A story about an Indiegogo campaign to raise $3000 in order to buy two 3D printer seems like an average tale in today’s personal manufacturing world. It would be, in fact, very standard, if it were not for the fact that Dee Pain, a young mechanical designer from Vietnam, is raising funds to 3D print and sell real weapons from the Assassin’s Creed video game series.
His campaign is like the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone, only backwards. Many video games have long been criticized for being too violent (and Assassin’s Creed, as the name implies, is no family fun type of game), while one of the enduring controversies debated at length around 3D printing relates to the possibility of making weapons at home.
So what does Dee Pain do? He sets out to 3D print video game violence right into reality. He wants to raise $3000 to make the spring hidden blades from Assassin’s Creed. It would be easy to say he should have just put his creative talent to work to make something more creative from the game, like, artefacts from the medieval and Renaissance, or Civil War eras it takes place in, but all you Assassin’s Creed fans know you’ve enjoyed coming up quietly from behind your enemies or maybe jumping on them from the rooftops – on screen – and slicing their throats with the blade just shooting out from inside your sleeve.
As a cosplayer, Dee Pain has actually been making the weapons for a while, not just Assassin’s Creed’s but Wolverine’s claws as well, getting them manufactured from an online 3D printing service and selling them at $300 a pop. He says he has received more than 100 orders for them and argues that by owning 2 $1,500 3D printers he could cut the price down to $100 each. The logic is flawless. The only issue, and it is an issue of concern, is whether or not he should be selling functional weapons.
Then again it could all be to attract media attention (that is also working, it seems) for getting his YouTube channel off the ground — it already has close to 15,000 fans. That said the blade is amazingly realistic and it works. Even the first prototype, entirely made in wood shoots out just like in the game.
Then again it could all be to attract media attention (that is also working, it seems) for getting his YouTube channel off the ground — it already has close to 15,000 fans. That said the blade is amazingly realistic and it works. Even the first prototype, entirely made in wood shoots out just like in the game.
A few weeks back I had argued that it would be wrong to ban weapon’s design because a design, after all, is not a weapon and it could lead to banning even fake digital weapons if they ever became too similar to real life guns. I said it as a hyperbole but it seems that the line between in game weapons and real life weapons is thinning out, even if it is just for fun.
