Osama Bin Laden Loved Playing 'Animal Crossing' and Maybe Watching Sassy Movies

Almost every person in the United States old enough to remember the Sept. 11 attacks knows exactly where they were when the first plane hit one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. In under two hours, both buildings were hit by two different planes piloted by Al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked them mid-flight. Another plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., while a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after some of its passengers fought back.

Authorities later learned that the architect of 9/11 was Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al-Qaeda. It took the United States government nearly a decade to find him but on May 2, 2011, bin Laden was killed during a U.S. military operation in Pakistan. In November 2017, the CIA released information regarding what was found at his compound. That's when we learned that Osama bin Laden played Animal Crossing.

According to a post on Reset Era, more than half a million files were recovered from bin Laden's hard drive, which included .sav entries from Animal Crossing: Wild World. "Animal Crossing? Really?" responded one user. "That's quite possibly the game I would've least expected him to have ever played." Many people expressed an interest in checking out the terrorist's village but alas, the files were simply too large to download.

Over on the r/lostmedia subreddit, someone posted a similar message about bin Laden's love of games, and in particular Animal Crossing. One Redditor pointed out the fact that this kind of made sense as bin Laden was a "bit of an early tech nerd." According to them, that was "part of the whole deal behind Al-Qaeda. He was pioneering ways to use the early internet to run a criminal organization."

Evidently, bin Laden's tastes reached beyond jaunty social simulation games involving anthropomorphic animals. He also played Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Resident Evil, and Super Mario Bros., reported VT. To no one's surprise, bin Laden's Steam library had a copy of the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike. That feels like a more appropriate game to play if one is a terrorist.

Less than two weeks after bin Laden was killed, Reuters reported that an extensive stash of pornography was found at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Officials couldn't confirm whether or not bin Laden himself was watching the robust collection, but what they could say for sure was that these were VHS copies of older pornographic films, per The Washington Post.

Soon after this reveal, David Covucci sent the CIA a FOIA request on behalf of BroBible. The CIA denied this request.