Originally published at: Halo's incredibly racist Juneteenth celebration | Boing Boing
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Somehow I am envisioning that Duke Nuke’m will raise (ahem, lower) the bar with something even more tasteless, and offend an even wider audience.
No matter the advances in whiz-bang technology, doing things well, correct and with thoughtfullness requires care and diligence. A lesson as old as time, yet still being learned every day.
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Oh sure but I bet Bonobo could write a song called “Halo” and nobody would say boo.
Just STOP white people… just… stop.
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…343 employees state that “Bonobo” is a name given to a toolset used by the company to develop some aspects of the game, so there’s the possibility that someone just left it as a placeholder there
So the charitable explanation for this is that the effort was so little cared about that the studio completely dropped the ball and no one ever bothered to even name the item. Whoo boy.
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for the first time in the company’s history, at the one time when it would pose a problem. What a very interesting coincidence.
It’s charitable to assume it’s the very first time. The Bonobo toolset goes back a long way. There must be some execs sweating at the potential prospect of 20 odd years of material
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity. But either way, yeah, woof.
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Having worked in game development, I can totally see this happening “by accident” - but it would have required the designer working on the item to have ceased work on it mid-development and not looked at it again (which could easily have happened if they were no longer working at the studio, or got moved to something else mid-task, for example), but then whoever they reported to didn’t follow up on the task or check it, and then the testers either didn’t test it, didn’t look closely enough at it to notice and flag it (or, worse, thought it was fine), or they flagged it, but no one responded to that flag… all of which would have happened if no one gave a damn about it in the first place.
So it’s still a result of racism, only a more subtle variety than if it had been deliberate. Either that, or they’re so generally overworked the development process has broken down, but it’s odd that it only broke down noticeably for this.
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