When his identity was revealed, Ledonne did not just feel the need to stand up for his game as a valid personal and political statement. He also felt that video games as a medium had every right to depict and tackle difficult subjects, just like the countless films, books and other media that had been produced about Columbine without a sliver of the same controversy.

"I got fan mail, I got death threats. I got people who admired me and wanted to work with me. I got people who tried to get me fired from my job," he says. "It was very difficult and very stressful. I was concerned for my family. It was ironic: I made this game that's basically anti-bullying, and now people were actively bullying me in the most vitriolic ways."

For some it was particularly offensive for a video game to depict these events when the medium had been so widely implicated in the shooting. Harris and Klebold were particularly fond of first-person shooter Doom, and some were quick to accuse it of having trained them for the real-life event.

Ledonne chose to make light of this assertion in the second half of his game. In SCMRPG! Harris and Klebold commit suicide and awaken in hell. The game becomes a far broader satire, and a much more traditional video game, as they fight monsters lifted directly from Doom, level up, and meet pop culture figures such as Satan from South Park.

"Columbine was a big rallying point for the Christian evangelical movement in the U.S., suggesting it was the satanic influence of games like Doom that caused the shooters to do this," says Ledonne. "They were quite sure that the shooters were in hell. So I thought that the story of Doom features monsters coming up from hell, maybe [Harris] and [Klebold] were down there having a good time, shooting all the monsters and demons! It was a tongue-in-cheek way of suggesting that it wasn't that simple."

A feeling of dissonance creeps into the experience during the second half of the game. As well as making a statement, Ledonne also wanted to try his hand at creating a traditional video game. Although he stands by the decision, he admits that putting together these two sides of SCMRPG! results in a "fundamentally flawed" experience.

Kline believes it is these prominent game elements that upset so many people. He doesn't believe that playing violent video games leads to violence in young people, but he understands the need to be sensitive of those who do.

"It's one thing to dramatize the lives of those involved, and it's another thing to make what the kids did seem like sort of a game," says Kline. "I think in reality that's how they perceived themselves, as playing a kind of a game, and that people could somehow cross the line of playing a video game for fun to actually doing violence feels very palpable to a lot of people."