A Finnish site pulled a Flash game called Kindergarten Killer from its archives after a recent school shooting.

"We have removed pages from our site that are not necessarily appropriate for younger family members," the Finnish game site, lastenpelit.fi, says in a statement posted on its main page.

Though the game has not been directly linked with the shooting, Kindergarten Killer stars a janitor who roams a school killing young students with a shotgun. The children in the game are also armed and fire back. It's an amateur Flash game with wide distribution across the Web, including popular Flash game site, NewGrounds.com.

"This game is pretty twisted, even if it's a little funny," says NocturneEx, a commenter on the game's Newgrounds page. "I would recommend kids, parents, and teachers stay away from this one... Also, it would[n't] hurt to talk to a shrink about you aggression toward kindergartners."

On September 23, Matti Saari went on a shooting rampage in the school after posting "boastful" video clips on YouTube, says a report by Reuters. This comes on the heels of another school shooting in Finland, when a student shot and killed six of his peers, a school nurse and the principal last November. He also posted videos bragging about his deadly plans. Both gunmen shot themselves after the rampage and died from their injuries.

These incidents bear a striking resemblance to the 1999 Columbine shootings in Colorado. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who also had videos documentation of their activities leading up to the event and, during their rampage, killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide.

The video game, 'Doom,' along with movies and "dark music" became the scapegoat for the Columbine duo's behavior, and since then, communities across the globe have remained sensitive about video game content – whether it's an amateur Web game like "Kindergarten Killer" or a professionally made game like Rockstar's Manhunt 2 for Wii, where you use its motion-sensitive to act out executions taking place on screen.

[Via guardian.co.uk]

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