Top-selling Canadian video game assassinates Prime Minister
Joel Kom, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, March 31, 2006
Prime Minister Stephen Harper should hope life doesn't imitate art.
A new top-selling video game kicks off with a bang -- a few bangs, actually -- with the assassination of the Canadian prime minister, sparking continental turmoil that only an elite group of soldiers can undo.
The kicker? The fatal shots are fired as the prime minister meets the Mexican and American presidents at a landmark summit in Mexico -- the same place the real-life Mr. Harper wraps up a meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox today.
The video-game killing appears in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, the latest game inspired by thriller author Tom Clancy for the Xbox 360 system. The game, hailed by some reviewers as the best of its kind to date, has sold almost 50,000 units across Canada since its March 9 release and is already the most popular game for the Xbox 360.
The real-life Prime Minister's Office had no comment on the game.
For those thinking of buying it to see the assassination, well, you never actually see it. That part of the storyline merely sets up the game. In fact, the similarities between the real-life and video game scenarios begin and end with the three leaders meeting in Mexico.
In the game, the continental chiefs are in Mexico City to sign the North American Joint Security Agreement (softwood lumber didn't make the agenda).
Things are going smoothly until Mexican rebels storm the leaders' rendez-vous and kidnap the American and Mexican presidents, assassinate the prime minister and leave it up to the game player to save the day.
The game was designed by Ubisoft, a worldwide firm with a flagship studio in Montreal that employs 1,400 people.
And no, it wasn't the Montrealers who designed the game: it was created in France.
Adrian Fernandez-Lacey, a senior co-ordinator for Ubisoft in France, said Canadians shouldn't take offence to the assassination.
The other leaders had to live to keep the game's tension high: Mexico's president needed to hang around to allow conflict with the rebels, while the U.S. president had remain alive because the elite group of soldiers charged with the rescue are American.
"Basically, for the game, the Canadian guy was the only one that we could actually sacrifice in the story," he said. "We weren't being malicious or anything like that."
In fact, it was Mr. Fernandez-Lacey who took offence at first. Because he was born in Montreal and is half-Canadian and half-Mexican, he joked with the game's creators about hitting him on two fronts.
"When they first sent the scenario to me, I said, 'Look, you're invading my country and you're killing my prime minister,' " he said.
