters, whose reactions differ depending on whether they're fleeing Cho or not. The game's dialogue has occasional grammar or spelling errors, and is riddled with obscenities, insults, racist terms, scatological references and offers of sex from female characters in exchange for their lives.

[edit] Events

Lambourn offered to remove the game if he received $2,000 in "donations." For an additional $1,000 he offered to apologize.

"Attention angry people: I will take this game down from newgrounds [the games website] if the donation amount reaches $1000 US. I'll take it down from here [his website] if it reaches $2000 US, and i will apologise if it reaches $3000 US." ^[3]

Lambourn later retracted the offer to remove the game, stating:

…the donation thing is there as a joke against all the people commanding me to take my game down. I didn't think anyone would donate money to it and so far my paypal account has proven me right…^[4]

More recently, an "RIAA edition" was created, with the original tracks removed, due to copyright infringement with the RIAA. This has replaced the original version on Newgrounds, The original edition was until recently available on Lambourns site, However it has since been removed due to further threats from the RIAA, Now the RIAA edition is the only available one with the title music "Hey Hey Hey Fuck The RIAA" on a looped track.

Observant players will also notice that Ryan Clark was incorrectly portrayed as Caucasian when the game was first created; this has since been fixed.

[edit] Impact

The game was compared to SCMRPG! ^[5] due to the re-creation of a mass murder in which the player controls the killer through a video game. Danny Ledonne, creator of SCMRPG! posted a comment on Lambourn's website:

Inevitably, comparisons between SCMRPG and VTech Rampage are being made right now… For myself I wish to point out that SCMRPG was never a for-profit endeavor and thus I never posted statements like that which is on the VTR game’s homepage: “I will take this game down from newgrounds if the donation amount reaches $1000 US, i’ll take it down from here if it reaches $2000 US, and i will apologize if it reaches $3000 US.” This quote seems to indicate that Ryan has no intention of leaving the game up permanently or having a channel for discourse (as I have done) but instead has unfortunately chosen an artist’s statement that reads more like a hostage note… I would like to ask bloggers to consider not whether a game about the Virginia Tech shooting SHOULD be made but how we might go about making a game that accomplishes more than VTR does with the subject matter. ^[6]

New York State Senator Andrew Lanza, chair of the Senate Task Force on Youth Violence and the Entertainment Industry requested that the gaming community boycott the game.^[7]

Video game publications wrote of concerns about backlashes against video games and wrote that this game was created by an individual, not the gaming industry. ^[8]

GamesRadar.com ranked the game as 4th in the Top 7 Most Evil Games.^[9]