Where Is 9/11? Video Games and the Missing Disaster

This article originally began as a tongue-in-cheek “Top 10 Games About 9/11” list. 

In the twenty-five years since September 11, 2001, video games have become one of the principal cultural mechanisms through which contemporary societies rewrite historical violence into consumable experience. This beloved medium has demonstrated an almost pathological willingness to transform virtually every conceivable catastrophe into an interactive simulation. Features of war become setpieces; political revolutions become backdrops. Surveying the landscape of bestsellers, you might reasonably conclude that the collapse of civilization has matured into a genre unto itself. Thus, somewhere amidst the enormous and largely ungovernable ecology of commercial bestsellers, and similarly assorted digital garbage, there would be enough material for me to assemble a deliberately tasteless retrospective – at least out of the cobwebbed corners of Steam. Alas, despite the platform publishing a record-breaking 21,400 games in 2025, I was unable to assemble my top ten. Instead, like the towers themselves, I encountered a conspicuous absence.

The immediate realization was not that games had somehow ignored September 11. That would be demonstrably false, and the academic literature surrounding post-9/11 games is extensive precisely because the event and its political consequences have exerted an enormous influence over the medium. What surprised me was the distinction between a game being about 9/11 and a game being produced within the cultural wake that 9/11 created. The latter is ubiquitous, whereas the former is extraordinarily difficult to find. 

Marc Ouillette’s 2008 article, “‘I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This’: Pedagogy & Allegory in ‘Post 9/11’ Video Games,” provides a lens through which to view “games which function allegorically (at the very least metaphorically) and pedagogically through their imbrication with the web of so-called ‘post-9/11’ narratives.” In other words, not necessarily games about 9/11, but rather, games that exist because of 9/11. 

There are games that engage with terrorism, games shaped by the “War on Terror,” games whose representations of military intervention would be difficult to understand without the geopolitical environment of the early twenty-first century, and games whose development or publication was altered because their imagery suddenly became uncomfortably reminiscent of the attacks. What there is not, at least within the mainstream commercial canon, is an obvious body of ludic work that takes September 11 itself as a historical object and asks the player to confront its causes, consequences, moral ambiguities, or reflect on human meaning.

To this challenge, Ouillette concludes, perhaps prematurely, that “consumers of video games are more concerned with their own recreation than the implications of the terror attacks or they are not sufficiently media literate to recognize the collusion between the entertainment industry and the Bush regime; the metaphorical linkages between what they are seeing and the project of nationalism. A third, and worse, possibility is that they simply do not care.” There is thus, at the very outset, an inherent tension between the critical impetus to engage video games with the events of September 11 and the stubborn reality that the overwhelming player base won’t engage in the cultural conversation required for such a work to produce strong emotional responses.

That discrepancy became more interesting the longer I pondered the absence of 9/11 games, because it is not simply a question of taste. In this respect, there is no shortage of historical events that have been converted into interactive entertainment despite their violence, moral complexity, or continuing political sensitivity. Video games have represented the Second World War from every conceivable perspective, transformed the Cold War into espionage fantasy, dramatized genocidal violence through historical strategy games like the Civilization games (don’t give Ghandi a nuke, y’all), and most markedly, annually invited players to inhabit the roles of soldiers, intelligence officers, revolutionaries, insurgents, police officers, criminals, and political leaders. Most prominently, of course, is the first-person military shooter. With this landscape in mind, even the most morally compromised historical subjects can become available to the player once sufficient temporal distance, abstraction, or fictionalization has been applied. September 11 appears to occupy a peculiar position in which the event remains culturally proximate enough to resist direct representation while its downstream consequences have become sufficiently normalized to function as the setting for entire genres. Is 25 years “too soon”?

Matthew Thomas Payne’s Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11 is useful here precisely because his analysis demonstrates how misleading it would be to characterize 9/11’s black hole in gaming as a simple absence. Payne examines the relationship between serialized military shooters and the post-9/11 political environment, emphasizing the way games transformed contemporary warfare into an interactive form in which players could experience, rehearse, and theoretically negotiate ideas from the game with their own regarding military power. Payne argues not that September 11 disappeared from games, but that it became embedded within the assumptions governing what military games were permitted to represent and how their players were expected to understand contemporary conflict and their own potential complicity. The attacks on the twin towers could remain outside the immediate frame while their ideological and brutally violent consequences became part of the medium’s ordinary vocabulary.

The events of September 11, 2001 were burned into my third-grader brain, but I was not yet attuned to contemporary video game news aside from what was shared on the playground. Looking back twenty-five years ago, several prominent games were delayed, modified, or otherwise reconsidered because material that had previously seemed innocuous suddenly appeared disturbingly close to reality. Grand Theft Auto III, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002, and other titles became objects of scrutiny because they contained imagery involving New York, terrorism, military destruction, or recognizable urban landmarks that many feared could inspire similar attacks. In the case of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002, the World Trade Center was absent from the game’s representation of Manhattan. The decision is understandable in its immediate historical context, but this absence also produces an almost uncanny philosophical problem: a simulation of reality became less realistic because reality itself had temporarily become too difficult to reproduce. Sartre’s “nothingness” emerges.

9/11 feels bizarre as a cultural object because our response to it has reflected a uniquely corporate sensitivity. When an object is removed from a simulation game because it has become traumatic, the simulation does not necessarily remain neutral; instead, the removal creates a new historical statement. The absence of the towers becomes an alteration to the historical record represented by the game, and players who know what has been removed become capable of perceiving the omission as an object in itself. Again, we find ourselves in Sartre’s cafe, looking around for Pierre. 

Unlike films, video games are unusually susceptible to restoration by their audiences. Players can modify, reconstruct, and reinsert elements that developers have removed, meaning that the relationship between corporate representation and historical memory does not necessarily end when a publisher deletes an image – or, in the recent Halloween controversy, removes a problematic mini-game post-release. The resulting conflict is less a simple contest between censorship and freedom than a struggle over who gets to determine which version of reality a simulation is entitled to preserve, as the genre suggests, 1:1.

It’s not as though some corporate video game Illuminati has collectively conspired all publishers to prohibit 9/11 games. Rather, the term “mainstream absence” becomes a more useful shorthand when analyzing why the subject matter has yet to be thoroughly explored. There is no singular institutional mechanism preventing developers from making such a game like 9/11 Simulator, and it would be irresponsible to reduce the absence entirely to censorship.

A game explicitly reconstructing September 11 would inevitably invite uncomfortable questions about exploitation, victimhood, historical accuracy, political bias, and the ethics of turning mass death into an interactive consumer product. From a corporate perspective, avoiding the subject is therefore extremely easy to justify: “respect for the victims” compresses innumerable potential concerns into a single moral explanation.

This corporate explanation becomes less satisfying as historical distance accumulates. Twenty-five years after the attacks, September 11 exists alongside an almost incomprehensible quantity of subsequent violence. The “War on Terror” produced brutal occupations, refugee crises, torture scandals, surveillance programs, sectarian violence, and political movements whose consequences continue to shape the present. What has emerged is an entire vocabulary of national remembrance – of myth-making. Our culture now balances the opposing ideas that the events of 9/11 are sacrosanct with the frank acknowledgement that its consequences have become ordinary, mundane fodder for pop culture backdrops. The cultural prohibition has not prevented 9/11 from becoming “content”; it has instead determined which portions of its history are socially permitted.

The mainstream industry eventually became extremely comfortable representing the political world that followed the attacks, provided that the historical event itself remained sufficiently displaced. The player could participate in fictional counterterrorism operations, invade fictional Middle Eastern countries, pursue fictional insurgents, operate advanced American weapons systems, and occupy the perspective of soldiers confronting threats constructed from the geopolitical anxieties of the period. What was generally more difficult was asking the player to inhabit the uncertainty surrounding the event itself, where there is no uncomplicated heroic perspective and where the questions of responsibility extend beyond the immediate identification of an enemy. The easy rebuttal is that a game like this “wouldn’t sell,” and to that I challenge anyone with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a game that leaves even the player dripping in blood from their moral decisionmaking.

Ouillette’s book, The Post-9/11 Video Game: A Critical Examination, demonstrates that video games became an important site for negotiating questions of American identity, violence, militarism, nationalism, and representation. Games did not, in other words, need to reproduce the attacks literally in order to participate in their cultural aftermath. The conventions of the military shooter could absorb the political imagination of the period without ever forcing players to confront the historical event that had helped produce that imagination.

The racial dimension of this transformation is equally difficult to ignore. The “War on Terror” produced a political vocabulary in which particular regions, religions, languages, and populations could increasingly be associated with the category of terrorism, and commercial games did not exist outside that environment. In short, the American reaction to 9/11 largely festered deep-seated distrust and outright hatred towards brown people, specifically Muslims. 

Games like Call of Duty, of which I eagerly participated with my friends throughout high school, could therefore offer the player an apparently uncomplicated structure in which violence against foreign populations was converted into the pursuit of identifiable antagonists. Players weren’t explicitly told that, in the real world, particular ethnic or religious groups deserved violence, but plausible deniability goes a long way when we consider the overwhelming playerbase for military shooters: young men. Structurally, games have normalized the assumption that certain populations belonged naturally on the receiving end of American military force while obfuscating the political circumstances which produced that violence.

Nick Robinson’s paper, “Beyond the shadow of 9/11? videogames 20 years after 9/11,” resists the idea that games are magical-ideological machines that transform their players into whatever political subjects their developers intended. As anyone who has played games for a few years naturally realizes, we possess considerably more agency than simplistic accounts of propaganda allow. Nevertheless, the persistence of post-9/11 military conventions demonstrates that the cultural shadow of the attacks did not disappear simply because contemporary games became more technologically sophisticated or because younger players became increasingly distant from the original event. In Robinson’s analysis, the political assumptions embedded in military games can persist precisely because they have ceased to feel exceptional. Desensitization, in other words.

A game does not represent something merely because it displays the correct images. Violence is represented through a game’s rules, its available actions, its restrictions, its rewards, its perspective, and its assumptions about issues like causality. A hypothetical 9/11 game would therefore not need to be a literal recreation in which the player is given some macabre objective to reproduce the attacks. In fact, such a game would probably be among the least intellectually interesting possibilities available, even though I know I’d personally platinum it. The more consequential possibility would be a game that asked what it means to experience a historical catastrophe from within a network of incomplete information and conflicting motivations, where no participant possesses the omniscient perspective that history retrospectively grants to the audience.

To this end, I discovered a game on Steam called Threads of New York 9/11. While there is no targeted release window for this game at the moment of writing, the Threads of New York 9/11’s description sounds as close to this sort of morally compelling game that I have been able to find: “In Threads of New York, Step into the life of Sameer, a Pakistani American living in NYC during the week of 9/11. Sameer must navigate rising tensions, protect his family, and make impossible choices. Decisions that will shape his future and the fate of those around him in a city forever changed.” I imagine Threads of New York to be a game in which I don’t even encounter a gun, much less shoot one in a seemingly morally justified manner. While I can’t say the game looks particularly polished, nor do the screenshots present promise much, the concept’s germination seems to be emerging from a sorely needed perspective, and that alone piques my interest.

September 11 is an unusually difficult subject for an interactive medium because the player is accustomed to believing that their decisions matter. A historically faithful representation would have to confront the possibility that the most consequential event in the game could occur independently of the player’s wishes, while the player’s subsequent choices would take place within a world already transformed by something they could not prevent.

Thus, as we move away from simplistic notions of a “9/11 Simulator,” we could imagine a narrative game following several characters whose knowledge of the developing crisis is partial and contradictory, with the player moving between perspectives that cannot be reconciled into a single authoritative account. I’m thinking of a Detroit: Become Human styled game, albeit without a monster at the head of the studio. 

Another possibility would be an investigative game focused on the institutional conditions preceding and following the attacks, where the player gradually discovers that historical responsibility is distributed across bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, political decisions, ideological movements, and individual actions rather than residing within a single villainous figure. A game could focus entirely on the aftermath and ask the player to navigate the moral consequences of retaliatory violence, surveillance, occupation, and public fear. Hell, from what I hear about the inimitable Return of the Obra Dinn, apply that formula to these events and something genuinely profound might emerge. None of these approaches would require turning the deaths of thousands of people into a conventional entertainment spectacle, and all of them would exploit something that games are uniquely capable of doing: converting abstract relationships into systems that the player must learn to understand.

Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th comes close to fitting this vacancy. September 12th is not a reconstruction of the attacks, nor is it principally interested in historical fidelity. The game certainly isn’t aesthetically pleasing, with a simplified isometric aesthetic that could flatter the early Age of Mythology games. Instead, September 12th abstracts the logic of the “War on Terror” into a gameplay system in which military retaliation can generate the very conditions that produce additional hostility. September 12th‘s significance lies in its refusal to treat violence as a straightforward solution. Rather than merely telling the player that retaliation is counterproductive, it allows the player to encounter that proposition on their own. The political argument therefore emerges not simply from dialogue or exposition but from the relationship between the player’s actions and the simulated world’s response – something only games, as a storytelling medium, can do.

A conventional historical narrative can tell us that one action caused another, while a game can make the player discover the relationship by attempting to manipulate the system. It’s not necessarily that games are inherently superior historical instruments; games can just as easily simplify, distort, or trivialize history. But the possibility exists for a form of historical representation that is neither documentary nor fictional in the conventional sense. A game can construct an environment in which the player must inhabit competing incentives, incomplete information, and unintended consequences, allowing historical interpretation to emerge through interaction rather than simply through the transmission of facts. It’s a glaring problem to me that there isn’t already a shortlist of classic 9/11 games, sans crude browser titles.

When you strip “9/11” from the search bar, and look more broadly for games involving the World Trade Center, games depicting the attacks, games about their immediate aftermath, games whose political premises could plausibly be traced back to the “War on Terror,” there is plenty of adjacent material. But it’s just that: adjacency itself became the pattern. 

The closer I moved toward the historical event, the more likely I was to encounter either an omission, a euphemism, a fictional substitution, or a controversy about whether the subject should be represented at all. The events of 9/11 are a walking disclaimer reminding you that any likenesses are purely a coincidence.

Steam contains an almost indescribable quantity of political extremism, historical atrocities, terrorism, war crimes, and almost every conceivable variety of human misery. It’s not like Steam has the reputation of Nintendo with censorship. But if you peer into corners of the gaming world that I tend to avoid – Minecraft, Roblox, etc. – you’ll see how people inevitably construct things that the developers did not intend (or want) them to construct.

The existence of such material demonstrates that the prohibition is not technologically necessary. It is a cultural decision about what kinds of representations are considered legitimate. The fact that players can construct the subject themselves does not necessarily make those constructions admirable, and some are obviously motivated by edgelord provocation rather than sincere inquiry. But their existence complicates the comforting idea that society simply decided that September 11 should not be represented. Society has represented it. But that representation has occurred unevenly, making certain forms of engagement respectable and others almost automatically obscene. This absurdity begs for irreverence.

I have an admittedly concerning relationship with 9/11’s historical taboo as a source of humor, particularly because I grew up in a world that blatantly overreacted to its events. You might consider me a “9/11 completist,” someone whose favorite special interest involves tracking down new photos, videos, and vintage memorabilia pertaining to the event. Growing up, the institutionalized language of “never forget” became stranger than the thing we’re supposedly protecting, and thus I’ve always harbored deep irreverence. Being fondled by TSA agents every time I fly out, as per the trans woman ritual, is something that our 9/11 response is directly responsible for. 

My impulse to make a deliberately tasteless “top ten 9/11 games” list was obviously not motivated by an interest in mocking the people who died. 9/11 jokes are directed at the bizarre cultural contradiction in which an event can become one of the defining historical facts of modern American life while simultaneously occupying a category of representation that is treated as unassailable, even unspeakable. And here I am, a few thousand words in, still stunned that there aren’t more games to choose from.

For zoomers not yet born in 2001, September 11 does not exist as a purely personal memory. It is inherited history, encountered through photographs, documentaries, political rhetoric, memorials, classroom lessons, airport security, and the accumulated mythology of the internet. The analogy for my generation would be the civil rights movements that occurred decades before my own birth; I can recite the important names, dates, and so forth, but I cannot ever adequately sketch in the “before” side of the timeline, for I inherited this world. In the same way, cultural distance doesn’t lessen the significance of historical events, but it does change the emotional vocabulary through which they are encountered. Irony, for me, is a way of negotiating inherited trauma, particularly the official language surrounding that trauma and how 9/11 is treated so rigidly that sincere engagement itself feels artificial. While I will always hold contempt for the United States government for its military occupations killing and oppressing people all around the globe, the question about 9/11 and historical boundaries persists. I cannot believe this prudish boundary is as absolute as everyone insists.

September 11 involved real people, real deaths, and real families whose relationship to the event cannot be reduced to an academic thought experiment about representation. A person who lost someone in the attacks does not have the luxury of treating the event as an abstract historical system, and the distance that makes irony possible for one generation does not erase the intimacy that remains for another. Any serious argument for representing September 11 in games therefore has to resist the adolescent fantasy (mine included) that transgression is automatically profound. Making something offensive does not make it intellectually courageous, and the mere existence of a forbidden subject does not obligate anyone to turn it into entertainment.

But, for me, the perfunctory problem persists: refusing representation also has consequences. When an event is treated as uniquely beyond the reach of interactive interpretation, its historical meaning becomes disproportionately shaped by institutions that are willing to represent its aftermath. Governments can construct narratives about responsibility. Militaries can construct narratives about necessity. Entertainment companies can construct narratives about heroism and retaliation. News organizations can construct narratives about memory and national identity. Video games’ refusal to represent the original event therefore does not remove ideology from the conversation; it may simply leave more room for the ideology of its aftermath to become invisible, shaped by forces outside of the industry.

I want to believe that interaction produces understanding, yet the most historically honest response to September 11 may be an experience in which the player repeatedly discovers the limits of their own agency. There are historical circumstances that cannot be solved by acquiring better equipment, selecting the correct dialogue option, or defeating the final antagonist. In fact, some of the best games are, as my friend Dave Jackson and I explored on his podcast, games that ask you to fail. Some games are meaningful precisely because they strategically remove your ability to “win.”

That may explain why the industry has found it easier to make games about the “War on Terror” than games about September 11. The former provides an established grammar of action: identify the enemy, move toward the objective, overcome resistance, and receive confirmation that the mission has succeeded. The latter threatens that grammar because the historical event does not resolve itself according to the logic of the mission. Its consequences extend outward through decades of political decisions, military interventions, cultural changes, and personal memories, none of which can be reduced to the completion of a level. A game attempting to represent that reality would have to give up some of the most fundamental pleasures on which commercial games are built, and who wants to market that?

So I never found my ten games. But I did spend far too long learning that Super Mario Odyssey’s New Donk City has its own canonical 9/11 involving rogue Bullet Bills.

In seriousness, instead of my list, I arrive at a medium that has spent twenty-five years processing the consequences of September 11 while remaining strangely hesitant to process September 11 itself. The event did not disappear from games so much as become submerged beneath the genres that followed it. By the time I went searching for 9/11 in 2026, I had to reconstruct its presence from missing buildings, delayed releases, fictionalized conflicts, altered representations, academic arguments, and games that addressed the “War on Terror” without (almost) ever naming the historical trauma that made that cultural formation possible.

The absence of a canonical 9/11 game may therefore tell us less about the limits of developers’ imagination than about the limits of the cultural roles we have assigned to games. We are comfortable asking them to make war playable, terrorism legible, military power entertaining, and geopolitical violence consumable – and on an annualized cycle, at that. We become considerably less comfortable when the game asks us to remain inside the ambiguity before those categories have been neatly assigned.

My punchline article transformed into a research problem. I went looking for an absurd collection of games that I assumed must exist because the contemporary entertainment industry has demonstrated such a voracious appetite for turning catastrophe into content, and I discovered that the conspicuous absence was itself, at least to me, historically meaningful. There are games that remember September 11, games that erase it, games that inherit its politics, and games that critique the wars conducted in its name. What remains remarkably rare is a game willing to make the event itself an object of sustained inquiry, not because the subject is impossible to represent, but because representing it would require the medium to confront an uncomfortable question about what interactivity is actually for. That’s why the forthcoming game, Fourteen Years of Flames, has my full attention: it borrows the military shooter to represent China’s struggle in the second Sino-Japanese War, a topic I have never seen portrayed in games before. Coming from a Chinese development team, I am incredibly hopeful that Fourteen Years of Flames will solve the problem that 9/11 has created above.

The irony, at least to me, is that this is precisely the kind of problem at which games ought to be unusually good. They are machines for testing assumptions, at least when you view game design from a pedagogical lens. They can make consequences tangible, distribute responsibility across systems, expose contradictions through rules, and force players to inhabit perspectives that prose can describe without requiring anyone to experience their internal logic. If September 11 remains largely absent from games, then perhaps the absence should not be interpreted simply as evidence of cowardice or corporate timidity. It may also indicate that the medium has not yet developed a sufficiently mature vocabulary for representing historical events in which the most important questions concern responsibility, causality, spectatorship, memory, and the limits of individual agency – a more interesting conclusion than the list I originally intended to write, although admittedly a much worse title for a top-ten countdown.

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