Call of Duty Players Keep the Itaewon Crush Scenes Until November 12

Activision has apologized for using real news footage of the 2022 Itaewon crowd crush in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, and says it will strip the scenes out in a November 12 update. ^[2][3]

The story is still moving. The footage has not been removed yet, and the families of the dead say no one from the publisher has apologized to them directly. ^[2]

The game's opening cinematic uses real news coverage of the disaster to set up a fictional story about a North Korean invasion of South Korea. ^[1][2][4] Images reported from the scene include people performing CPR, victims lying in the street and people being carried away on stretchers. ^[2][4]

What happened in Itaewon

On October 29, 2022, a crowd crush struck the Itaewon district of Seoul, a nightlife quarter, during Halloween celebrations. The death toll was 159. The Guardian reports that two more people were later recognized as victims after dying from trauma caused by the disaster. ^[1][3][4]

The 10.29 Itaewon Disaster Bereaved Families Association and civic groups condemned the game and called for the footage to come out. They said survivors, rescuers and witnesses are still living with trauma. ^[2][4]

That is the point worth holding on to. The people in those images are not extras. Some died, some tried to save them, and some watched. A cinematic does not ask their permission, and it replays them every time someone presses start.

Two statements from Activision

Activision's first response defended the choice. It said the opening used real-world news coverage to establish the fictional narrative and was not meant to reference or trivialize the Itaewon disaster or any other real-world tragedy. ^[2][4]

That explanation did not hold. On October 30, the publisher apologized to bereaved families, victims and anyone else hurt or distressed by the footage, and said it would remove it completely in the November 12 update. ^[1][2][3] The Korea Herald reported the wording of a statement Activision sent to the broadcaster MBC. ^[3]

The order matters. Activision apologized only after the families and civic groups had gone public. The apology came after the outcry and did not precede it.

The families' association welcomed the decision to remove the footage. It also told the BBC that it had not received a direct apology from Activision. ^[2]

Entertainment, and its limits

At the game's launch, Activision's chief marketing officer, Tyler Bahl, told BBC Newsbeat: "We have to understand this is entertainment." ^[2]

Nothing ties the remark to the Itaewon scenes in particular. But it describes the stance the apology had to walk back. War shooters have always borrowed from the real world, and a studio is free to build a fictional invasion on real geopolitics. The setting alone had already drawn debate in South Korea. The Guardian reported that conservative politicians urged President Lee Jae Myung to play the game, arguing it showed the threat from Pyongyang. ^[4]

But an invented war is one thing. Using the recorded faces and bodies of a mass-casualty disaster that happened four years ago is another. A studio that wants a fictional city to feel real can build a crowd, stage a crush and hire actors. Activision's team took the real images instead, and the choice treats other people's suffering as a texture to be licensed.

It is a failure of editorial judgement, and it is an old one. Every newsroom learns early that a photograph of a real disaster has an owner, and the owner is not the person who finds it useful. Someone at a publisher of Activision's size should have asked who would be watching these images and who might be in them. The fix, a patch, is cheap. The question should have come before launch.

What is not yet known

Activision has not said how the footage got into the cinematic or what review it went through before release. It has not said whether it will change how it handles real news footage in future games. Nor has it said whether it will apologize to the families' association directly.

The game came out the week before the BBC's October 30 report. ^[2] By the time the update lands on November 12, it will have been on sale for more than two weeks with the footage in place.

The next test is that update. If the scenes are gone, the families will have won what they asked for. If an apology reaches them directly, the publisher will have done the rest of what an apology requires.