Developer Blizzard has renamed a mission character in World of Warcraft after the homophobic remarks of the underlying musician resurfaced.
Blizzard has made yet another change to World of Warcraft that is highly suspected to be the result of a harassment scandal surrounding the studio. According to Kotaku, Gorge the Corpsegrinder, an orc NPC, was changed in the game because he was initially named after George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher, the frontman of Cannibal Corpse. And the singer had an offensive manifestation of the name in the past, which many found offensive.
In a 2007 interview, Fisher was very enthusiastic about what WoW meant to him, saying that he had four level 70 characters (the maximum level at the time) and that “I don’t play f***ing, WoW is f***ing life to me!” However, the problematic comment came next:
“I don’t play with the f***ing faggot Alliance… b****a and the Alliance, die you emo f***ers!”
In addition, a re-cut and bleeped version of this interview was shown to the audience at BlizzCon 2011. Even back then, this offended some gamers, and former Blizzard president Mike Morhaime apologized for the “narrow-minded” and “insensitive” video.
The orc, named after the musician, has not been removed from the game but will now be known as Annihilator Grek’lor. Blizzard has recently made several similar changes to the MMORPG, including removing the names of developers who have been involved in scandals and covering up female breasts.
Source: NME
Leave a Reply