It may be over the top when people accuse games for all the evil things going on, including school shootings. Then you have people like Jack Thompson condemning everything that has a joystick attached to it. In Germany however, things are far more serious. Crytek’s Tim Partlett has an interesting forum post here, describing what happened when the company got raided by armed police for making videogames.

Then the small tech team appeared to inspect our computers, they were accompanied by over one hundred flak-jacketed riot police, all armed with Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns.

It was a total overreaction. It was like they expected to find us hunkered down behind our desks, pulling out our shotguns and semi-automatics and shouting “you’ll never take me alive, polizei!” They arrived first thing in the morning, and kicked down our doors. They even raided the nearby private residences, with one of our programmers forced to lay down naked on the floor with a gun to his head after he discovered armed police in his room after finishing his shower.

Partlett continues on describing how the police setup ambushes and roadblocks around the town i order to capture Crytek developers. This happened in the state of Bavaria, who recently proposed a bill to jail game makers and gamers.

I’m surprised that Crytek hasn’t left the country yet. Although Germany has a violent history, if things continue like this the “violence” will be replaced by a far worse things; fear, suppression of free speech and creative freedom. We should be happy we got Jack Thompson instead of paranoid Germans.