On Friday, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah native, was identified by federal law enforcement as a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk. During Friday’s press conference, officials said that several bullet casings recovered from a hunting rifle found near the crime scene had messages inscribed on them.
During the press conference, officials appeared to take the inscriptions literally, to the extent they ascribed meaning to them at all. But the four messages apparently written by the alleged shooter instead seem to invoke a variety of memes and video game references.
One of the casings was said to be engraved with the phrase “Hey Fascist! Catch!” followed by an up arrow, a right arrow, and three downward facing arrows. That sequence is an apparent reference to the “Eagle 500kg bomb” in the popular third-person shooter game Helldivers 2. The bomb has become a meme in the Helldivers community for being comically excessive.
Arrowhead Game Studios, the developers of Helldivers 2, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Launched in 2024, the game has grown a cult following for its Starship Troopers-like storyline. The cooperative shooter allows teams of up to four players, called “Helldivers,” to spread “freedom” across a fictional universe—fighting bugs, robots, and squid-like aliens rather than other humans. Their form of managed democracy is “basically fascism,” says independent extremism researcher Harry Batchelor, who works with the Extremism and Gaming Research Network.
Helldivers 2 is satire, and the vast majority of players are in on it. “[The game takes] the whole ‘pretending to be democracy, while actually being a fascist government’ so seriously, it’s obviously a joke,” says Batchelor. The community around the game has generally maintained a positive reputation, even working together to combat “review bombing”—coordinated negative reviews intended to hurt a game’s chance of success.
The arrows that activate the Eagle 500kg bomb have been used in other memes to show that a user is “going to do a big, violent action,” Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, tells WIRED. “That’s maybe a cheeky way of expressing it on the casing.”
Shortly after the Friday press conference about Kirk’s fatal shooting, moderators locked the r/Helldivers subreddit. “Due to recent events and the high amount of posts about the topic, we will be locking the subreddit temporarily,” a post on the subreddit reads. “We’re aware of what happened, our modteam doesn’t condone it.”
Helldivers may not be the only game reference on the casings. Another casing was allegedly engraved with lyrics to a famous Italian folk song called “Bella Ciao,” which translates directly to “goodbye beautiful.” The song, which has associations with post-war anti-fascist movements in Italy, has seen a resurgence on social media in recent years. Notably, “Bella Ciao” holds significance for rebel forces during a mission in Far Cry 6, a video game set on a fictional Caribbean island ruled by a dictator. A USB stick with the song is a collectible item labeled “Bella Ciao de Libertad,” a reference to the rebel group; the in-game description notes that the song has been “inspiring guerrillas and partisans for over a century.”