Video Game Recreates JFK Killing

Firm Says 'Educational;' Ted Kennedy's Office Calls It 'Despicable'

(CBS/AP)  A Scottish company said Sunday it was releasing a video game recreating the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.

A spokesman for the president's brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., called the game "despicable."

The Glasgow-based firm Traffic said "JFK Reloaded" was an educational "docu-game" that would help disprove conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death. The game is due to be released Monday, the 41st anniversary of the shooting in Dallas.

Traffic said the game challenged players to recreate the three shots fired at the president's car by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository.

"We've created the game with the belief that Oswald was the only person that fired the shots on that day, although this recreation proves how immensely difficult his task was," Traffic's managing director, Kirk Ewing, said. However, he's offering $100,000 to the first person who uses it to duplicate the shots which killed the president, reports CBS News Correspondent Steve Holt.

The game is available as an Internet download for $9.99.

"What we are hoping to do is re-ignite people's passion for history. This is a unique insight into the assassination," Ewing told the BBC. "We think there's a whole generation of people who have no experience of the Kennedy assassination."

"I hasten to add that we don't regard it as a video game because there's no imagination been used to create the scene," Ewing said. "It's been covered in every kind of media so far, whether in books or movies, so what we've done is really just to extend that into the interactive media."

Sen. Kennedy's spokesman, David Smith, would not comment on whether the family was taking any action to stop the game's release.

"It's despicable. There's really no further comment," Smith said, adding that the Washington office started getting calls about the game Friday.