"Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" is a computer game in which players play the roles of teenage gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and raid the Jefferson County, Colo., high school to kill as many students as possible. The free-downloadable game, created by 24-year-old Colorado filmmaker Danny Ledonne, was to be a finalist in the festival's video game competition.

But Slamdance president Peter Baxter believes he has "moral obligations" to the families of the 1999 high school tragedy and pulled the game this week from the festival's lineup. It's the first time the 13-year event has ever banned a title - film or game - from its program.

That in turn spurred six of the remaining 13 finalists in the festival's Guerilla Gamemaker Competition to withdraw their games from the event in protest.

"This has nothing to do with whether the game is good or not. It has to do with whether video games can be seen as something more than toys," said Toronto gamemaker Jonathan Mak, 24, one of the developers who withdrew his game. "It's weird Slamdance will show controversial films every year, but it's like games have this double standard."

But Baxter said the game - which originally was selected by a jury and not him - is more problematic than any movie.

Baxter said he has received many complaints about the game's inclusion in the competition as well as questions from some of the festival's sponsors. He also has received threats of legal action, though he would not say from whom. His organization does not have "the resources to defend any action taken."

"If we were to get into a legal situation with this game," Baxter said, "there would be the danger of us not being able to continue with our organization."

The game is a cartoonish role-playing game in which the player controls the gunmen in a top-down view. As in the real tragedy that killed 13 people and injured 24 more, Harris and Klebold load up with shotguns, automatic rifles, knives and bombs and attack students and teachers inside the school. The killers then commit suicide, and the game continues into a more surreal section involving a fight in Hell.

Messages to Ledonne were not returned. But in a statement on his Web site, he says the point is to give players a better understanding of the forces behind the tragedy.

"This game asks more of its audience than rudimentary button-pushing and map navigation; it implores introspection," he wrote. "I present to you one of the darkest days in modern history and ask, 'Are we willing to look in the mirror?' "

vince@sltrib.com