Sometimes, real life and indie development collide, and this isn’t always pretty.

This week, Valve Corp. disabled purchases for an indie Steam game made by 31-year-old Cole Thomas Allen of Torrance, California, who allegedly tried to shoot up the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton hotel on Saturday.

That’s both what happened in the real world and what happened to the virtual.

Allen was a Caltech robotics graduate, later described by a WSJ article as recently winning “Teacher of the Month.” Parents and teachers he had tutored were shocked by his actions. As per the usual media profile, former classmates described him as “smart, polite, soft-spoken.”

He also made a video game. Bohrdom, released on Steam for $2, is best described as a “non-violent, chemistry-based fighting game” built around atomic mechanics. At the time of the incident, the game had four reviews — which is to say, it had essentially no audience.

Valve reacted by disabling sales within days of Allen’s identification as the alleged Hilton shooter. The page persists, but the game cannot be purchased.

Community reaction was something else entirely. Within 24 hours of Allen’s identification, users descended on the game like digital locusts and flooded it with reviews. The sentiment wasn’t simple — not straightforward mockery or outrage, but a kind of dark gallows commentary that refracted the attempted assassination plot itself back through the lens of a $2 chemistry game.

Others spoke out in support of Trump or Allen, while the usual detritus of internet memes and nonsense filled in the gaps. Almost 100 people paid $2 to post a review; many others migrated to the discussion forums to continue the political comedy and meme-making.

Some reviews leaned into the absurdity: “What a wild way to gain traction for your game! Anyway, this is my contribution to your bail money.”

A pulled comment on PC Gamer’s Facebook page joked: “This is the type of game you’d see a kid playing in the background on those detective shows where they’re trying to investigate who shot at the president.”

Another comment on Polygon read: “This sounds like the kind of game a fiction writer who doesn’t understand video games would have scientists getting addicted to as part of some nefarious plot.”

It’s rare for this kind of grim celebrity to intersect with the indie gaming scene — rarer still for it to land so suddenly on the same platforms that support it. At the time of publication, Valve had not commented on its motivations for disabling the game’s sales. When it happened, it happened silently and without fanfare.

The reviews are still there. The discussions are gone now, wiped clean, leaving only the game itself and the artifact of its strange few days of notoriety. The conversation has moved on to Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky — wherever the next thing is already happening.

What the community did here wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t nothing, either. Gallows humor and political comedy are how collective shock moves through a crowd when there’s no script for it. Nobody had a protocol for a $2 chemistry game made by the guy who allegedly tried to shoot up the Correspondents’ Dinner. So people did what people do: they made jokes, spent two dollars, and showed up.

We don’t know what Allen wanted, or what he thought he was doing, in any sense of that phrase. What we do know is ourselves. We play games made by strangers. We rarely think about who those strangers are — until suddenly, we do.

Image: ChatGPT / Vox Ex Machina