Deep Silver Offers An Apology For Anti-Feminist Slur
Deep Silver has welcomed much press coverage over the past week, dealing with the release of their new game Dead Island. Now, while they say that “There’s no such thing as bad press,” I doubt this is the phrase going through the team’s mind. Dead Island’s first week on the shelves hasn’t been especially smooth, although the game is nearly sold out, and some stores have no copies to offer the public. First there was the issue with the game being severely bugged, which is still plaguing consoles at this point. Then came the update for the PC version of the game that wiped out save files. Now comes an entirely new issue all together.
One gamer who was perusing the Steam forums found his way into the game’s code, and found this disturbing piece of content within it:
Skill(“TeamSpirit2Purna”)
Skill(“FeministWh*rePurna”)
Skill(“MeleeDurabilityPurna”)
Pay close attention to the skill listed in the middle. Do you see it? Since this early Steam version was marked as the “developer version,” this was, at one time, the name of Purna’s special ability to deal extra damage to males. The new skill, now that the first version was replaced on Steam, is called “Gender Wars.” The game’s developer, Techland, is most displeased.
A statement was released by International Brand Manager Blazej Krakowiak to Eurogamer, and he explained that, “It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened. We’re investigating this right now and we’ll issue a statement later. For now, I can only express my sincerest apologies for this incident and assure you that whoever acted so irresponsibly did not represent the views and opinions of Techland.” He finally added, “I’m sure that aside from the author of that unfortunate line of code, everyone at the office is as disturbed by this as you are.”
These lines of .scr code saw most of the skill names changed for the final version of the game, and for good reason as you can see. We’re still waiting to hear more on the matter, but right now we’re left with this apology. We don’t really know the reason for this specific incident, but it’s being looked into.
