Since the surprise announcement of the return of Six Days in Fallujah, the game has been in the news quite a bit. After languishing in development hell for over a decade, the team behind the contentious military combat game revealed it would finally be coming to PC and consoles later this year. Since then, publisher Peter Tamte has been doing the rounds of various industry outlets to promote the game and offer some insight into how it came to be, which hasn’t passed without some controversy.
Six Days in Fallujah aims to chronicle 2004’s Second Battle of Fallujah, a bloody and polarizing conflict from the early days of the Iraq War. Originally announced in 2009 with a release slated for 2010, the project was dropped after outcry from families of service members and anti-war groups. Konami, the original publisher, distanced itself and soon developer Atomic Games, Tamte’s studio, was down to a skeleton staff, despite Tamte’s claims over the years that the game was still on the horizon and definitely not cancelled.
Then, earlier this year, came the surprise revelation that not only was Six Days in Fallujah still in development, it would in fact release later in 2021. An interview with Polygon followed, with Tamte courting a degree of contempt from readers for his claims that he was “not trying to make a political commentary” with the game, despite the inherently political nature of the subject matter. In a talk with Gamesindustry.biz yesterday, Tamte reiterated many of his points, including his controversial take that the game will not portray the US use of white phosphorus in the battle, something that has been a huge point of contention in the years since, such as in the highly-criticized move to include a white phosphorus killstreak in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Tamte felt that the game didn’t need to portray such atrocities in order for players to “understand the human cost,” which corresponds with his comments in the Polygon interview where he claimed that his US Marine sources didn’t include the use of white phosphorus in the stories they told him and that he “[didn’t] want sensational types of things to distract from the parts of that experience.” He also disagreed with suggestions that he was “sanitizing events” and going against his own claims of authenticity by not including the atrocities.
Others in the industry have come out strongly against Tamte’s claims, though. Rami Ismail, developer of Luftrausers and Nuclear Throne, responded to the Polygon interview with a lengthy Twitter thread detailing the limitations of Tamte’s views and suggesting that Six Days in Fallujah was designed as pro-military apologia, despite the team’s claims that the game is not involved with the US Army.
One way or another, Six Days in Fallujah is sure to keep making news in the run-up to its release this year. With so little currently known about the actual features of the game, it seems the controversy whirling around the project will continue to dominate the discussion for better or for worse.
Six Days in Fallujah is currently in development.
Source: Gamesindustry.biz, Polygon, Rami Ismail/Twitter
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