Gamer was on deadly road

Creator of download says Columbine was a wake-up call

Brian D. Crecente, Rocky Mountain News

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The 24-year-old creator of a Columbine video game called the school shooting a wake-up call and said that before their rampage he was headed down the same path as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

"It was a bit scary, once I learned more about these boys, because it was like I was looking in the mirror and I didn't want the same fate for myself," said Danny Ledonne, a filmmaker from Alamosa.

"I had thoughts of hurting myself or hurting someone else, and Columbine forced me to take a long hard look at those ideas and walk away from that," he said Tuesday.

Ledonne, who was a sophomore at Alamosa High School when the Columbine shootings happened in 1999, created Super Columbine Massacre RPG last year. The free game mixes cartoonish scenes with photographs of Harris and Klebold, pictures taken from newspapers and television stations, and excerpts from their writings.

He initially distributed the game anonymously, but after a friend of one of the victims discovered his identity, Ledonne decided to come out as the creator.

About 10,000 people had downloaded the game in the year since its creation, but an additional 30,000 downloaded it in the week after the Rocky Mountain News first wrote about it on May 16.

The game is no longer available on Ledonne's Web site. Instead, it has popped up on a number of other sites and download services.

Ledonne initially accepted donations to defray the cost of hosting the game, but stopped when he took the game off his site. He said he is making no money on the free distribution of the game.

Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Dan, was gunned down on a sidewalk outside the school, was unavailable for comment Tuesday, but said previously that the game disgusts him.

"You trivialize the actions of two murderers and the lives of the innocent," he said.

Columbine and Kubrick

At just 5-foot-2 and "a little bit more effeminate" than other boys, Ledonne said that while growing up he was always a prime target of bullying.

"I was an easy target to be picked on, and that started in kindergarten," he said. "It was the kind of bullying that most kids who were bullied experienced.

"When you get pushed every day, and when you are ostracized not once, not twice, but years in and out, your perception of reality is distorted . . .

"These things really do warp your understanding and your perception of humanity in some almost irrevocable way."

But two things happened in 1999 that changed Ledonne's life and spurred him to "forge himself" into a new person.

The first was the death of renowned movie director Stanley Kubrick.

Ledonne said shortly after Kubrick's death he caught an airing of his film, A Clockwork Orange, and it opened his eyes to the potential impact of movies.

"Until then I didn't know I could have an analytical, cerebral relationship with films," he said. "I realized that you can actually make a movie that has levels to it, that suggests different things about our culture."

About a month later, Harris and Klebold killed a dozen students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others on April 20, 1999, in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

"Stanley Kubrick died in March of 1999 and Columbine happened in April of 1999, so there was a flood," Ledonne said. "Within a period of, like, three months a lot of my life was turning upside down."

Ledonne said Columbine had a "pretty significant psychological impact" on him.

He started learning martial arts, got more involved in filmmaking and went to a therapist.

"I had to ask myself, 'How can I deal with this, how can I change this?' " he said.

By the time Ledonne graduated from Alamosa High School, he had become a different person. He had nearly a 4.0 grade point average, was named English student of the year, and was voted most likely to succeed by his classmates.

'A really helpful guy'

After high school, Ledonne moved to Boston where he attended Emerson College, studying film.

He said he graduated magna cum laude from college and then moved back home to create his own production company.

Emberwild Productions deals mostly in editing other people's wedding videos, he said.

Ledonne also spends a lot of his time filming events for the community and volunteering.

Ledonne does work with an after-school program, does promotional videos for nonprofits and even helps out at his old high school.

Kerry Adams, Alamosa High's media technology teacher, describes Ledonne as a "really helpful guy."

"We have a media technical class where we teach kids how to take video and put it on computer and then on a DVD," he said. "Whenever we run into problems, he is the first one we call."

Ledonne said he understands that people may have trouble reconciling the image of a helpful, well-liked volunteer with the person who created a game based on the Columbine tragedy.

"It's funny - people, when they hear about this game I made, they see me as this little monster. But I do so much work in my community to make this a better place," he said.

Creating the game

In November 2004, Ledonne discovered a program called RPG Maker. The software allows a person to plug in images, text, a story and objectives for a game, and then it does the programming automatically.

"Almost immediately upon seeing this program I thought, 'You know I've always wanted to make a video game,' and then I thought, 'What would I make a video game about?' and the answer was so clear."

Even though Ledonne had moved on from being the loner kid who was constantly bullied, even though he had graduated from high school and college, he had never forgotten Columbine and the impact it had on him.

"It never went away in my mind," he said. "And, honestly, that's not a fixation that I have some personal uniqueness to.

"Columbine hasn't gone away in a lot of people's minds, and I don't mean people who live in Denver that experienced that trauma themselves. People around the globe are fascinated, sometimes morbidly or sometimes out of some deeper curiosity, I suppose, as to what happened and why."

Ledonne still remembers vividly his reaction to Columbine back in 1999 when it shocked him out of his downward spiral.

"My reaction sort of had the same duality that a lot of people, or at least some people, had to 9/11, and that would be: I can't believe this is happening and it's about time," he said.

Ledonne is quick to point out that he doesn't think the violence was good, just that it was inevitable.

His creation of the game was his way of dealing with and expressing that, he says.

"I have inside me the same interest everyone does in understanding the shooting, because it is one of the darkest days in American history," he said. "I just chose to confront it in a unconventional manner, and that's hard for people to deal with.

"But it is important because I am reaching people my age and younger who do understand the world through video games."

Ledonne sees his game as something akin to one of his favorite movie, another Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

"Dr. Strangelove isn't a film that advocates nuclear war, it isn't a film that glorifies nuclear war," he said. "This is not a game that advocates school shootings or glorifies Eric and Dylan."

crecenteb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2811