Khalid doesn't give a huge speech explaining his motives, there's no epic shootout, no catharsis. It's an anticlimactic conclusion to the hunt. I take out my pistol, put two bullets in his chest, and head to the extraction zone. He's a bald man with a beard, olive fatigues, and he's unarmed. In one video, I see a player complete the mission by firing a rocket into a building, and when I try the mission again that's where I find Khalid. Which is why I wasn't sure if I just couldn't find Khalid or if I was encountering another bug.Įventually I do what I should have done from the beginning: look up a walkthrough on YouTube. The textures are muddy, the environments are barren, and the enemy AI and scripting that triggers certain events in the level are often broken. The problem is that nothing changed or evolved between the first Delta Force in 1998 and Delta Force: Xtreme 2 in 2009. It also had an impressive online multiplayer mode that allowed up to 150 players to play on the same huge map, but that couldn't have been the appeal on bin Laden's compound, which had no internet connection. It was a game inspired by modern warfare at a time when most first-person shooters shied away from anything that might look like the current conflicts we're involved with, preferring instead to imagine future wars or reenact World War II.ĭelta Force: Xtreme 2 aimed for realism before it was in style, with just one or two bullets enough to take you or the enemies out, and the ability to lean around corners. When the first game in the series, Delta Force, was released in 1998, it was a revelation. Why would a guide for a game like that be in bin Laden's compound?
One mission briefing also says that Khalid is waging a "personal war against the West," and that he hopes to spark a global war by hitting Western targets around the world. It's impossible not to compare any terrorist bad guy in a video game after 2001 to bin Laden, but Khalid's elusive nature, dodging Delta Force as he runs from country to country, and his nickname-Desert Rat, which evokes bin Laden's notorious cave hideout in Tora Bora-is a better fit than usual. The strangest thing about someone in bin Laden's compound playing Delta Force: Xtreme 2 is that it's a game about hunting down a very bin Laden-like bad guy. Frustrated, I turn to Google in search of a guide that might explain what I'm missing, which is when I'm reminded why I started playing this overall pretty shitty game in the first place.Īccording to the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a "Delta Force Extreme 2 Videogame Guide," perhaps the kind I was looking for, was found on Osama bin Laden's bookshelf in his compound in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he was discovered and killed in 2011. It's so unclear where I'm supposed to find Khalid that I start to wonder if I've encountered a weird bug, where the game failed to trigger a sequence that spawns him into the level.
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