The "Active Shooter" Game

Imagine being so devoid of humanity that you develop a game where people can play as an active shooter going on a murderous rampage through a school.

If you're Anton Makarevskiy, you don't have to imagine, since that's what he did. As if just thinking about making such a game wasn't bad  enough, he set-up an Indiegogo page to raise money in its support. To their credit, Indiegogo shut that shit down.

The name of their company is "Revived Games", which is unfortunately very similar to the name of another company, "Revived Gaming", who took no small amount of misdirected abuse because of the similarity. For the record, Revived Gaming is an e-sports organization; they don't develop games.

The website for this game is activeshootergame.com and its anonymously-registered in Russia, but their servers are Bluehost, which is an American company.

According to their forums, three people were behind the Indiegogo campaign. I'm including links to their respective Twitter accounts:

• Anton Makarevskiy - Game Developer / Publisher
• Purple Vick - Music Compositor
• Ata Berdyev - Campaign Manager / Public Relations

They also have a YouTube channel, where Makarevskiy publishes under the name "Arthur Belkin".

So, if you've sent an abusive Tweet or direct message to @Gaming_Revived, in the mistaken belief that they were behind the "Active Shooter" game, I hope that you'll do the Adult Thing and send a apology to the 100% innocent people that you abused, especially if you threatened them! 

While I personally find a "game" based on such a premise to be morally repugnant, there is no law against such games being created and I personally don't think that there should be such legislation.

Sure, you can send a Tweet to express your outrage to @ataberdyev and/or @ACID_WTF and I doubt that it would do any good because I don't think they care what anyone thinks. Russians haven't experienced school shootings like have in America, so they don't take them as seriously. I guess they see such incidents as a natural byproduct of our national love affair with high-powered firearms.

So, before you send an angry message to company because of something you think they've done, take the extra step and make absolutely sure they did it.


Duane Browning