Activision has apologised to the bereaved families of the Itaewon crowd crush victims and confirmed it will remove real footage of the tragedy from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
In a new statement reported by Inven Global, Activision said the footage “will be completely removed” via a game update scheduled to roll out on 12th November.
The statement was issued in Korean, and the quotes come via Inven Global’s AI-assisted, editor-reviewed translation.
As we reported earlier this week, the game’s opening cinematic uses short news clips to depict fictional civilian casualties during a North Korean invasion of South Korea. Those clips have since been found to include archive footage from the 2022 Itaewon disaster, in which around 160 people died. The bereaved families’ association and the Citizens Countermeasure Meeting called for its removal.
“We bow our heads in deep sympathy and apology to the bereaved families and victims who were deeply hurt by this incident, as well as to everyone we have caused concern,” Activision said.
The publisher also said that Modern Warfare 4 “is a work of fiction created to provide realistic immersion”, and it “never intended to evoke or trivialise any tragic event, including the Itaewon crowd crush” by using real news broadcast footage.
The controversy has also reached the South Korean government. During a press briefing, minister of the interior and safety Yun Ho-jung described the footage’s inclusion as “secondary harm”, and said: “I believe appropriate sanctions should be imposed”.
“Using such a tragedy as material for a game, a form of entertainment or business, is something that should be refrained from as a matter of human ethics,” Yun added. He said it was up to the relevant agencies to decide “whether to impose punishment or block it to make general access difficult”.
Activision’s earlier statement to Eurogamer said the opening cinematic “utilises some real world news coverage to establish the game’s fictional narrative”, and was “not intended to reference or trivialise the Itaewon disaster or any other real-world tragedy in any way, shape or form”.