Families of Seoul crowd crush victims demand removal of tragedy footage from new Call of Duty

Real footage of a tragedy in a fictional war

Families of those killed in the 2022 crowd crush in Seoul's Itaewon district have demanded that footage of the real 2022 disaster be removed from the new game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, a representative of the families' committee told the AFP agency. In the game, whose plot centers on a full-scale North Korean invasion of the South, the crowd crush footage is used in a scene briefing the player about the aftermath of an attack: video recorded at the scene of the tragedy is shown in monochrome tones with noise filters to make it look like the result of war. The footage shows attempts to perform CPR, police and firefighters, and bodies lined up along the street.

Reaction of the families and the publisher

“This showed a complete lack of sensitivity to the pain of the bereaved families, the injured, and citizens at the sight of the disaster site shown exactly as it was, and a disregard for the dignity of the victims,” Cho In-young, an employee of the committee representing the victims' families, told AFP. According to him, the families, who are currently in South Korea for a memorial ceremony, plan to formally raise the issue after collecting their signatures. In a joint statement, the committee and a coalition of civic organizations called on the developers to “take action as soon as possible” if they have “even a drop of respect and empathy” for the victims. The game's publisher Activision did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment, but in an interview with the South Korean agency Yonhap it said the footage was used “as an element to convey the game's fictional storyline” and that the company “had absolutely no intention of referencing the Itaewon tragedy or trivializing it.”

Fourth anniversary of Itaewon

The dispute coincided with the fourth anniversary of the tragedy, which was marked on Thursday, October 29. On the evening of October 29, 2022, tens of thousands of people — mostly aged 20 to 30 — went out for the first post-pandemic Halloween celebrations in Itaewon, a popular nightlife district of Seoul. The night turned into a disaster when the crowd surged into a narrow sloping alley between bars and clubs: the crush and the lack of effective crowd control led to the deaths of more than 150 people. The families' statements concern specifically the use of documentary footage of the disaster in a commercial product; Activision's response to the demand to remove the footage remains unknown.