As reported by Newsweek and Wired, suspected White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, Cole Thomas Allen, had previously attempted a career as an independent game developer, and has a single game available for purchase on Steam: Bohrdom. The self-described asymmetric fighting game’s reviews and discussion forums quickly became a hotbed of political debate and dubious meme-making during and after the incident.
Rumors of the game’s provenance quickly spread on social media Sunday night. According to CNN, Allen allegedly stormed the Secret Service checkpoint outside the event around 8:30 PM Eastern. At 11:30 Eastern, Game File author and former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo had seen players flocking to Bohrdom’s Steam forums, and shared screenshots of the activity to Bluesky.
When I visited the game’s Steam store page last night, Bohrdom had four user reviews. At the time of writing, Bohrdom now has 107 user reviews, a 50/50 “Mixed” status, and 10 pages of discussion posts.
Bohrdom is an odd game: It scans as an educational tool more than anything else. You play as an electron or nucleus in a gamified version of atomic chemistry, which Allen described as “technically a skill-based, non-violent asymmetrical fighting game,” or, alternatively, “a hybrid of a bullet hell and a racing game.” Bohrdom is available for $2 on Steam, and lists support for up to 13-player multiplayer.
Over 100 people have paid that $2 for the privilege of engaging in a political debate via Bohrdom’s Steam reviews, with yet more freeloaders doing so in the discussion forums. It’s about what you would expect from this sort of thing: Sub half-hour playtimes with a message of support or mockery to Allen or Trump depending on whether the review is positive or negative.
Others are just shitposting, and that too gets old immediately. “The attack was guerilla marketing,” “where’d the dev support go,” and “It’s good to finally see these forums so active again” are all decent gags in a vacuum, but have already been repeated ad nauseam.
There’s little here to instruct about Allen’s potential motive, just the discomfort of seeing an incongruously light and whimsical relic of a life that appears to have been headed for an attempted act of extraordinary political violence. This is the second time in recent history where an accused political assassin in the US has left a significant footprint of activity on Steam for public scrutiny: Suspected Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson had over 2,000 hours logged in Sea of Thieves.
