It's more than just a hat
After courting controversy at Summer Game Fest, the head of 1047 Games apologized — but he still missed the point.
There’s a line in showbiz that goes, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Ian Proulx, CEO of Splitgate 2 developer 1047 Games, has recently learned the hard way that’s not entirely true.
Last week, during the Summer Game Fest keynote livestream, Proulx came out to promote his game wearing a black hat that read “Make FPS Great Again” — an obvious reference to Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. The Splitgate 2 community, journalists, and regular gamers seized on the hat (and not, you know, the game), immediately calling the statement gross and tone deaf. As questions from the Splitgate 2 community poured in, Proulx doubled down on social media, saying that he would not apologize and that the hat wasn’t a political statement and should be taken at face value.
Today, however, he’s singing a different tune. He posted on X with the simple caption, “No excuses, I’m sorry,” accompanied by a nearly three-minute video explaining the decision to wear the hat and the intention behind it.
When I reported on the Trump-evoking slogan and the backlash to it, some commenters responded that “it’s just a hat.”
But it is not just a hat. Aping a political statement that has been used to enact state violence isn’t “a meme,” it is a continuation of that violence. I think of the people in attendance at the show and those who work at the YouTube Theater who are immigrants or have immigrant family members. I think of the worker at the City Market Social House, the venue where SGF holds its Play Days event, who told me about the protocol they have in case ICE shows up: how people can hide in a room in the basement and hand out cards so they don’t have to speak to ICE and potentially implicate themselves.
https://www.theverge.com/games/684957/splitgate-2-hat-apology
= new reply since forum marked as read
