News
Hot point
The Kill the Haitian controversy
Video
Game Maker to Drop `Kill Haitians' Line
December
10 2003__0.26 AM East
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published
by the New York Times
|
|
 New
York-based video game company announced yesterday that it
would make changes to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a game that
had provoked angry protests from Haitian immigrants and city
officials.
The best-selling
game features dialogue at one point that exhorts players to
"kill all the Haitians." |
Bending to pressure from
the community and from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who spoke out
against the game on Sunday at a Haitian church in Brooklyn, the game
company, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., apologized, saying it
would delete the dialogue from new copies of the game.
Census figures for 2000 showed that 204,561 Haitians lived in the
New York metropolitan area.
"We are aware of the hurt and anger in the Haitian community
and have listened to the community's objections to certain
statements made in the game," the company said in a statement.
"Accordingly, we will remove the objectionable statements from
future copies."
The video game was published by, Rockstar Games Inc., one of
Take-Two Interactive Software's labels. The company is the
second-largest publisher of video games in the United States, and
employs about 1,000 people.
This is not the first time the Grand Theft Auto series has been
criticized for its violence. An earlier version had a plotline in
which players had sex with prostitutes, staged carjackings and
killed passers-by, among other criminal acts. Vice City increased
the violence and sexual content.
Though Vice City was released in October 2002, the public debate
in New York over the dialogue began about a month ago, when a local
station, WCBS-TV, Ch. 2, carried a report about it on Nov. 6.
Since then, pressure from community leaders had mounted and was
capped on Sunday, when Mr. Bloomberg said of the game: "It is
disgraceful. It's vulgar."
Mr. Bloomberg, in a statement yesterday, said he was "very
pleased" that the game company had decided to "remove
offensive statements made by characters in the game."
But members of the Haitian community were more cautious. Garry
Pierre-Pierre, editor in chief of The Haitian Times of Brooklyn,
said Haitians were waiting to see whether the game company would
keep its promise to remove the offensive language.
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