JFK Reloaded

JFK Reloaded is an interactive historical simulation that places players in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, tasked with accurately reenacting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza. Using a sniper rifle, players aim to replicate the motorcade event as documented by the Warren Commission, with features like multiple perspectives and ballistic analysis to support its claim as an intellectual exercise in historical reconstruction.

JFK Reloaded: The Calculus of a Click

Introduction: A Pipe, a Pixel, and a Presidency

On November 22, 2004—the 41st anniversary of a national trauma—a small Scottish studio released a piece of software that would become a lightning rod for America’s deepest cultural anxieties. JFK Reloaded was not marketed as a “game” but as an “interactive reconstruction,” a forensic simulation inviting players to re-enact the assassination of the 35th President from the vantage point of the accused gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Its central promise was audacious: to empirically test the feasibility of the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman conclusion by crowdsourcing the shot patterns. The player’s objective was not victory in a conventional sense, but fidelity—to replicate the notorious “single-bullet theory” and achieve a perfect 1,000-point score by matching every documented variable. This review argues that JFK Reloaded is a paradoxical landmark: a technologically earnest, historically fastidious simulation whose profound ethical misreading of its own interactivity generated a firestorm that ultimately obscured its methodological ambitions. It stands as a pivotal, failed experiment in the documentarian potential of games, a title whose legacy is inseparable from the moral vertigo it induced, and whose buried code comments reveal a profound dissonance between scholarly intent and juvenile execution.

Development History & Context: From WTO Riots to Dealey Plaza

The genesis of JFK Reloaded lies in the career of its creator, Kirk Ewing, and the specific technological and cultural moment of the early 2000s. Ewing, founder of Traffic Management Ltd. (trading as Traffic Games), had previously served as creative director on State of Emergency (2002) at VIS Entertainment, a game infamous for its depiction of violent anti-globalization riots, released amidst real-world WTO protests in Seattle. This experience provided a crash course in the Manufactured controversy, teaching him that games could be thrust into the center of political and media debates. After a stint in Los Angeles working on film rights for Rockstar Games, Ewing returned to Scotland determined to pursue a smaller, more concept-driven project.

His initial idea was an interactive moon landing, but he pivoted to the JFK assassination, attracted by the unparalleled volume of public domain forensic data: precise maps of Dealey Plaza, the Warren Commission report, ballistic tests, wind speeds, and the frame-by-frame Zapruder film. As he later stated to VICE, “I’m driven by technology first and foremost.” The key technological component was the physics engine from Carmageddon (1997), notorious for its vehicular mayhem. Through a contact at Stainless Games, Traffic Games licensed the engine, repurposing its robust ballistics and physics simulation for a far more somber, precise task.

The development team, a lean group of ten including veterans from State of Emergency, Grand Theft Auto, and Killzone, dedicated themselves to historical and forensic accuracy. Their stated goal was provocative: to “debunk assassination conspiracy theories by buttressing the Warren Commission’s conclusion.” The project was conceived as an empirical, anti-conspiratorial exercise. “In my mind, all it did was show that Oswald went to the Book Depository, he knew how to fire the rifle and he shot JFK,” Ewing reflected. “It was completely plausible he did it alone.”

The game was built using the modified Carmageddon engine (internally nicknamed “Beelzebub”) to model the 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, bullet drop, wind resistance (a 15 mph crosswind was factored in), and tissue dynamics. The team spent months in research, poring over commission exhibits, and another six months in development, striving for sub-millimeter precision in aligning the limousine’s speed (~11 mph), occupant postures, and the infamous “single-bullet” trajectory. The development was self-funded and independent, a fact that allowed total creative control but also meant no institutional buffer against the coming storm.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Anti-Story

JFK Reloaded presents one of the most radical narrative vacuums in gaming history. It possesses no traditional plot, character arc, dialogue, or theatrical climax. The “story” is a pre-written, immutable historical event. The player is not a protagonist with agency in a narrative sense but an agent in a forensic reconstruction. The theme is singular: the empirical validation of an official historical record through interactive simulation.

The game’s narrative framework is its scoring system and post-shot analysis. The “plot” is the sequence of three shots, each a prescribed data point: Shot 1 (miss), Shot 2 (neck/Connally wound), Shot 3 (head shot). The player’s performance is measured against the Warren Commission’s findings, not against a rival faction or a survival goal. The only “conflict” is between human fallibility and historical exactitude. The theme of lone-gunman viability is enforced mechanically; deviation from the official path—hitting Jackie Kennedy, shooting from a non-Oswald position—results in point deductions, not narrative branches. This is a narrative of causal closure, where the only permissible outcome is the one that already happened.

However, the game’s buried code comments, unearthed by critical code studies scholar Mark Sample, reveal a profound thematic dissonance. In the game’s asset files, programmers left behind readable annotations like:
* // Jackie cradling JFK before the money shot
* // Nelly shoving Connally’s bonce down into her minge, in a last desperate attempt to get oral sex out of him before he croaks

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