Hungarian studio Gaijin Entertainment has been forced to apologize after using an image of the Challenger shuttle explosion in promotional artwork.
When players discovered the promotional artwork for the new game update War Thunder, Seek & Destroy (“Search and destruction” in French), they immediately recognized the tragedy: the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986.
The studio forced to apologize
In War Thunder, players must pilot different war machines, tanks, planes and boats, in order to participate in online clashes. In the artwork of Seek & Destroywe can see at the bottom left an explosion in the clouds, behind a plane, but this was not drawn or produced on a computer, it is the transposition of the famous photograph of the shuttle drama Challenger, which occurred in 1986.
This event which traumatized America killed seven NASA crew members. 73 seconds after liftoff, the space shuttle exploded. The photo showing a dispersing white cloud went around the world. Even today, researchers regularly find pieces of the rocket in the ocean, as in a History Channel documentary from 2022.
The use of the photo was denounced by players on the Reddit platform, forcing the Hungarian studio Gaijin Entertainment to apologize: “Please accept our apologies on this subject. This image is part of a pack serving as a reference for our artists , and whose context has been lost.”
The studio has promised to modify this artwork from this Monday, June 24 [à l’heure de l’écriture de ces lignes, il est toujours en ligne, ndlr]: “We will make sure this never happens again, sorry everyone, this should never have happened and we will make sure this mistake does not happen again.”
