Controversy within the video game space is hardly a new thing. In fact, it’s something that dates back to some of the earliest generations of gaming, if you can believe it. However, as time went on, the controversies went from well-intentioned conversations about game design to throwing out hate unnecessarily or even trying to bring down people and entire cultures through that hate. That hate once again surfaced with the reveal of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. In it, Ubisoft put in a character named Yasuke, who was a Samurai but also African. He’s a reference to the HISTORICALLY ACCURATE Samurai of the past, and yet, all people could see was his skin color, and then decided to throw hate at him.
That included infamous billionaire Elon Musk. He made a hate speech tweet stating that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was “killing art.” That’s a lie in every way, and there are numerous ways to prove that’s a lie. But for someone like Elon Musk, they don’t care, especially when they own the platform they can put such hate speech on.
Enter Assassin’s Creed series vice president executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté, who spoke with Game File and quickly shut down both Elon Musk, and all who would throw hate on the character of Yasuke:
“That tweet generated emotions, that… the first thing I wanted to do was go back on X – that I had deleted – and just tweet back. And I just took a step back. I have a mindfulness app on my phone. And I did a bit of mindfulness to try to explore the emotions that this tweet created. For me, Elon, it’s sad, he’s just feeding hatred. I had a lot of three word replies that came to mind.”
Undoubtedly, many people would’ve LOVED to see those “three word replies” be said to Musk, especially given all the billionaire has done in the last few years.
He then put out that while they were doing initial research on developing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, they kept finding references to the real-life Yasuke:
“We’ve got a super-mysterious historical character from which not much is known about. And for us, it was what we want in Assassin’s Creed.”
He went on to say that after replaying the game recently, he found “the answer” as to why people will like their version of Yasuke, which can be found within the game’s first twelve minutes. We’ll have to see if people give the game that much time so that truth can be found and hate can be silenced.
