Finnish Site Pulls 2005 Flash Game Kindergarten Killer After School Shooting Tensions Rise

A Flash game called Kindergarten Killer has been pulled from Finnish site lastenpelit.fi in the wake of a recent school shooting.

On September 25, we reported that the Finnish government was revisiting web monitoring laws after Matti Saari killed 10 people at a culinary academy. Prior to the shootings, Saari had posted several chilling videos online. Although Kindergarten Killer has not been linked with Saari's rampage, sensitivity in Finland over the tragedy remains high.

According to GameDaily.biz, a statement posted by lastenpelit.fi explains that "We have removed pages from our site that are not necessarily appropriate for younger family members."

Kindergarten Killer is a Duck Hunt-style, point-and-click shooter. Its cell-shaded rendering contains extremely bloody kill animations, including cartoon beheadings via shotgun. The game plays exactly as its title suggests — armed youngsters pop up in hallways and classrooms, and the player must mow them down. The object is to "kill the kindergarten," meaning the entire school.

According to its copyright notice, Kindergarten Killer was written by Gary Short. The game also cites a URL, zsoa.com, which is currently parked. Google cache snapshots of the site are dated September 28, 2008, six days after the shootings in Finland. It's unclear whether Short took down his site voluntarily or had it pulled by his hosting company.

The cached version of zsoa.com indicates that Kindergarten Killer probably came out as early as 2005, so the game's link to the recent school shootings is more the result of Finnish media and hosting sites' reviewing their content rather than its author's attempt to grab headlines.

Finland's President, Tarja Halonen, put his country's Web media and ISPs on notice recently, telling a Finnish broadcaster that "the Internet and YouTube forums...are not another planet. This is part of our world and we adults have the responsibility to check what is happening, and create borders and safety there."