Boston Marathon Bombing Game Created at Shock Website

By Daniel Bean

Kevin Dolak
@kdolak
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Apr 24, 2013 4:46pm

Image credit: Lolokaust

The horror of the Boston Marathon bombing has been turned into an online game making fun of the three people who died and the 260 who were injured, some losing their legs from the blasts.

The game is called “Boston Marathon 2013: Terror on the Streets,” in which a runner dodges crudely rendered pressure cooker bombs.

If the runner hits a bomb, the runner explodes — which is followed by a crude graphic of a bandaged, legless man in a wheelchair, and the phrase, “You got fu*ked up! Better luck next year.”

A narrator in the trailer created for the game’s release states, “You will beg for mercy while doing mad jumps over weaponized pressure cookers.”

The game, hosted on the website lolokaust.com, is being called a “careful retrobit recreation of the Boston Marathon bombing” by its creators.

The game’s format is structured like an old 1980′s Nintendo sidescroller. The entirety of the game play is mashing a keyboard spacebar, prompting an on-screen runner to jump over bombs.

PHOTOS: Terror at the Boston Marathon

The game’s creators included some other bits in an attempt to mock Boston with a bar called “Cheerz” and a restaurant called “Boston Chowda Inc” appearing in the scrolling backdrop. There are also city of Boston “facts” subtitling the game play, one explaining that the New England Patriots almost had a perfect season in 2007 until they lost to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII.

Nina Huntemann is an associate professor in the department of communications at Suffolk University and co-editor of “Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games.” She told ABCNews.com that these types of low-quality games are not uncommon following a tragedy.

“There was a similar thing around Columbine, around Sandy Hook,” she said. “The reason is that the tools to make a game at this level, which is very low production quality, this simple, are readily accessible and don’t require a lot of technical knowledge.”

Huntemann says the game is definitely offensive.

“It does speak to a minority of Internet culture that seems to have no filter, no moral line that they won’t cross,” she said. “It’s not enjoyable, and it’s not engaging. It will disappear and hopefully, be forgotten.”

All of lolokaust.com’s creators are listed under aliases, so ABC News could not make contact with the game’s creators.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com