Knott’s Pulls the Plug on 36 Violent Video Games

Following Disneyland’s lead in reacting to the Colorado school shootings, the owner of Knott’s Berry Farm moved Tuesday to purge video violence from game parlors at its five amusement parks.

The Buena Park theme park unplugged 36 of the 280 video games at its three arcades and taped over the coin slots on orders from the chief executive of Cedar Fair LP, its Ohio-based owner.

“It’s just a testament to what we want to be: family entertainment,” said Jack Falfas, Knott’s general manager. Violent games also were ordered removed at Cedar Fair parks near Cleveland, Minneapolis, Allentown, Pa., and Kansas City, Mo.

The directive means that parkgoers no longer will be able to revel in the spy versus spy carnage of “Time Crisis,” blast aliens in “Area 51,” or eradicate zombies and shoot babies in the ultraviolent “House of the Dead” and “Carn Evil.”

Knott’s, home to the G-rated Peanuts cartoon characters as well as hair-raising thrill rides like “Supreme Scream,” has been emphasizing that it is a “family park” for the past two weeks, since a Cinco de Mayo nickel-admission day provoked rampant truancy and a near-riot.

But the removal of the gory games is motivated mainly by backlash against video violence since the mid-April school shootings that left 13 dead in Littleton, Colo. The attackers were two teenage outcasts said to be fixated on the blood-drenched games “Quake” and “Doom.”

Bob Webster, who runs Knott’s games operations, said some offending titles are “kit games” that can be replaced electronically in their machines with less violent fare. Others cannot be changed so easily. “ ‘Time Crisis’ cost us about $15,000 originally, and there’s not much we can do about that,” he said. “Except sell it off.”

“It’ll be very difficult to replace them because of what’s on the market,” Webster said. “Seventy percent of the video games out there are violent games.”

Even before Tuesday’s decree from Cedar Fair boss Richard Kinzel, Knott’s had pulled several of its most violent games, Webster said. And company officials said previously that they had eliminated human targets from its old-fashioned shooting galleries five years ago. Customers of Knott’s shooting galleries now aim at inanimate objects, as is the case at Disneyland shooting galleries.

Walt Disney Co. pulled the plug on 30 coin-operated games late last month in arcades in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland and Critter Country sections and in the two hotels the company owns just west of the park. A spokesman said Disneyland had been considering the move anyway but moved quickly on it because of the shootings.

Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia recently removed “five or six” violent games from its three small arcades, spokesman Andy Gallardo said. He said the park’s owner, Oklahoma City-based Premier Parks Inc., is considering restricting games at all its parks. The company specializes in roller coasters that appeal to teenagers--the audience most fond of video games.

Since the violence in Littleton, lawmakers have called for tighter restrictions on games and have organized summits on the culture of teen violence. The families of three girls killed in a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Ky., have filed a civil lawsuit against more than two dozen video game and entertainment companies.

And despite the lack of conclusive evidence that playing video games leads to real violence, educators and parents across the country have launched an assault against game companies and their teenage fans.

Striving to defuse the criticism, game makers have promised to do better at promoting a ratings system launched in 1994, which divides software content into five categories ranging from “early childhood” to “adults only.”

“We intend to significantly increase efforts to raise the visibility of [the ratings system] and to work cooperatively with retailers to improve enforcement at the store level,” said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Assn.

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Times staff writer P.J. Huffstutter contributed to this report.