It took 25 years to become reality, but as it turned out, Robert Pfitzner’s Commando Libya for the Commodore 64 was pretty spot on in terms of predicting the future.
If you’re old enough you remember this game. In the mid ‘80s, there was a floppy disc or a tape with this game in every teenager’s room.

Yes kids, I said tape.

No, not Scotch tape; tape as in cassette.

Never mind.

In the game Commando Libya you were standing behind a machine gun killing soldiers coming in from the right and left side of the screen. This task wasn’t that hard. At this time, Libya seemed to have the slowest moving soldiers around.

However, once in a while bombs were rolling towards you at a quicker pace, and that was the real trouble. When they reached your gun you were dead.

Basically that was what the game was all about. And to be honest, it wasn’t that exciting.

The reason why people played Commando Libya was the bonus rounds.

After you’ve completed a level, a line of war prisoners were lined up against a wall. To get the game to move on you had to gun them down by holding the fire button and moving the joystick over the soldiers.

You executed them.

When they were all killed, you’d get a comment like: “That’s funn!” (the comments had bad spelling) or “That were Ghadaffi’s children” (that was how he spelled his name back in the days.)

The reactions to this game when it was released in 1986 were pretty, well, how should I put it … mixed.

When people were talking about dangers of playing violent video games (which they still do today,) this was the perfect game to bring up.

“Look at the disgusting games we allow our children to play. And the games look SO REALISTIC”

At the same time, a lot us of saw the dark humor in this and it didn’t create hordes of gun-loving C64 geeks (that’s a real game idea for you!)

And when you think about it, the same people that thought Commando Libya was going to destroy a whole generation of children probably didn’t mind when Kaddafi was executed in real life a while back.

I guess Commando Libya was just ahead of its time.