WASHINGTON — The recent declassification of all records relating to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination has revealed that the event was motivated entirely by Lee Harvey Oswald’s lifelong obsession with violent video games, historians announced.
“For the first time ever, we’re able to look back on that day with almost perfect clarity,” explained Owen Císte-Torthaí, professor of history at the University of Maryland. “All the ridiculous speculation and conspiracy theories can finally be put to rest. We know exactly why Kennedy was assassinated, and like every act of violence, it’s because of video games.”
A recently revealed FBI profile of Oswald found his obsession began in childhood, where he frequently visited the penny arcades of the 1940s.
“Oh yeah, there was this old driving game Lee loved,” recalled Edmund Ford, Oswald’s last surviving childhood friend. “One day in ‘49 we were at it together, and he said ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if instead of a road, the screen showed two people fighting?’ He went on like this for a while, describing the dream game in his head, and … look, it was Mortal Kombat, all right? I don’t mean it was kinda like Mortal Kombat, I could’ve sworn he said ‘Earthrealm’ at some point.”
As he got older, Oswald’s obsession with this theoretical technology worsened, the report found.
“In 1956, Oswald joined the Marines, since it was the closest he could get at the time to playing a military FPS,” continued Císte-Torthaí. “Two years after that, Oswald used his military connections to visit Brookhaven National Laboratory and play the early video game Tennis for Two. This was not a violent video game, but it was a video game, and it had the exact effect on his fragile young mind that you’d expect. A simple sports game can’t drive a man to kill, but betraying his country? That would make sense. By 1959, Oswald would defect to the Soviet Union.”
Oswald was unhappy in the Soviet Union, complaining about “no places of recreation,” and returned to the United States in 1962, shortly after the invention of the game Spacewar!
“As soon as he heard about Spacewar!, Oswald had to go back,” said Císte-Torthaí. “It wasn’t a fantasy anymore, someone made a video game. A violent video game, where you blow things up. As soon as Oswald shot a digital spaceship and watched it explode, he knew he had to do the same thing to the President’s head.”
Equally revealing are the newly-declassified records of Oswald’s personal correspondence in the days leading up to the assassination.
“Oh yeah, the whole video game industry basically exists because Oswald asked really hard for it,” confirmed Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, reading from a yellowed piece of paper. “He sent me this when I was in college. ‘Dear Nolan, please invent a video game company called Atari and make a game where two tanks shoot each other. It’ll kick ass. Love, Lee Harvey Oswald. P.S. I’m gonna kill JFK.’ And it wasn’t just me, he sent letters to all kinds of people. Nintendo, Sega, Sony, those were all him. He also complained a lot to Jack Ruby about how his nightclubs didn’t have any video games in them, so, you know … another mystery solved there.”
At press time, historians had discovered a 19th-century pinball machine with John Wilkes Booth’s high score.
