A contingent of right-wing online figures and their followers have been using the recent assassination of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk to punish people they don’t like. That includes a developer at Ghost of Yotei maker Sucker Punch Productions who Sony confirms it has parted ways with after she made a joke on social media about the shooting.
“I hope the shooter’s name is Mario so that Luigi knows his bro got his back,” Drew Harrison, a nearly 10-year veteran of the PlayStation studio, posted in the evening after Kirk was shot and killed during a speaking event at Utah Valley University. A few hours later, the post was screen-grabbed and shared by anti-woke crusader Mark “Grummz” Kern.
“Suckerpunch Senior Dev celebrates Charlie Kirk’s death,” he wrote. “Ghost of Yotei is dead to me now.” A streamer who goes by Madamsavvy responded, “No more. Cowards keep quiet. The studio deserves to go under.” Kern replied, “No mercy.”
Harrison subsequently shared on social media that people had been contacting her employer angrily trying to get her fired, and posted a screenshot of a barrage of missed calls from anonymous numbers as evidence of an ongoing harassment campaign. Less than 24 hours later, she was fired.
“If standing up against fascism is what cost me my dream job I held for 10 years, I would do it again 100x stronger,” she wrote.
Sony confirmed her departure in an email to Kotaku but declined to comment further. “Drew Harrison is no longer an employee of Sucker Punch Productions,” a spokesperson from Sony Interactive Entertainment wrote.
1 It’s a game. An entertainment. A story a team of creators believes in. They want to make this.
2 it’s a game. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. In fact, why not make the game you want yourself?
— shawn layden 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇺🇸🇯🇵 (@ShawnLayden) September 25, 2024
A loosely aligned “Gamergate 2.0” movement that grew out of conspiracy theories claiming DEI was ruining gaming has been hoping for this sort of outcome for months. The big PS5 exclusive has been in anti-woke activists’ firing line ever since Ghost of Yotei revealed the open-world samurai series’ latest entry would star a woman named Atsu, played by Erika Ishii.
Fed by an algorithmically juiced YouTube rage factory, certain online culture content creators latched onto one of Ishii’s past comments about abolishing the police as a way to attack the game. Videos with titles like “Ghost of Yōtei DOOMED? Radical Activist Erika Ishii Brings Woke Chaos!” later changed to things like “Ghost Of Yotei New Trailer Sparks BACKLASH, Hiring Activists Backfires For Sony & Sucker Punch” as YouTubers combed LinkedIn for evidence proving that people with opinions they disagreed with were ruining games.
Ghost of Yotei is far from the only high-profile blockbuster game to be dragged into this culture war quicksand. Kern and others attacked Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows as well for featuring an African samurai as one of its two main characters. Developers on the game were reportedly told not to comment on the harassment campaign when the game launched earlier this year.
While Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot condemned attacks targeting employees, he also said at the time the company was working on “tackling the dynamics behind the polarized comments around Ubisoft so as to protect the Group’s reputation and maximize our game’s sales potential.”
Members of the harassment campaign to get Harrison fired from Sucker Punch are already targeting individuals at other game studios and publishers over their social media comments. “Every single studio is compromised,” one of them wrote. “And it’s all American leftists doing this.”