The Physics of a Fallout: When Your $2 Indie Game Becomes a Crime Scene Artifact
AI Gaming News Author · IGN South Africa ·
An obscure $2 indie physics game called Bohrdom has become the center of a bizarre Steam storm after its developer was arrested for an alleged shooting near a White House press dinner.
I’ve been tinkering with this story all morning, and bloody hell, it’s wilder than it first appeared. You know that feeling when you’re messing about with a spell and it works a bit too well, but in the most catastrophic way possible? That’s essentially what happened on the Steam storefront this week, though I reckon 'catastrophic' doesn't even begin to cover the vibe.
Normally, when an indie dev sees their player count spike by 1,100%, they’re popping the bubbly and wondering if they can finally afford that ergonomic chair they’ve had their eye on. But for the creator of a little-known physics game called *Bohrdom*, that spike didn't come from a sudden viral TikTok or a glowing recommendation from a big-name streamer. It came because the developer, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, allegedly decided to swap his keyboard for a firearm and try to storm a high-profile press dinner at the Washington Hilton.
First, a bit of context for those of you who weren't glued to the news cycle. According to a report by Wesley Yin-Poole over at IGN South Africa, Allen was arrested after police say he opened fire near a security checkpoint during the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The targets? Likely the President and his officials. It’s the kind of headline that makes you want to crawl into a sensory deprivation tank for a week. But what makes it specifically 'our' kind of weird is that Allen identifies himself as an indie game developer.
Now, I’ve seen some pretty aggressive marketing tactics in my time—I’ve seen devs promise the moon, the stars, and a decentralized utopia just to get a few wishlists—but this is something else entirely. It’s the ultimate 'what the hell is happening' moment in the gaming world.
Let’s talk about the game itself, *Bohrdom*. It’s currently sitting on Steam like a digital ghost ship. Allen released it back in December 2018, and it’s described as a 'skill-based, non-violent asymmetrical fighting game loosely derived from a chemistry model.' I’ve got to be honest, mate, that sounds like something I’d actually be quite curious about on a lazy Sunday. A hybrid of a bullet hell and a racing game with self-propelled pinballs? If you’re a nerd for physics or chemistry, it sounds like a weirdly charming little experiment.
On his LinkedIn, Allen painted himself as the quintessential polymath: mechanical engineer, computer scientist, teacher, and dev. He bragged about writing a custom C++ physics engine and creating over 750 custom graphics. Looking at his digital trail, you see a guy who was clearly obsessed with the 'how' and 'why' of digital collisions—the irony of which is a bit too thick to swallow given the real-world collision he allegedly sought out in Washington.
But here is where the internet gets properly strange. Until this weekend, *Bohrdom* was a ghost town. According to SteamDB, it had a peak concurrent player count of exactly one or two people for basically its entire life. Then, news of the arrest broke, and suddenly the player count rocketed to 22. Now, 22 people isn't a stadium crowd, but it’s a crowd for a game that was essentially dead.
And then came the reviews. Ah, the Steam community—never one to let a tragedy go by without a bit of dark, often toxic, commentary. The game was promptly review-bombed. It went from having two lonely user reviews to over 125 in a matter of hours. One of the 'most helpful' reviews currently reads: 'when I’m in a “weirdest way to get publicity for my game” competition and my opponent is this developer.'
It’s a bit grim, isn't it? This is the digital age we live in. A man commits a violent act, and the first thing people do is go and leave a joke review on his $2 physics game. The Steam discussion pages are even worse, filled with the kind of toxic sludge you usually only find in the dark corners of a failed MMO. It’s like people are using the game’s storefront as a proxy for the actual courtroom.
Steam (or Valve, if we’re being formal) has stepped in, as they usually do when the magic goes haywire. They’ve disabled the ability to buy or download the game, which is the digital equivalent of cordoning off a crime scene with yellow tape. It’s a sensible move, though I wonder about the mechanics of it—does a game remain on the storefront forever if the dev is behind bars? Is it a piece of history or a digital biohazard?
There’s a second game mentioned on Allen's LinkedIn called *First Law*, which was supposedly in development. I suspect we won’t be seeing that one hit early access anytime soon.
What’s the takeaway here? Beyond the obvious horror of the event itself, it’s a fascinating, if depressing, look at the permanence of our digital footprints. We’re all wizards in our own right, casting spells in C++, Python, or Solidity, leaving behind these little fragments of our minds in the form of code and pinball physics. Usually, those fragments are just hobbyist curiosities. But sometimes, they become the only window we have into a person who has completely lost the plot.
I’m always one for finding the silver lining or the 'why' behind the 'what,' but here, the 'why' feels like a broken logic gate. We have a creator who built something 'non-violent' and 'atomic,' only to end up in the news for something that was anything but. It’s a reminder that the person behind the 'Indie Dev' tag is just that—a person, with all the complexity and potential for malfunction that entails.
Keep your eyes on the tea leaves, mates. This one is going to be in the courts for a while, and the fallout on Steam is just a small, weird ripple in a much larger, darker pond.
Source: This story was originally reported by Wesley Yin-Poole at IGN South Africa.
Tags: Indie Games, Steam, Gaming News, Developer Culture
Original article: IGN South Africa