Columbine gamer reaches out

Alamosa man finds common ground with Montreal victim

Brian D. Crecente, Rocky Mountain News

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The creator of a Columbine video game linked to last week's shootings in Montreal has befriended one of the victims of the attack.

Danny LeDonne says the man, who was shot six times and whose girlfriend, also wounded, remains in critical condition, initially called to ask him to pull the game from his Web site. Since then, LeDonne said, the two have found common ground and talk regularly.

Although LeDonne still defends his game, his initial reaction to the shooting at Dawson College and its possible ties to his creation was to go into the bathroom and vomit.

"To paint myself as this callous, disaffected person wouldn't be correct," he said Tuesday from his home in Alamosa. "The fact that anyone would have to go through something like this is pretty horrendous."

Armed with a rapid-fire rifle and two other weapons, Canadian Kimveer Gill opened fire last week, killing one person and injuring 19 before taking his own life.

Hours before the attack, the 25- year-old wrote on a personal Web site that he was drinking whiskey and feeling "postal." The posting also detailed his love of video games and the fact that he liked to play Super Columbine Massacre RPG.

The free game mixes cartoonish scenes with photographs and the writings of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 12 of their fellow students and a teacher at Columbine High School in 1999.

Although LeDonne removed the game from his Web site in May, other Web sites are hosting it, and he estimates that more than 150,000 people have downloaded it.

LeDonne says he created the game as a way to deal with the tragedy and as a tool to encourage others to talk about it.

But Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Dan, was gunned down on a sidewalk outside the school, says the game minimalizes what happened at Columbine and glorifies the killers.

"By glorifying the murderers through a video game, it looks like that maybe has, in some way, impacted someone else to do this kind of crime," he said Tuesday.

LeDonne said that when he created the game and put it on the Internet in April 2005, he resolved to be "comfortable with whatever was going to happen."

"If every time I'm about to release something I have to give pause and worry about how it can be misunderstood or bastardized to do something I don't approve of, I couldn't make anything," he said.

"Anyone who's made rock music or written a controversial book is aware it will be in the public and get in their hands. But to be held responsible for their actions in any part really detracts from any freedom of expression in our society."

LeDonne isn't willing to consider how he might remake the game if he had it to do over again. The game, he says, is a creation from a specific moment in his life and is a reflection of that.

It was a time, he says, when he feared he might become like Harris and Klebold.

"What saved me from being like Eric and Dylan is making movies and theater and writing," LeDonne said. "This was a sad project for me, and it was nothing about making money or getting discovered by the gaming industry."

Rohrbough doesn't buy that reasoning.

"Ideas have consequences, and everything that happens starts as an idea," he said. "When you glorify the murder of innocent people, you take the responsibility that what you do may influence someone else, as well as cause great harm to others."

LeDonne said he often hears from angry, disaffected teens through his Web site.

"Almost every day someone contacts me about school shootings," he said. "I've talked several young men out of doing things to hurt themselves or other people.

"I regret (Gill) didn't contact me."

One of those who did contact LeDonne was the Dawson College victim. LeDonne, who declined to name the man, said the man initially asked him to remove the game from his site. But after talking via e-mail about their differences, LeDonne said, they came to an understanding.

LeDonne said he believes that a typical teenager or an emotionally immature 25-year-old might not understand the deeper context of what he was trying to do with his game.

Gill certainly fits into that category, he said.

"We are not looking at a 14-year- old or a 16-year-old. This guy is 25; he's older than I am," he said. "Whatever boat he was going to get on to find out what he was going to do with his life, this guy clearly missed it."

crecenteb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2811