The Disaster Art That Forced The War Thunder Team To Apologize

"War Thunder" is a war simulator that's been running since 2013, and the game is no stranger to real-world controversy. "War Thunder" players even caused real military secrets to leak last year, but the game still managed to weather the PR storm. Now the devs at Gaijin Entertainment have made a mistake of their own, concerning a piece of loading screen art that was added in the latest update to the game.

As fans started making their way through the new content, they noticed that a midair explosion featured in the new piece of art looked just a little too familiar. On further inspection, it became clear that the image in question was from the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. NASA launched the Challenger space shuttle in 1986, but the ship's flight lasted barely over a minute. As the Challenger was making its way out of Earth's atmosphere, a joint failure in one of the motors caused the shuttle to explode, tragically killing all seven astronauts aboard the ship. "War Thunder" players were understandably upset to see images from a real tragedy used in the game's art. Following this discovery, the devs issued multiple apologies and addressed the issue head-on.

"War Thunder" has a dedicated discussion forum that's fairly active, so fans quickly congregated there to discuss the offensive image in the new update. It didn't take long for a community manager from Gaijin Entertainment to respond, writing, "Please accept our sincere apologies for this, the picture was part of an aerial explosion reference pack used by our artists and the context was lost." They went on to explain that the team had immediately started on the process of removing the image and making sure that another mistake like this doesn't happen in the future.

Another Gaijin community manager responded to similarly concerned fans on Reddit: "We'll change the key art on Monday [June 25] and will make sure this doesn't happen again, sorry everyone, things like this shouldn't happen and we'll make sure it doesn't repeat." Players thanked the community manager for that response, and the "War Thunder" playerbase quickly got back to doing what they do best: enjoying the game.

This issue was just an oversight on behalf of the devs, but it highlights the risks that games inspired by real warfare can face. The "Call of Duty" devs faced a similar controversy recently when they had to shoot down rumors about "Black Ops 6" including a mission centered on 9/11. Realism can make games extra engaging — in fact, some game footage has even been mistaken for real life in the past. At the end of the day, however, most fans play games as an escape and don't want to be reminded of actual tragedies.