Ever since Atari introduced Space Invaders into the homes of the American people, every parent and politician has pointed to the big plastic box sitting in their children’s rooms any time they are seen near a gun. Violence has always been a rather common topic in video games. One would be hard pressed to find a game that does not have some form of violence. Even Super Mario Bros depicts Mario stomping on his enemies to get rid of them. It is a common part of daily life at this point. Grass grows, dogs bark, birds fly, and video games depict horrible violence. So politicians try their hardest to get violent video games away from the youth of our nation in some new way every week, from proposing to tax them, requiring an ID upon purchase, or, in the case of Australia, outright banning them if it has any form of violence beyond lightly brushing against someone’s shoulder in a hallway. In recent years, these attempts have slowly been layered back to an extent, but video games are still a large target for politicians to place the blame on every time there is a gross act of violence. Yet, the millions of people on this planet who decide to pick up a controller and make pixels shoot at other pixels still manage to not go on a violent rampage once they turn the console off. There have been hundreds of studies, and a million attempts to disprove them, but in the end, video games are not the cause of violent outbursts. In the early 80’s and 90’s before the dawn of home consoles, gaming was best done either at an arcade or on a personal computer. With technology being far more advanced on computers than on home consoles, PC gaming was the way of the future, and early PC games would come to influence generations of games to come. But the king of PC games, the absolute fire starter for generations of games and controversy came on May 5th 1992 with ID Software’s Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein was one of the very first in what is now the most popular genre of video games, the first person shooter. It depicted a man named BJ Blaskowitz fighting through the fictitious Castle Wolfenstein with an end goal of killing Adolf Hitler (in a robot suit.) It was a major success and led to developer Jon Carmack’s next earth-shattering game Doom in 1993, in which an unnamed character kills demons. It was clear that these games did not mean to imitate real world violence. They were made for the purposes of entertainment. ID Software went on to develop more 3D first person shooters with many riding on it’s coattails. But the idea of playing through the eyes of a man with a gun sparked high controversy. This controversy exploded on April 20th, 1999 with the Columbine shootings. “At approximately 11:19 a.m., Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, dressed in trench coats, began shooting fellow students outside Columbine High School.” (History.com) When it was discovered that both boys were large fans of ID Softwares games, occasionally making levels for it like so many others, politicians and parents everywhere were set on getting violent video games removed from homes. Ever since the tragedy, a mention of video games has cropped up in discussion of every major shooting, and every time it has been disproved. From Sandy Hook, to the Isla Vista shootings, to the Aurora theatre massacre, video games have been at the center of controversy during any major tragedy. The influence of these video games on the shooters however have always been disproved. None of the shooters ever stated that video games were an influence, or the reason they committed the crimes. The murders at Columbine, at Sandy Hook, at Arora, at Isla Vista, were not the cause of the influence of violent video games. They were the influence of a mental illness. According to an article on Slate.com, Dylan Klebold was depressive and suicidal with a short temper, and Eric Harris was a rather nice person on the outside, but was deeply hurting inside and wanted to hurt people. They were the definition of psychopaths, and diagnosed as such. According to a report by UPI.com, “Lanza refused to take drugs for problems that included obsessive compulsive disorder, autism and anxiety.�