Activision said Friday it will remove controversial footage from its newly released Call of Duty game after backlash in South Korea over scenes tied to the 2022 Halloween crowd crush in Seoul. The company said a Nov. 12 update will completely strip out about 10 seconds of heavily edited footage from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
The timing sharpened the outrage. The game reached players only days before the Oct. 29 anniversary of the disaster, which killed nearly 160 people in the South Korean capital’s Itaewon district. The footage does not name the tragedy, but families of the victims said that was beside the point: they saw scenes of CPR, victims lying on cold streets and chaos that they said mirrored the disaster too closely.
Lee Jin Woo, who said he played the new game, said he did not notice the Itaewon footage at first. But after hearing about it and thinking it over, he said he began to realize the images looked very similar. The more he thought about it, he said, the more he felt betrayed as a gamer. “After all, it was a game company and a game series that I had liked,” he said.
Activision said the game was meant to be a fictional work that delivers a realistic and immersive experience, and said it never intended to evoke any tragic incident or trivialize suffering tied to events like the Itaewon disaster. That explanation did little to calm critics, because the game’s premise itself leans on a fictional North Korean invasion of South Korea, echoing the broader history of Seoul’s capture in 1950 during the Korean War. In other words, the controversy was not just about a clip in the background; it was about whether a commercial release had crossed a line by borrowing directly from a recent national tragedy.
That argument lands in a country where grief over Itaewon has not faded. On Thursday, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said his government would uncover the truth, as nearly two dozen officials face charges in the investigation and three former police officers have been jailed. For the victims’ families, the removal of the footage is a first step, not an ending. The question now is whether the Nov. 12 patch will erase the scene cleanly enough to satisfy players who noticed it and families who say it should never have been there at all.
