It's a hell of a time in America when a video game taking an anti-Nazi stance is considered by some to be too controversial. Yet here we are.
The video game Wolfenstein II, the latest iteration of an exercise in killing virtual Nazis, has angered Nazis with an online presence because it is about... killing Nazis.
"Make America Nazi-Free Again. #NoMoreNazis #Wolf2," reads a tweet from the video game's account, alongside a trailer for the upcoming release.
The video is brief, just 13 seconds long, but shows heavily armored, mask-wearing, jackbooted soldiers marching through the streets under Nazi flags. "Not my America," reads the text over the top of the images.
A certain subgroup of folks got angry online with the game-maker, Bethesda Softworks, for producing a product that thinks Nazis are bad. Many claimed they weren't angry about the anti-Nazi stance per se, but rather that the game was tapping into liberal anger. Certainly it is political to co-opt President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan, but Bethesda Softworks is hardly the first one to play with the line made famous by the billionaire Republican.
But in the wake of the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia, rally, where Nazis marched and chanted anti-Semitic slogans under the banner of "Uniting the Right," Nazism is now apparently a right vs. left debate.
So, people on Twitter got angry about a promo saying Nazis were bad. Here are a few responses.
here were, of course, many, many others who supported the apparently political stance of anti-Nazism and made jokes at some of the pro-Nazi folks' expense. It's also worth noting that Wolfenstein has always been about killing Nazis, and games involving killing Nazis have been around for quite a while—and were not accused of carrying political implications. Wolfenstein II is scheduled to be released on October 27.