Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
In Quest for Hussein, you can invade Iraq all by yourself. But is ousting this evil dictator worth the effort?
Nov 12, 2002 | In Quest for Hussein, a new video game for sale on the Web, Saddam Hussein isn't much of a threat to world peace. The Iraqi dictator isn't close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction; indeed, his henchmen don't have anything worse than AK-47s, and they're not even especially good shots. Iraq is in ruins, a vast desert wasteland populated by stoic camels and abandoned buildings adorned with murals of Saddam. There's not even a U.N.-authorized international force assigned to bring about "regime change." Only one tough guy is charged with that job -- you.
The Quest for Hussein was designed by Jesse Petrilla, a 19-year-old who lives in Malibu, Calif. The game is similar to Quest for Al-Qa'eda, which Petrilla created a couple of months after Sept. 11, 2001, at a time when many game makers and others on the Web were building clever ways for Americans to show Osama we wouldn't take what he did lying down. In the swirl of grief and desire for retribution that gripped the country after the attacks, Flash animations of a snickering bin Laden being bombed and treacly MP3s recorded in the garage flourished all over the Web. During that period, Petrilla's al-Qaida game achieved enormous success. He says it was downloaded almost 2 million times.
Petrilla's Saddam Hussein game is a sequel to his Osama bin Laden game, in the same way, perhaps, that some in the Bush administration have painted a war in Iraq as the logical second step to the one in Afghanistan: The two enemies are distinct yet are purportedly vaguely connected. The gameplay is largely the same, with the goal -- trouncing evil -- identical. But Petrilla's own goals have changed. He created the al-Qaida game and distributed it freely, he says, as a way to "give Americans an outlet to express their emotions." He thinks that the Saddam game will be similarly cathartic, but this time he wants people to pay for the experience. Quest for Hussein costs $3.95 per download, which Petrilla bills as a 60 percent savings over the "regular price" of $10. (An undetermined portion of the revenue will go to the Red Cross, Petrilla says.)
Will people pay for the virtual chance to blow away Saddam? The world order may hang on that seemingly trivial question. Petrilla, who sounds like a smart, nice kid with a head for marketing himself and his achievements, thinks that if many people consider Saddam so evil that they want to topple him, then many people will buy a game to do that online. People will especially want to do this, he says, when the war in Iraq begins.
But Petrilla's potential market of would-be Saddam killers is probably smaller than those willing to line up to whack Osama. The news of possible war in Iraq, so far, has mostly been a complex and delicate geopolitical dance, a series of speeches fraught with diplomatic qualifications that have produced, in the American people, nothing like the angry response to al-Qaida after Sept. 11. Maybe that's because it's early yet. But maybe not; maybe the response to Petrilla's game and to other works that attempt to skim some cash from the froth of war will tell us something about whether Americans think Saddam is in the league of al-Qaida, or whether he's just another video-game bad guy.
Jesse Petrilla began creating mods -- independently created games that run on rendering "engines" made publicly available by other game designers -- a few years ago, when he was still in high school.
His first game was Plunder & Pillage, in which, according to Petrilla's site, the player is "a renegade pirate who must fight his way through gangs of enemy pirates, plunder your way through enemy villages, and pillage everything in sight in an attempt to regain what was lost at sea and gain a name for yourself as the most notorious pirate on the high seas!" After Sept. 11, however, the American appetite for plunder and pillage ebbed, and Petrilla, who had just graduated from high school and has always dreamed of one day creating a software company to rival Microsoft (actually, to "drive Microsoft into the ground"), knew that his success depended on a game tailored to the mood of the day.
"I didn't want to profit off the terrorist attacks," Petrilla makes clear about Quest for Al-Qa'eda. That's why he gave the game away for free. But he also figured that he could make a name for himself by striking while the loathing for bin Laden was fresh, and he expected to generate some media buzz.
That's exactly what happened. In April 2002, a local newspaper -- the Auburn Journal, in Auburn, Calif., where Petrilla lived at the time -- wrote an isn't-this-kid-precocious account of Petrilla and the game he created. It was the type of odd news story that strikes a chord, for the local NBC affiliate quickly picked it up, and "from there it went nuts," Petrilla says.
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