The Steam downloadable games shop launched its "Greenlight" initiative in 2012 as a way to open its sales doors to smaller game developers. However, because the shop launched with a glut of inauthentic and joking submissions, the folks at Valve added a $100 fee to "cut down the noise."

Whether or not that fee has been backed by any active filtering or monitoring service, Greenlight still failed to stop a game from launching that clearly violated its terms of service. Kill The Faggot, a light-gun-styled game about shooting gay people made by a California developer, skateboarder, and Christian shoe promoter named Randall Herman, launched for public consumption early Monday morning before being pulled from the Greenlight service hours later.

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 gay people (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."

Before the game had been taken down, its Greenlight page included many comments from upset customers, including calls to Steam to institute a more rigorous filter or monitoring system so that the service didn't have to depend on community votes. that the mere hurdle of a $100 Greenlight fee apparently wasn't enough to deter people who might break the service's rules. This incident followed a December back-and-forth between Valve and an "adults-only" shooting game called Hatred, which eventually was reinstated on Steam Greenlight.

After KTF was removed from Greenlight, a statement was posted at Skaldic Games' site with a link to a free version of the game and an explanation about its creation. The title had originally been made as a mini-game within a larger open-world adventure that Herman is still working on, he wrote, and he claimed that the game's lack of quality was due to being made "in only a few days."

"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," Herman wrote. "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."

“The teachings of Jesus Christ through quality footwear”

Herman claimed that he received e-mails "wishing physical harm on me" in response to the game, though he did not quote any of those e-mails to clarify what those threats were. He called the game development industry "overly sensitive and easily offended" and claimed to have been part of it "since 2007." While his personal website mentions having "worked" on such games as Disney Infinity and Call of Duty: Black Ops, a Google cache of his LinkedIn profile clarified that he was a QA tester on those titles as opposed to a developer. (That LinkedIn profile no longer exists.)

In addition to the game, app, music, and skateboarding projects listed on Herman's personal site, Ars Technica found another project with his full name and likeness attached: Devotor Footwear. Herman, who rode a skateboard while wearing Devotor shoes in the site's primary YouTube video, launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 on behalf of a skateboarding shoe company "with one goal in mind: to promote the words and teachings of Jesus Christ through quality footwear." That campaign was canceled before coming anywhere near its $20,000 fundraising goal. (Herman created a separate Kickstarter account for his video game projects, but a Whoisology search confirmed that a Randall Herman with a Skaldic Games e-mail address registered the site for Devotor Footwear.)

In an e-mail response to Ars Technica, Herman confirmed that he made the KTF game entirely by himself and that Valve delisted and banned the game within "about two hours" of the game going live. When asked about his role in creating Devotor, Herman claimed that he merely "built and hosted" the Devotor site "for a friend." When pressed about the fact that Herman posted to at least one forum saying he "started" the shoe site himself, rather than list any other names either at that forum or at the project's original Kickstarter, Herman insisted that he was "promoting it for a friend." He declined to respond to any questions about the ideological conflict between those two decidedly different projects.

Our questions to Valve Software about the game's Greenlight removal—and that service's apparent lack of pre-publishing filter or monitoring for offensive content—had not been answered as of press time.