JFK Reloaded

JFK Reloaded is a first-person shooter. It recreates the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, as it occurred on November 22, 1963, according to the report of the Warren Commission. The player controls Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

As Kennedy's presidential limousine passes through Dealey Plaza, the player has to take three shots at the president with a sniper rifle. They gain points based on how closely these shots match the Warren Commission's report: The first has to miss the car, the second hit Kennedy in the neck and John Connally (the governor of Texas) in the chest, and the third fatally wound Kennedy in the head. The perfect score is 1,000. While the game does not prevent the player from pursuing alternative scenarios, points are deducted when the player deviates from the event, such as by hitting Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady.

JFK Reloaded was developed by Traffic Management Limited (trade name: Traffic Games), a company based in Stirling, Scotland. The company's founder and managing director, Kirk Ewing, had a background in producing documentaries for Channel 4. In the video game industry, he had previously worked for VIS Entertainment as the creative director for Earthworm Jim 3D (1999) and State of Emergency (2002). The latter was denounced for similarities to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, despite not being inspired by them.

Having worked on projects as large as State of Emergency, Ewing wanted to focus on smaller ventures. In establishing Traffic Games, he intended to create a game based on a historical event and initially considered modeling one after the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Ewing later settled on the assassination of Kennedy because there was a high amount of public domain information documenting the event. He also noted that ballistics simulations were a staple of video games and that many other forms of media had already covered the incident.

JFK Reloaded was subject to controversy, being denounced by several public figures: David Smith, a spokesman for Ted Kennedy, stated simply that "It's despicable." Senator Joe Lieberman was "sickened" by the game, according to his spokesman Casey Aden-Wansbury. The politician John Kasich discussed the game in his book Stand for Something: The Battle for America's Soul in a segment about graphic content in mainstream video games: "I'm telling you, despicable doesn't even begin to describe some of these things." The Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning it.

The presidential historian G. Calvin Mackenzie considered JFK Reloaded to be "in incredibly bad taste" and noted that "marketing it as an educational tool seems to stretch the notion of education beyond belief". The game was attacked by members of the public online, on television, and in print media. Ewing claimed to have received death threats.