Not even a week after tweeting a fictional war in order to promote Call of Duty: Black Ops III, video game publisher Activision and developer Treyarch are under fire again over the game’s latest trailer, released this week, which reportedly uses footage of a real town.
In the trailer, footage of extremely powerful flooding in the seaside town of Rhyl in North Wales is used to depict a post-apocalyptic world in the “gritty future” of the third installment of the Call of Duty: Black Ops trilogy. Footage of the flood was edited over a two-second clip that’s used in the trailer, and it’s upsetting citizens of Rhyl, including the mayor, who lived through the harrowing event that destroyed property and left dozens homeless during the December 2013 flood.
“Whilst I can see it is a brief two-second clip, in amongst many other real destruction clips, I think it’s a shame they chose to use it,” Andrew Rutherford, town mayor during the flooding, told the Daily Post. “It’s terrible to put people’s misery into a game. It certainly wasn’t a game for the those affected by it.”
Twitter exploded with reactions to the trailer, with some questioning whether or not it was a good call.
https://twitter.com/Trudyhiggins235/status/651416968201957376
https://twitter.com/thatprickclaude/status/650719916195246080
It definitely seems like it might have been in bad taste to include footage of a real disaster like that within the trailer, like there couldn’t have been some fictional “war” footage created, but the Call of Duty hype machine keeps rolling on. Hopefully future promotions are a little more conscious.