Christian Video Game: Kill The Faggot

ArsTechnica reports that "failed Christian shoe promoter" Randall Hermann yesterday released a video game titled Kill The Faggot. The game briefly appeared on the Greenlight section of the downloadable games site Steam before being yanked following complaints.

Before its removal from Greenlight, games critic Jim Sterling downloaded and tested the game, which launched via Herman's game shop moniker Skaldic Games. The resulting YouTube video revealed a crude game that has players aim a bullseye to shoot and kill people who say such things as, "Can I put my weiner in your butt?" and "Whoops, I just dropped the soap." (After playing a minute of the game, Sterling shouted, "Where is the fucking satire? What is it satirizing? Not really anything. It's just being 'the thing.'") The game makes very clear that its goal is to shoot and kill homosexuals (with liberal use of the pejorative F-word in the game's title, at that). Players get points for killing gay people—more points if the person killed is transgender—and they lose points for any straight people they kill. It's hard to make a judgment call about the "most" offensive thing in this game, but we were particularly disturbed to hear the game's announcer celebrate a kill by saying, "AIDS carrier eliminated."

In a statement posted to another gaming site, Hermann wrote: "These people that think if you are even remotely homophobic, you are 'hateful' and a 'bigot,' and do everything they can to destroy you in every vicious way possible. So I decided to go down a path that most developers are afraid to go down: to piss these people off by making the most overly offensive game possible to these idiots to prove a point."

Hermann appears in the promotional video for a "Christian skate shoe company" that failed to launch last year after its Kickstarter campaign was canceled. According to materials for the shoe company, the product was intended to "promote the words and teachings of Jesus Christ through quality footwear." Herman's Twitter page notes that he is a "composer, 3D artist, game programmer/designer, skateboarder, and follower of Jesus Christ." His IMDb page lists a number of video game credits.

The video game has attracted wide attention on Reddit and in the gaming community. The below review clip of Kill The Faggot has been viewed 118K times since yesterday.

(Tipped by JMG reader Paul)