"People have a lot of gall saying something is 'too soon' especially if they aren't even involved in the events in any way shape or form," said another, coming down on the other side of the fence. "It's like all those people who demanded that the Twin Towers be removed from movies because it was 'too soon.'"

KOBJ's motivation for producing the mod was, as he says, not to mock or make light of the earthquake. Rather, his decision to recreate the devastation at the Fukushima plant was to show how things actually were and to highlight the fact the government were supposedly lying to people about how bad things had become. What a lot of people aren't taking into account is the fact that we don't know very much about KOBJ -- we know he is 25 and from Japan, but outside this, we have no idea whether he has been personally affected by the tragedy or just feels strongly about what he feels to be inaccurate reporting of the issue.

If you're thinking it's too soon for this sort of thing, consider this: TV news crews were on the scene in Japan as soon as possible after the disaster. Newspaper reporters were crawling through the wreckage looking for stories. News programs were awash with images of devastation and the emotional reactions of those whose homes and livelihoods had been destroyed. Does the fact that this mod explores a real-life tragedy in an interactive manner make it somehow less worthwhile, or more of an insult to those personally affected by the tragedy?

According to some people, apparently it does. It's evidence that games are not considered "serious" enough as a medium to be able to explore a real world tragedy. That's kind of sad -- the potential is surely there for people to be able to experience the horror and emotion of a genuine disaster in an interactive form. But as long as the argument "it's just a game" still holds water, it's always going to be "too soon" for games to tackle this sort of thing.

And surely, if ever there's an appropriate setting to explore a destroyed nuclear power plant, it's the Fallout universe?