A popular game by the name of Sniper Assassin: Shoot to Kill had a mission in the game pulled down by the developers after being contacted by HuffPost. The mission was called “Breaking News” where the player needs to kill a journalist.
Sniper 3D Assassin Game Gets Pulled After Journalist-killing Mission Surfaces
Sniper 3D Assassin is a mobile game that’s free-to-play on both Android and iOS. It’s developed by a company called “TFG“. On the official Steam page, the developers wrote “Sniper 3D Assassin® in 7 words: great gameplay, awesome visuals, and entertaining missions“. The game has over 850 “thrilling” missions in 13 different worlds. The game is intended for mature audiences as the developers say:
“This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content.”
NYTimes Journalists Stumbles Upon Controversial Mission
A journalist by the name of Jamal Jordan has stumbled upon the game in the worst way possible. He was playing Sniper 3D Assassin with his nephew who choose a mission called “Breaking News” to start the game. The mission is to “Kill the person receiving the briefcase“.
Shocked about what he saw, he immediately went to Twitter to post about his findings.
My nephew let me play an iPad shooting game with him. He chose the mission: It’s called “Breaking News,” and the objective is to shoot a journalist who just received documents from a police officer.
The goal is to make the journalist “famous in a different way.” pic.twitter.com/nQy4Hzq97r
— Lil Uzi Hurt (@lostblackboy) May 18, 2019
In the screenshot, Jamal Jordan shows the description of the mission where it says, “A journalist bribed a cop and will pick up a briefcase from the cop. The briefcase is full of sensitive documents. Make him famous in a different way.” Essentially, if you read between the lines it’s basically making him famous by killing him.
HuffPost Reaches Out fo Jamal
The HuffPost reached out to Jamal to get more information about the situation after he posted this disturbing news on twitter yesterday. Jamal told HuffPost, “My nephew is 10, and we had a very long talk after“.
The mission was removed by the developers of the game, TFG after the news site contacted them with their story. Since the news broke out on Twitter, TFG took down their Facebook page, possibly because of the influx of criticism over the mission that was put in the game.
Journalists Respond
Various Journalists responded to the story on Twitter.
Well, this is horrifying.
— Lauren Hard (@laurenhard) May 18, 2019
Whoa?!?
Not very comforting since some of my reporter friends have been shot at recently.— Sergio Quintana (@svqjournalist) May 19, 2019
What the hell
— Meghann Farnsworth (@mtfarnsworth) May 19, 2019
Holy crap. What “game” is this?
— Elijah Nouvelage (@wanderinghome) May 18, 2019
TFG’s CTO Response
“At TFG, we work to create games that bring fun and entertainment to users all around the world,” CTO Mac-Vicar said.
“As such, we take feedback from our players very seriously. After listening to our community today, we have decided to remove the mission ‘Breaking News’ from the game.”
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