JFK Reloaded: The Definitive Review
The Funniest Jokes Have No Punchlines
There exists a class of videogames that find a kind of cultural transcendence by design. All too often, deliberate attempts to be ‘art’ or to push the envelope of videogame pigeon-holing in mainstream culture come off as too arch, or too earnestly enthusiastic to gain real significance. This also applies to games that chase the edges of acceptability; those that wire-walk the moral tightrope to deliberately provoke outrage. These lose any real sharpness if the presentations and performances feel the slightest bit hollow. You’d see that in Watch Dogs’ performative digi-anarchism from a multinational corporation trading on the stock exchange, or Grand Theft Auto’s multi-billion-dollar-grossing capitalist critique. Likewise, the grandstanding sociopathies of Manhunt or Postal 2 can never really challenge any moral baseline when there’s such puerility in their demeanours. On the other hand, and thanks to the perceived sanctity of the indie space, we receive Papers Please and The Castle Doctrine and find them to make far more pointed and successful commentaries almost precisely because of their specific intent. And then there’s JFK Reloaded, which I think is, without a hint of irony, one of the most important videogames ever made.
It’s obviously a joke, as the name gives that away immediately, but it’s a very serious one. JFK Reloaded is cut from the same cloth as British satire’s long history and as such, is perhaps the first videogame to do satire successfully with such a specific focus. This is the Brass Eye Paedogeddon Special of gaming and perhaps just as important in pricking pomposity, especially given the similar howls of incandescent outrage from the establishments that claim victimhood from its attack, an act just as audacious as the game itself. JFK Reloaded is principally, and is repeatedly stated as such by its creator Kirk Ewing, about the truth. Or rather, it’s about disarming an attack upon it. Kirk states in many interviews that the project was about dismantling JFK conspiracy theories by giving the player the opportunity to recreate Oswald’s shots. It does this with a surprisingly rigorous simulation of Dealey Plaza, the presidential motorcade and Lee Harvey’s Mannlicher-Carcano. And surprisingly, players found it was entirely possible to precisely recreate the Warren Commission’s account of the assassination. In fact, the game’s analysis and scoring debrief is just as rigorous as the ballistics simulation, going as far as punishing the player for firing the wrong number of bullets and hitting the wrong people, while rewarding trajectorial accuracy and even shot timings. The specificity and accuracy of the simulation is part of the joke - and wonderfully so - but it’s also the core virtue upon which the game’s validity hangs. Without that soberness, its absurdity becomes too acute. And yet, upon seeing the trajectories1 in the post-game analysis, you gain an understanding in how videogames repeatedly lie about what firearms do to humans. This constantly-missed fact is one reason why this game is incredibly important - it teaches you that bullets can indeed enter forearms and exit via buttocks to cause life-changing injuries to people behind. It teaches you the real consequences of your actions.2
JFK Reloaded has an option to turn up the motorcade behaviour to ‘chaos’, which adjusts the simulation to make NPCs react more wildly, which in turn can force the whole affair into slapstick carnage. I wonder why this was included as it breaks the kayfabe, so to speak. Maybe it’s there to defuse the sombre seriousness of the piece, or simply to add more value to the commercial proposition by allowing it to become a mayhem simulator.3 Perhaps it’s just acknowledging the cosmic joke. Or perhaps it’s actually deeper and more textural; a means of allowing the satire to explode into parody, particularly given the JFK assassination’s place in popular culture and how it validates the perverse psychology of conspiracism. It’s worth remembering that JFK Reloaded is from 2004, just a year after Operation Iraqi Freedom, a fallaciously-justified invasion of Iraq that leant heavily on conspiratorial thinking to promote its validity. It’s also a year before the release of Loose Change, which gathered together 9/11 conspiracies in a package palatable to wider audiences than the forums and blogs where such theories were coalescing. 2004 is also the year of Adam Curtis’s The Power Of Nightmares and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The fact that both documentaries are about perversions of the truth means we can draw a tentative circle around JFK Reloaded as a way of non-extreme creators establishing a sanctuary of sorts from politically-motivated attacks on the truth from all sides of the political spectrum. It’s interesting to note that Kirk’s previous game, State Of Emergency, was accused of drawing on the 1999 WTO protests which were organised, in part, by conspiracy-theorising anarchists.4 Again, this sociological context places JFK Reloaded into a unique position, one that only becomes clear if you understand the evolution of the paranoid style in American politics.
Initially a lecture from 1959, The Paranoid Style’s publication in 1964 posits how the right leverages conspiracy theories as a means of obtaining and maintaining power by conjuring imagined, evil forces working against the good. Whether this is done with belief or not in said theories is largely irrelevant - what matters is the destruction of the singular truthful narrative in pursuit of malleable, politically-utile misrepresentations, of which the JFK assassination is a canonical root. Consider that in the neoconservative melee of post-9/11 US politics, paranoid conspiracies flourished in part due to the deregulation of media brought about by the most recent idol for Neocon authoritarianism, Ronald Reagan’s administration.5 The lack of consequence for lying in broadcast media undoubtedly fuelled the conspiratorial 90s, a decade hallmarked by the rise of the conspiracy theory to pop-culture phenomenon, thanks in a large part to The X-Files, which happily mixed and matched real and imagined conspiracies as if they were all true. In a series where a character called Deep Throat sits alongside a trio called The Lone Gunmen, we see the consolidation of JFK and his assassination as a conspiracy as a standard feature in global pop culture. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie may have ushered it into the decade specifically as a conspiracy, but it was The X-Files that atomised it, and conspiracism itself, as a pop culture phenomenon.
In 2004, this was no doubt still fresh. In a way, 9/11 was so unavoidably a giant shock to the global psyche that previous atrocities, like the conspiracy-led Oklahoma City bombing, would fade in comparison. That conspiracy theories thrived in its wake is hardly surprising. In this sense, Kirk Ewing’s attempt to take us back to the very root of the modern US conspiracy theory and attempt to establish a viable truth, or a faith in the objective analysis carried out by the state, makes JFK Reloaded something far more significant than it would first seem. It’s interesting that in researching for this piece, I googled to see when the last article was published about it, only to find that JFK Reloaded gets talked about quite a bit. Vice interviewed Kirk about it as recently as 2022, and you find it popping up all over the place. And yet, it’s not lauded at all. This is mostly because the majority of the commentary is on the reaction to it, rather than what the game itself is actually saying. Perhaps the truth of that is too difficult to parse, or too complex to easily relay in the modern age, or too boring in comparison to the emotions it stirs by simply existing. For it to be a Scottish game is particularly acute - it sits in quiet opposition to another Scottish game about America, and almost silently shames it with its rigour and purpose. But this makes JFK Reloaded all the more important, and we really need to consider how subtle the joke is, how great the idea actually is, and how well it was executed. The fact it’s now legitimate freeware is fascinating. Much like Jason Rohrer, making it freely available is an important part of the statement. That said, the fact it was originally a commercial product, and offered a prize for nailing the ‘full Oswald’ based on revenue, is an almost genius act of deliberate cultural vandalism. It’s a pity Kirk Ewing didn’t keep it up and do more games with as fierce a purpose and humour, as I’d say this places it easily alongside the most biting of Chris Morris’s work. Given the amount of shit piled upon him by the US media, it’s understandable why he didn’t go further.
Naturally, JFK Reloaded failed miserably - JFK conspiracies are just as alive as ever, but in the modern age just making the fucking gesture is an act of defiance that we must absolutely support. Its heroic mission is all the more important with contemporary US politics the way it is. Where originally it baited arch-assholes like Ted Kennedy and Jack Thompson, now it serves as the slimmest of weapons against the psychology of RFK, an absolute monstrous creation of the conspiratorial, paranoid right. As he sets about tearing down the institutions of American health with Ivermectin and antivax supremacism, we find the links back through the monsters created by the 90s; Alex Jones and the supplement-selling model for lying fucks grifting the vulnerable and under-educated. The way shock jocks on independent talk radio were freed of consequence for their dishonest conspiratorial rage-baiting in the 80s lead to the politics of Fox News’s alternative facts and the dominance of MAGA, all of which shows how badly and tragically the odds are stacked against those that just want the objective truth to be shared by all. What we really needed in the post-Reloaded melee was a sequel of equal rigour to show how crashing a passenger plane into the WTC Towers could bring them down, and not the pleas for a Diana crash-sim in Paris. What we need now is a Pandemic with research-grade accuracy, one that lets you choose between MRNA vaccines or worming tablets to compare the death rates. The precedent that JFK Reloaded set was all too easily lost in the furore about the reaction it caused, perhaps because the point it really makes is too hard to swallow. When a game condenses the core of the modern FPS into a tight simulation of a real event, the truth is perhaps too uncomfortable to contemplate in that hyperfactual context. The ugliness of our glee in killing too naked for us to bear, it’s easy to understand why we’d only remember the fuss it caused.
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I distinctly remember seeing a JFK assassination documentary from around the same time as JFK Reloaded that used computer reconstruction to model the ballistics in order to ‘prove’ the magic bullet theory, showing that Oswald could have made the shots, and that no Grassy Knoll shooter was necessary. I think this may have been a key inspiration for the game.
One thing to consider is how JFK Reloaded uses conspiracy culture and realistic ballistics to try and prove a truth when so many other games use conspiracy culture with unrealistic ballistics to try and be cool. If only there was a JFK Reloaded for every Clancyverse game or modern Call of Duty.
There are other odd aspects: the replay is shown as if you’re Zapruder himself, filming the motorcade. There’s also a bullet cam, way before Sniper Elite, but it’s a first-person view for the bullet itself. This becomes particularly trippy with ricochets, where you’re going from the crimson darkness of someone’s body to flying into the sky, or another body, at terrifying speeds. Absolutely a unique perspective on the horror of firearms injuries.
A fascinatingly weird fact is that a lot of the anti-Globalism protests of the late-90s, alongside the ‘Occupy’ movement had anarchist academics playing a role in their creation. I remember hearing an interview where it was claimed a key Spanish academic had the ear of one Russell Brand, leading to his fucking booky-wook about a quasi anarcho-syndicalist revolution when his currency as a film star started to wane. The fact he’s now turned full evangelical Christian grifter, claiming a conspiracy against him in an attempt to whitewash his sexual crimes, including rape, makes him a weirdly totemic figure for the misery of the modern, paranoid-style media culture. Fuck him.
In a surprising turn that should surprise no-one, I’m going to link to two pieces by J G Ballard that have extraordinary relevance here. Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Regan and The Assassination Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race . In both these instances, Ballard drew the same ire as Ewing did, showing how a British perspective on the JFK assassination that enrages the US right wing is actually a cultural tradition, of which JFK Reloaded is an absolutely necessary, urgent and vital work. As for Regan, fuck him.