The player

Will Osama bin Laden surpass Hitler as a video-game villain, asks JOE GRIFFIN

IT SURPRISED nobody to see numerous games emerge based on the recent killing of Osama bin Laden, although the velocity of their appearance online was startling. The content of one game (a simulation of the assault on his compound) has been well documented, but the coming months and years will prove interesting.

Games have often looked to the news and history books for their bad guys, and the reaction to the death of bin Laden suggests that he may overtake even Hitler as the villain of choice.

Arguably Hitler’s most famous video game appearance is as a mechanised cyborg in Wolfenstein 3D: better known for its mutant Nazis than its historical accuracy. A more muscular Hitler appeared in Bionic Commando in the 1980s, with the recognisable moustache but a body like that of fellow Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger. That game also had crude and violent speculation of the demise of the Führer that predates a similar scene in Inglorious Basterds by more than two decades.

In Command and Conquer: Red Alerta young pre-Fascist Hitler is erased from history by a time-travelling Albert Einstein.

These games all offer a guilty pleasure, but I prefer when real-life characters appear in brief, relatively understated cameos. I loved how a meeting with JFK in Call of Duty: Black Ops also included a well-rendered appearance by Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defence made famous by the documentary The Fog of War. Leonardo Da Vinci in Assassin’s Creed II is a sort of young medieval Q – a charming, ingenious supplier of gadgets, such as a hang-glider based on his celebrated design.

Communists and fascists are good shorthand for video-game villains, from Stalin (in Singularity and Stalin vs Martians among others) to Lenin. But in recent years terrorists have taken a more central role, such as Modern Warfare II, Medal of Honor and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell games. The stage is set for a greater bin Laden presence on your consoles.

Video games aren’t always known for their restraint, and less is known about bin Laden than about Hitler; the former was a lot more reclusive than the Austrian.

The picture of bin Laden’s smirking face is iconic, so – thanks to a relative lack of information about his life – expect to see him in even broader and wilder game interpretations than Hitler.