By Bradley Lau
“We made a game out of dying because we were mirroring the state of the world.”
When I moved to La Porte, Texas, in the early 1980s, I didn’t know anyone. New town. New school. New self to invent. Where was my tribe? Who had their finger on the pulse? The pigeon hole identities of Jocks, Kickers, Stoners and Nerds held no charms for me. I needed musically literate, worldly and unique personalities to associate with. Not suburban robots drinking Reagan’s Kool-Aid.
Sitting in class, I noticed Jerome. Smart, funny, nice guy. Beneath his grey trench coat I noticed a soft-pellet pistol. Well, well… this is interesting. Following him after class I saw more kids in trench coats, whispered code names, attempts to secretly exchange dossiers. They moved through the hallways like cold-eyed operatives, hidden pistols at the ready, their paranoia palpable.
I had heard about this phenomena from college kids and the movie with Anthony Edwards (you know, when he had a head full of hair and didn’t play a nerdy doctor). They were playing Killer. Or T.A.G. Or Gotcha!, the name changed depending on who you asked, but the premise didn’t: you were given a target. Eliminate them. Then take their target. Repeat. Survive. It was espionage theater played out in cafeterias, hallways, the band hall and chemistry labs. A game that mirrored the anxieties of the era almost too perfectly.
I. A Game Born in the Shadow of the Bomb
Killer didn’t originate in suburbia, it filtered in from above. The earliest versions of the game appeared on Ivy League campuses in the late 1970s, particularly Dartmouth, Wesleyan, and MIT. Students carried out mock assassinations with suction darts, squirt guns, or stealth-applied “contact poisons” (often salt, ink, or Vaseline). The structure was elegant in its menace: everyone was a target, but only you knew yours.
It was Cold War playacting, borrowed from John le Carré and The Day of the Jackal, cross-pollinated with the Reagan-era mood of ever-present dread. The fear of annihilation was ambient. So why not train for it, casually, between biology and fourth-period history?
The game spread quickly, aided by photocopied rulebooks and breathless word-of-mouth. You didn’t sign up. You were invited. (Well, I wasn’t but it did help me find and barge my way into my tribe.)
II. The Sacred Texts of Faux Violence
To outsiders, it looked absurd. But within the game, everything had gravity. The rules weren’t guidelines, they were canon. Violations weren’t frowned upon; they were prosecuted.
Each player had a dossier. A weapon (usually plastic). And a Game Master who played god from the shadows, resolving disputes and keeping the ecosystem balanced. The stakes were imagined, but the emotional intensity was very real. You learned to check your six. You learned to lie.
Why play football when you could stage a low-stakes coup in the auditorium?
III. Training for the Apocalypse
The deeper truth was this: the game felt like a simulation. And in a way, it was. We were children rehearsing disaster in a world that had already promised it. We’d grown up on a cold war diet of spies, nuclear detonations, fallout shelters, televised air raids, and nuclear instruction films. We weren’t imitating James Bond, the world order was collapsing and we were trying to make sense of a reality too large to process. We were practicing for resistance in an occupied America.
Contact poison became a metaphor for invisible threat: radiation, betrayal, disease. Every friend might secretly be your executioner. It was equal parts spycraft and social experiment.
And yes, schools freaked out. Rightly so. But the more they tried to shut it down, the more real it felt. We were subversive. We were dangerous. We were teenagers.
IV. Girls with Lipstick Guns
Though the game skewed male, the outliers became legends. You’d here tell of some girl who rigged her purse with a retractable dart gun. The sophomore who played sweet until she eliminated three seniors in two days. The cheerleader whose pom-poms held poison pins. Legends.
The game was an accidental space for performance, gender play, and experimentation with control. Who gets to be a killer? Who gets to survive?
V. The Fade-Out
And then, one day, it was gone. A flash in the pan that was replaced by the next 80’s trend.
And now post-Columbine, the idea of carrying a fake weapon to school has become unthinkable. After 9/11, surveillance replaced spontaneity. Schools became lockdown zones, not playfields. A squirt gun in a backpack was no longer a toy, it was a threat.
But Killer didn’t vanish entirely. Its DNA is traceable in Humans vs. Zombies, in Nerf wars, in apps that gamify daily life. It also predicted something darker: a world where everything is a game. Social media likes as kill counts. Credit scores as stealth status. Surveillance as play.
Killer was just the beta version.
VI. The Last Dossier
Could a game like this exist now? Probably not. And maybe that’s for the best. LARPing seems ridiculous now. The novelty and innocence have burned off.
But for a moment, one brief, paranoid, beautifully dumb moment, we turned our boredom and our fear into a strange kind of theater. We shot our friends with little yellow balls and called it fun. We conspired in practice rooms and hallways. We plotted and schemed and ambushed. We practiced betrayal and called it fun.
We called it Killer.
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