A Danish video game company has removed the "Slave Tetris" portion of their recently discounted Slave Trade game, expressing a baffling sense of bemusement at the explosion of controversy initiated by the game's arrival on the distribution platform Steam. What exactly was included in the now-deleted Tetris portion of Slave Trade? Were people between the ages of 11 and 14 actually stacking human beings like blocks for fun?
As this most certainly is the year 2015, there must be some sort of passably reasonable explanation for such an astounding oversight. This was surely some sort of profoundly unsettling mistake, yes?
Sadly, the "educational game" argument wasn't just a satirical phrase tossed around with glee on Twitter. In fact, that's the entire fucking basis of the argument from the company's CEO Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen:
Thankfully, practically no one is taking Simon's reasoning as anything but an obvious case of The Stupids. The game, which was originally released in 2013 but only recently received a wider release via Steam, inspired Twitter's finest to properly eviscerate the game's purported creative minds:
UPDATE: The game and trailer has been updated. Slave Tetris has been removed as it was perceived to be extremely insensitive by some people. This overshadowed the educational goal of the game. Apologies to people who was offended by us using game mechanics to underline the point of how inhumane slavery was. The goal was to enlighten and educate people — not to get sidetracked discussing a small 15 secs part of the game.
Steam posted a statement on the game's site after revealing that "Slave Tetris" had been removed, though the statement still clings to the "it was all for the education" argument:
Do better, video games.
