It is also a clarion call for the type of people we want to bring into our studio to help us make better games.” This isn’t merely a platitude, but an official pillar we hold ourselves, and our work to. “We want everyone to know their identity is welcome in our studio and in the worlds we create. “We know there was no degree of malicious intent from anyone on our team,” the studio said. in recent months.īungie expressed confidence in its investigation, and rejected the idea that a developer knowingly put artwork resembling a white nationalist symbol in Destiny 2. The Kekistan banner is modeled after a Nazi war flag, and white nationalists have flown it at rallies across the U.S.

“The more contemporary, vile derivation that has been repurposed by hate groups was not surfaced through this process, and therefore, the armor was approved for ship,” said Bungie.

They would type “kekeke,” a transliteration of an onomatopoetic Korean phrase used online to represent laughter.) Adherents of the alt-right later hijacked “kek” and applied it to a religion that they created to represent their values, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog.īungie has a team dedicated to reviewing content for “cultural, geographical, and other sensitive issues.” It turns out that the members of the group didn’t miss the Road Complex AA1 design - they just reviewed it solely in the context of the World of Warcraft meme, and didn’t consider the recent history of the Kekistan flag.īungie fixing Destiny 2 armor resembling white nationalist symbol The two opposing factions in the game - Alliance and Horde - speak different languages, so when a Horde player types “LOL,” an Alliance player sees “KEK.” (This appears to have been a reference to a previous Blizzard Entertainment game, StarCraft, which became very popular with Korean players. The Kek “religion” has its origins in the gaming world: The term “kek” came from online games such as World of Warcraft. Bungie said that the artwork wasn’t designed to emulate the “kek” meme. The design originated in June 2015, according to Bungie, and came together from three main sources of inspiration: real-world reference art, iconography and typefaces graphic design elements from sports teams and shapes common to Destiny’s Guardian iconography. It seems that Bungie undertook a thorough investigation of how this happened the studio laid out its detailed findings in a blog post this evening. Bungie/Activision, Southern Poverty Law Center Hunter gauntlets from Destiny 2’s Road Complex AA1 armor set (left) the main section of the “national flag of Kekistan.” (right). In announcing the removal of the artwork on Tuesday, Bungie said its appearance in Destiny 2 was “not intentional.” But the strong similarities between the armor’s design and the logo for Kek, a satirical “religion” created by members of the so-called alt-right, led people to wonder if somebody on the Destiny 2 development team had very much intended to sneak the design into the game. Today the studio answered the bigger questions - namely, how did this happen in the first place? Destiny 2 developer Bungie responded swiftly this week once it was notified of a piece of armor in the game featuring artwork resembling a logo associated with a white nationalist movement, apologizing for the design’s presence and pledging to remove it.

Destiny 2 road complex armor