Early Monday morning, the FBI arrested 26 year old Luigi Mangione in connection with the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week.
He was reportedly recognized by an employee at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania., and was carrying a weapon and multiple fraudulent ID’s when he was arrested. As information has started to filter out about the suspect, a surprising link to the video game world was established.
According to CNN, shooting suspect Luigi Mangione worked as an intern at Firaxis Games, and claimed to have fixed hundreds of game bugs on Civilization 6. Meanwhile, the New York Post is reporting that while in college, Mangione started the University of Pennsylvania Game Research and Development Environment.
Other details have started to trickle out about the shooting suspect as well, though not related to video games. Mangione appears to be a fan of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and an AI optimist, having tweeted multiple times about the ways in which technology could eventually help humanity achieve immortality.
He also has a now-privated Goodreads account wherein he read Vice President-Elect JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, as well as the manifesto of unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Surprisingly, Fox News has also revealed that he is a cousin of Maryland Republican State Delegate Antonio D. Mangione.
The words delay, deny, defend were engraved into the bullets used to kill Brian Thompson – words alluding to United Health Care’s seeming notoriety for denying insurance claims.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is currently available for PC. In case you missed it, you can find our thorough written / video review of the game here (we highly recommend it!).
