Tax Time: Austin Plane Crash as Video Game

Joe Stack’s disgruntled siege on the American financial system may not get a page in history books, but his airplane suicide attack on an Austin IRS building is now immortalized in a Flash video game. Tax Time is not so much a game as a very simple interaction, in which the player sets a house on fire, gets in a plane and inevitably flies into a building. It was created by Falcon, who also developed a quick-turnaround game based on Balloon Boy (but not the one we covered here).

I’m tempted to classify Tax Time as tasteless, given that one other person, reportedly an IRS collection agent, died as a result of the plane crash. Then again, there may be a point to simplifying Stack’s actions: Man gets angry, decides to kill himself while punishing others for the way his life has gone. Yes, the game’s 8-bit style and boppy music maintains a light tone, but at the risk of reading too much into it, perhaps turning Stack into a caricature is the point. Stack wrote a whole manifesto to explain his actions, but if you’re of the mindset that his ramblings don’t serve the time of day, Tax Time tells you everything you need to know (minus an additional car crash, which didn’t really happen. Update: Yes it did). [Newgrounds via Prison Planet]