Outcry prompts ‘Call of Duty’ to cut Seoul tragedy footage

American video game publisher Activision said Friday that it was removing controversial footage from its newly released “Call of Duty” game after an outcry in South Korea over the inclusion of real-life footage from a deadly 2022 Halloween crowd crush in Seoul.

Last week’s global release of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4” came days before the Oct. 29 anniversary of the disaster in the South Korean capital’s nightlife district of Itaewon, where a crowd of tens of thousands of partygoers surged beyond control in a narrow alley, causing nearly 160 deaths.

The game, which takes place amid a fictional North Korean invasion of the South, features about 10 seconds of heavily edited footage of the tragedy to illustrate what the aftermath of a Pyongyang attack might look like, though it does not refer to the Itaewon crowd crush directly.

Groups representing families of the crowd crush victims had demanded that the footage be removed, saying it was appalling that the game had directly reproduced actual scenes of people performing CPR “while victims lay on the cold streets amid chaos and desperation.”

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“If the game developer has even the slightest sense of respect and empathy for the victims of the Itaewon disaster, it should promptly take corrective action,” the Itaewon Disaster Bereaved Families Association and Itaewon Disaster Citizens’ Countermeasures Committee said in a joint statement Friday.

The California-based game publisher, Activision, apologized in a statement and said the footage would be completely removed through a game update scheduled for release Nov. 12.

“This game is a fictional work created to provide a realistic and immersive experience,” the company said, according to the South Korean public broadcaster MBC. “In using actual news footage in the game, we never intended to evoke any tragic incident, including the Itaewon disaster, or to trivialize the suffering associated with such tragedies.”

The controversy came as grieving families are still waiting for answers about authorities’ failure to prevent the disaster four years ago. Nearly two dozen officials have been charged in the investigation, which is still underway, while three former police officers have been jailed.

On Thursday, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung vowed that his government would “uncover the truth.”

“On that day, when what should have been a joyful autumn night turned into the scene of a horrific tragedy, the state was nowhere to be found,” he said in a statement on X.

Lee Jin Woo, whose younger sister was 28 when she died in the crowd crush, told NBC News that he had played the new “Call of Duty” game and didn’t notice the Itaewon footage at first.

“But after hearing about it and thinking it over, I began to realize the footage looked very similar,” said Lee, who works at a South Korean gaming company.

“The more I thought about it, the more I felt betrayed as a gamer,” he said. “After all, it was a game company and a game series that I had liked.”

The game’s premise, in which South Korean conscripts are thrust into defending their country alongside American soldiers after a North Korean invasion, has been controversial since before it was available to play.

Though the “Call of Duty” invasion is fictional, it draws on North Korea’s real-life capture of Seoul in 1950 during the Korean War. The conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice instead of a peace treaty, and the two Koreas remain technically at war.

Tensions between the North and South have escalated in recent weeks, with the two countries embroiled in a standoff along their heavily militarized border. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has rebuffed diplomatic outreach from Washington and Seoul as he continues to advance his nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

“Ultimately, whether we’re talking about an actual war or the Itaewon disaster, both involve the suffering of real people,” Lee Mi Hyun, a director at the Itaewon Disaster Citizens’ Countermeasures Committee, told NBC News in an interview.

“They’re turning that suffering into entertainment,” she said. “It’s an approach that seems to show absolutely no empathy for the people who experienced that suffering.”

Some South Korean lawmakers say the game should be taken as a warning.

“We need to pay attention to the question it raises,” Han Dong-hoon, an opposition legislator, said last week in a Facebook post. “If that day were to come again, would we be ‘prepared’?”

The game has also been defended by members of Lee’s governing Democratic Party such as Kim Han Kyu, who said there was “nothing wrong with playing a game set against the backdrop of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.”

“We are still technically under an armistice, aren’t we?” he said Thursday in a Facebook post. “Wouldn’t it be even stranger if no games depicted a war against North Korea?”

Others have used the game to criticize Lee’s conciliatory approach to North Korea, with opposition lawmaker Ahn Cheol Soo suggesting last week that the South Korean president try playing the game to correct his “naïve judgment” about the North Korean threat.

With its “Call of Duty” franchise struggling to sustain interest in recent years, the Microsoft-owned Activision used “Modern Warfare 4” to deliver what fans loved about its previous games: a hyperrealistic military shooter.

“I don’t think we were happy with every aspect of last year’s game, and we heard the feedback loud and clear,” Activision Chief Marketing Officer Tyler Bahl told “The Game Business Show” earlier this month.

“With ‘Modern Warfare 4,’ we’ve tried to adjust based on that feedback. It’s getting back to a grounded military shooter. Making it cinematic, making it authentic and bringing that edge back that ‘Call of Duty’ is known for,” he said.

That approach appears to have worked. As of Friday, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4” was the top-selling game in both South Korea and the United States on Steam, an online PC game distribution platform.

In its review, gaming website IGN said it was a “much-needed reminder of what ‘Call of Duty’ can be at its best, even if it can’t fully recapture the heights of its glory days.”